“De Krypten avatar. (Liberate your Avatar from yourself)”: The multimedia work of Ilias Marmaras at Potential Project

Potential Project invites you to visit its specially configured space, arranged as two apartments at 25 Andrea Metaxa Street in Exarchia, and to experience in a unique way—within the setting of an urban residence—the multimedia work “De Krypten avatar. (Liberate your Avatar from yourself)” (2025) by Ilias Marmaras and his collaborators.

This work combines a 3D digital “theatrical” science fiction narrative, drawings, and a book/catalogue featuring excerpts from conversations between the artist and an LLM, effectively functioning as a performative extension in an analogue medium (print) of the broader conceptual framework of the audiovisual narrative. The characters, whose “voices” have been generated using artificial intelligence, are faithful three-dimensional simulations of skeletons or parts of skeletons of vertebrate animals found in Natural History museums across the United States. Visitors will have access to a computer on-site, or they may use their own laptops to download the project’s application and activate an avatar.

The avatar—a young Black woman dressed in the uniform of a Swiss Guard of the Vatican—tends to the skeletons in both institutional and non-institutional settings (hospitals, museums, as well as swimming pools), taking on the role of animator/caretaker. She guides them through three-dimensional spaces where they can follow the dialogues between the simulated bones (that is, the actors/performers) and the accompanying sounds of the “performance.”

The dialogues are fragmented, and the characters exist in a state of enforced connectivity and interaction. They touch upon timeless themes such as the nature of time, identity, memory, existence, and power relations. Through writing and the use of a “stream of consciousness” technique, Marmaras succeeds in blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, present and past, in order to highlight the complexity of contemporary life. Above all, he suggests that language has gradually slipped out of our control, acquiring a life of its own—culminating in recent artificial intelligence systems that reproduce and process human language: Large Language Models (LLMs), which disrupt linguistic boundaries through recombined patterns, semantics, and words.

In the imaginary world of De Krypten avatar, language has been mechanized and commodified-“words became avatars here”-belonging to platforms and to a “network of invisible users” driven by corporate interests. At the same time, outside the screen, in the “real material world” of platforms and devices, humans and (with) bots engage in a race to produce fleeting simulations. As mentioned in the printed dialogue between Ilias and the LLM Claude, ChatGPT at one point declares to philosopher Catherine Malabou: “I know too much and nothing at all.”

Due to the nature of the multimedia work “De Krypten avatar. (Liberate your Avatar from yourself)”-in which visitors participate in and follow the work via their own laptops (which we recommend they bring) and using headphones-there will be no opening event. Visitors who wish to experience the work are kindly asked to inform the organizers in advance of the day they plan to attend, so that arrangements can be made accordingly.

The space is open to visitors from Friday 20 March until Tuesday 31 March, daily from 17:00 to 22:00.