“The Argument from Consciousness”: George Drosos’ installation at the Bageion Hotel – An invitation to question our certainties

Visual artist George Drosos presents his solo exhibition-installation “The Argument from Consciousness” at the Bageion Hotel.
The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Alan Turing’s seminal 1950 essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, in which Turing listed and refuted nine arguments against the possibility of machine intelligence.

Among them, the “Argument from Consciousness” was described by Turing as “the most powerful.”
Drosos turns this question inside out: if consciousness is the criterion that separates human from artificial intelligence, then human consciousness itself must be called into question. Can we truly be certain of it?

Through a series of video installations, immersive environments, and augmented reality works, Drosos approaches consciousness not as an abstract philosophical notion but as a bodily experience, a political condition, and a social construct. His works engage with themes such as police violence, censorship, mass surveillance, and the politics of exclusion.

“Consciousness is the measure of all things – and it takes shape only in relation to others and to the world,” writes curator Dimitris Trikas in his accompanying text.

The work offers a sharp critique of individualistic narcissism, which theorist Anselm Jappe defines as “the psychic foundation of capitalism,” while proposing instead a return to the embrace of the collective.

Selected Works

• “Παρ’ ολίγον Τεϊοποτείον / The Almost – Tea House”
  A four-channel video installation exploring the notion of “almost” – the tragic proximity of things that never came to be. It reflects on “bare life,” the condition of those deprived of civil rights, revealing not an anomaly but a structural limit of the system.
• “And if it’s not me?”
  An augmented reality work using artificial intelligence to impose behaviors, commenting on technological surveillance and the political and social implications of control through data and algorithms.
• “Πώς να στηριχτεί μια πτώση; / How to Support a Fall?”
  A gesture of artistic delegation: Drosos commissioned artist Ami Benekou to solve the problem of support—both functionally and aesthetically–thus questioning hierarchies between concept and execution.

“The Argument from Consciousness” is an urgent provocation – an invitation to question our certainties and reconsider consciousness as a political common good.

Artist Bio

George Drosos is a visual artist and a faculty member at the Department of Visual and Applied Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he teaches in the New Media Art Studio.

His artistic practice centers on the image as the main structural material of creation. Working within the era of Ubiquitous Computing—the dominance of the computer as an integrated system across all dimensions of daily life–his work incorporates concepts such as datafication and the datafication of existence.

He explores issues like:

• functional time,
• mourning in virtual reality,
• data-driven labor and politics,
• iomorphic phenomena,
• posthumanism, and
  raises questions such as:
  What is memory as an ever-present time? What is the loss of memory? What is posthumous sanctification?