10 Questions with Constantina Scapetoulia
Constantina Scapetoulia is a visual artist and member of the Laboratory Teaching Staff of New Media at the Ξudiovisual Department of the Athens School of Fine Arts. As of 2022, she is the elected special Secretary of the Athens School of Fine Arts Laboratory Teaching Staff Association and is a member of the Ξnstitution Curriculum Committee.
She holds a degree from the Athens School of Fine Arts (1997) in Painting and in Stage Design, and a master's degree from the same School in digital art forms (2003). She has studied linguistics, computer graphic design, social networks and cultural management. The expressive means she uses cover a wide range of photography, video, digital applications, interactive installations, gaming, text, graphic design, and code-based web artworks.
Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions. Her educational experience includes teaching through conferences and lectures, as well as supervising the process and development of students' artistic proposals.
Constantina Scapetoulia - Portrait
ARTIST STATEMENT
Constantina Scapetoulia is an artist, theorist and educator working with pictures and mainly text-based art projects. She primarily focuses on the role of language and new knowledge through science and technology in the perception of reality. Her work is interdisciplinary, combining text and image to explore and highlight issues of language visibility. The issue of creating a hybrid space emerged as a productive nexus of art, linguistic theory, computational creativity, and practice. The expressive means she uses cover a wide range of photography, video, digital applications, interactive installations, gaming, text, graphic design, and code-based web artworks.
As Language activates situations in a non-perceptual way, only art can perceive, as it works beyond certainties but with questions. Because natural language does not always have a defined structure, the use of language models helps to reveal the unlimited possibilities of language as they recognise relationships and forms. In the installation βLegographyβ, using Lego bricks and an alphabet model based on the correspondence of letters to colours, a unique text is created collectively. The project βopen imagesβ is based on data gathered through social networks. It is a series of digital prints that highlight the collaboration of different readers. In the work βHomo Vidensβ, employing graphic design strategies of text, a dictionary corresponds to the function of a technological language.
Netword, digital photo, 2025 Β© Constantina Scapetoulia
INTERVIEW
Can you tell us about your background and how your studies in painting and stage design led you to explore digital and interactive art forms?
Through my studies in painting, I became interested in the function of symbols and believed in the value of the work of art, not as an object of momentary pleasure but as a carrier of a message connected to space and time. In parallel with my interest in the materiality of image, my preoccupation with language as well as an expressive medium led me to study stage design. The theatre, and mostly the opera, in modern productions, has gathered many elements from other art forms, embracing technologically rendered, mediated stage design, performance, sound installations, and, of course, the discourse through the text. The intersectionality of different art forms and interactivity that we often encounter between the arts expands the boundaries of artistic pursuits. Technology mediates to highlight new sensory experiences that surround contemporary reality. What interests me about digital forms of expression is that they emphasise meaning and logical composition, cultivate experimentation and originality, and highlight the semiotic content of the work of art.
What first drew you to the intersection of language, image, and technology in your artistic practice?
I would say that what initially drew my attention to the intersection of language, image, and technology was their expressive potential through coding. I have always been fascinated by writing system encoding standards, as they are the coded language of road signs, logos, diagrams, device instructions, and even elements of computer machine language. The area where the verbal message functions as an element of representation. This figurative character of language is based on the function of symbols. According to Lacan, in language, thought, and culture, reality is structured through symbols and laws. With the phrase, the entire world of the machine is the symbolic world, he states that even the machine is not simply a material object, but an element that carries a symbolic load, incorporating human structures and ideas.
Metagraph, digital print, 1x1,20 m, 2023 Β© Constantina Scapetoulia
How do you approach the relationship between text and image in your work?
Language has, in its use, a tool a dominative role as it determines who lives and who dies, who speaks and who is silenced, but at the same time has a creative role as it activates situations and events, in a non-perceptual way, a function that is very close to artistic practice that attempts to decode and interpret the world. In the modern technologically mediated world of data, information, machine learning and artificial intelligence, the word or phrase has become the basic signifier of the artistic work in the sense of text-visual symbol. The proclamation of the word itself, its treatment as material and the experimentation of verbal combinations, to achieve audiovisual tensions, resulted in the production of a "different text" based on creativity and not on the conventions of language. The text pre-exists the work of art, functions as a guide in its production and is ultimately used in its interpretation, although sometimes it can appear as a work of art in itself. Ξn my artistic practice, both the figurative character of the text and the verbal character of the image appear.
Many of your projects use data, coding, or digital tools. How do you decide which medium best fits an idea?
It is true that during my artistic career, I have been involved with almost all expressive means. And the reason is that I truly believe that every idea needs the appropriate medium to be realised. The idea for me is not something abstract, any, that seeks to take on characteristics. It has an entity. The world exists; we do not need to create it or dominate it by imposition. We need to discover it. To listen to it and observe it. As an example for a concept that explores the tactile function, what else could I use as a means besides physical performance? Or for a work that explores language, how could I not use the grammatical sequence of the text. Quite often, a work bears the traces of the medium like a watermark. The medium participates decisively in the production of a work; it becomes a co-creator to the extent that Marshall McLuhan stated that the medium is the message.
Can you describe the concept behind your project Legography and how it connects language and collective creation?
The work "Legography" is an interactive installation in which the viewer creates words or expressions using LEGO bricks placed on a horizontal platform. With the guidance of a dictionary which shows what colour suits each letter, the viewer can match the different colours with letters. This creates a text in two dimensions without obvious continuity and specific intention. The viewer is liberated from the convention of language to play with its structural elements. As a result, we have a coded text. The artist's final intervention is to try to synthesise the created forms to create a text based on them.
MEDIATIO, videostill, 2022 Β© Constantina Scapetoulia
Metafos, digital print, 1x1,20 m, 2023 Β© Constantina Scapetoulia
Your work often explores how language shapes perception. What interests you most about the invisible or abstract aspects of language?
Language is a mental system of signs that mediates to determine thought. It is a mechanism that mobilises, shapes, andinfluences sensory and mental experiences. Spoken language is the material of thought. It is developed in space through the body, voice, facial expressions, and movement, occupying space as a natural sensory phenomenon. On the other hand, in written language, the arrangement of letters in space produces meaning, so their materiality serves a semantic function. The words and their compositions, their meaning, their external and inner form, acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality. The ability to produce work gives language presence and materiality.
How do your roles as artist, theorist, and educator influence one another?
The Theory and Philosophy of Art that I deal with usually explores those "particular" concepts that, since they are definedby language, exist as "phenomena", situations, events. Art goes one step further by giving form and substance to the results of this procedure, bringing it closer to the essence of human existence. Through education, a wider audience is given the opportunity to become partakers of this cognitive experience through interaction and dialogue.
Collaboration and participation seem important in your projects. What do you hope audiences experience when engaging with your work?
Ξccording to my opinion the visual event, it has the characteristics of a ritual where the viewer is invited to be initiatedinto the humanitarian messages that the artist wants to share. It is an integral part of the artistic work to the point where the viewer can also be characterised as a collaborator or co-creator. The viewer should be captured by the work of art, feel familiar with it in order to make their own reading, to position themselves towards it, to ask their personal questions, and thus contribute to the further development of the artistic work. Artistic practice for me does not aim to direct in a specific direction or to manipulate the viewer. It is a participatory process.
Letter-bricks, digital print, 100x50 cm, 2024 Β© Constantina Scapetoulia
Anixiatiko, acrylics, tape, 100x70 cm, 2025 Β© Constantina Scapetoulia
In your view, how is technology transforming the way we understand and produce art today?
The question is how our technological future is shaped, but also the future of art. The way in which we perceive the world around us determines the way in which we perceive artistic creation. The modern methods by which art is created, promoted, preserved and disseminated have also been transformed as a result of society's shift to a technologically mediated form. New forms of art are constantly evolving and developing through the Internet, social networks, nano and biotechnologies, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Art is disseminated almost as soon as it is produced via the Internet, it is financed by crowd funding services, it is produced very easily through a large and available variety of tools.The intersection of technology and art often involves people from different disciplines with diverse interests in computing, cyber-artists, roboticists, mechanical researchers, who create environments of interdisciplinary collaborations transforming the visual arts scene.
Also, the interconnection with technology has helped to increase the audience for art through online and social media platforms.
There is a deeper impact of technology on our lives and a strong bond with culture that also leads to significant changes in our sensory perception. According to Walter Gropius, art and technology are one. Technology fed and feeds art with materials, means and tools while art fed and feeds with ideas and inspiration that expand the boundaries and possibilities of technology.
What new ideas or directions are you currently exploring in your artistic or academic practice?
Currently I have been working on the materiality of language as it is expressed through spoken language. I am interested in the mapping of language in space and time as a linguistic event. Speech as it is expressed through the body occupies space and time. Spoken language develops through the body in space, shaping it through another fourth dimension, thus managing to broaden the horizon of our perceptual possibilities. Besides, for Heidegger, language is the residency of being.
Artistβs Talk
Al-Tiba9 Interviews is a promotional platform for artists to articulate their vision and engage them with our diverse readership through a published art dialogue. The artists are interviewed by Mohamed Benhadj, the founder & curator of Al-Tiba9, to highlight their artistic careers and introduce them to the international contemporary art scene across our vast network of museums, galleries, art professionals, art dealers, collectors, and art lovers across the globe.
