About
Nikos Kourous Vázquez is a London-based computational artist working with code, installation, moving image, and machine learning to examine, manipulate, and recontextualise computational tools, software, and technology. Nikos is a co-founder and organizer of Phreaking Collective, the London based computational arts collective centered on computational art exhibits and events.
Artist statement +
My work stems from a desire to challenge and expand prevailing narratives around machine learning: what it is, how it functions, and how it might evolve. As 'machine learning' becomes the mythologized term 'artificial intelligence,' as user-machine relationships become engraved, and as companies scramble to innovate and incorporate it, I feel compelled as an artist to challenge its position, role, and ethos in daily life.
In the early days of generative adversarial networks, I probed the latent space of generative media, extracting hidden patterns and aesthetics through animated short films like
field, sky, body, mind (2022),
and
i feel so alone in this house (2022).
At the time, these spaces were mysterious and unknown; exploring them felt like a collaboration between the machines and myself.
Today, the latent space of artificial intelligence is a familiar one. Machine hallucinations and distortions have become culturally familiar and are no longer mysterious and uncanny. Furthermore, the underlying mechanisms behind machine learning have been increasingly obscure, replaced with polished products and user interfaces. My practice, then, evolved as a response to this shift.
Rather than working collaboratively with machine learning tools, I began to work in observation of them. By confining them within self-evolving environments and feedback loops, I’d place this technology inside a fishbowl, allowing viewers, and myself, to engage with, observe, analyze, and critique it.
By creating machine learning systems to run autonomously, I allowed them to diffract and reveal their embedded and hidden functions.
Simulacrum Orbita (2025),
for example, created a never ending feedback loop between a machine vision model and a generative image model, resulting in a thorough exploration into its latent imagery, and its weights and biases.
Flickr Reflections (2025)
extended this setup by introducing images scraped from the web, initiating a conversation between hallucinated generative imagery and its training dataset of real images.
Then we sat for some time and observed (2025)
lent agency to an AI agent through the autonomous exploration of Google Street View, allowing it to develop its own memories and personality.
In 2026, my relationship with machine learning soured. The AI industry had tangibly grown into an ugly behemoth, built on negligent datasets, powered by damaging infrastructure, and deployed in counterproductive ways. Artwork built on the autonomous running of AI tools relied on the constant use of these services, inevitably staining them with the policies and economic structure of their companies.
My latest work was created with this sourness towards artificial intelligence in mind.
Chorus Inutil (2025)
re-contextualized the chatGPT user interface as a dystopian well, echoing sounds of stuttering, screams, pain, and music trapped within its text-to-speech feature. Here the tool wasn’t placed on a pedestal and didn’t take advantage of its brightest and newest features. I potato self–portrait (2026) abandoned any use of AI tied to a company, instead showcasing a locally trained model of potatoes powered by a large-potato battery array. Here, machine learning was framed within a lens of redundancy and uselessness, while requiring immense material infrastructure to power the piece.
I am Paraguayan // American // Greek but based in London, United Kingdom. I studied Fine Arts: Computational Arts (with Creative Computing) at the University of the Arts London // Camberwell College of the Arts (Creative Computing done at the Creative Computing Institute).