Miltos Manetas

Biography

Miltos Manetas is a Greek-born painter, conceptual artist, and theorist, born in Athens in 1964 and trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. In 2000, alongside Mai Ueda, he founded NEEN, often described as the first art movement of the 21st century, which brought together an international group of artists producing single-serving, internet-native works that treated the browser and the network itself as an artistic medium. Manetas has long been recognized as a pioneer of Machinima, using video game engines and virtual environments such as Active Worlds and Second Life as sites for painting, performance, and world-building well before such practices became mainstream. His work spans painting, photography, video, and internet-based installation, and has been exhibited at major institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and MAXXI in Rome, as well as at events like the Venice Internet Pavilion. Manetas often blends philosophical and spiritual inquiry with technology, using AI, avatars, and historical figures to interrogate value, provenance, and memory in an image-saturated culture; recent projects include an AI persona of Saint Francis of Assisi built for the Venice Internet Pavilion. Nicknamed the "El Greco of the geeks" by The Guardian, he continues to explore how private money, networks, and images shape who gets to participate in contemporary art and culture.