Strange Genders Manifestation 1. 44×44 inch. Archival Print on Canvas. 2020.
Strange Genders Manifestation 2. 44×44 inch. Archival Print on Canvas. 2020.
A piece by 64/1 (Karthik Kalyanaraman and Raghava KK) and Harshit Agrawal, commissioned by Myna Mukherjee for Artissima.
Around 1000 people are asked to draw a standing ‘woman’ and separately a standing ‘man’. An AI is trained on these drawings and taught how to draw human figures. However, unlike humans, an algorithm trained on both genders, when asked to produce drawings of humans, can only produce an image that has a certain probability of being recognized as, say female, by a second AI which is taught to classify an object on a spectrum from ‘female’ to ‘not female’. Two works of art are created from this process: a poster inspired by the S. Indian Saiva Siddhanta concept of the bindu or the female material origin of the universe, and 3 books that catalogue both the (strange) human binary conception of gender and the machine’s (natural?) reconstruction of a gender spectrum.
We, as humans, are conditioned to think largely in terms of binaries when we think ‘gender’. This is neither necessary nor ‘normal’ for a machine. The artists investigate our cultural representations of gender by passing human drawings through the mind of a machine, and have these conceptual representations returned to us ‘more truly and more strange’ by their passage through this alien ‘mind’. Moreover, a human is born morphologically female then ‘somatically’ differentiated during embryonic growth, the female alone is capable of parthenogenesis. Inspired by the female centric vision of certain Tantric schools of thought, adopted by the nada-bindu philosophy of South Indian Saiva Siddhanta , the artists invite us to contemplate the radiation of the female outward into the ‘male’ in their central artwork.