The works in this series are created by a new way of art making, that of using artificial intelligence (A.I) to make art. With AI art slowly but steadily gaining popularity internationally, one visual trend hard to miss is the art being created by it reflecting European and American art histories and aesthetics predominantly, both because of majority AI artists being from that region, and because of better availability of digital art archives of those regions. Does it then mean that that is what AI art’s foundations will be? What is an AI machine’s cultural underpinning and how can we broaden its scope? As we engineer the nuts and bolts of and approach the dawn of a new ‘species’ standing around by the corner of its own ‘intelligence’, one question that seldom gets any attention is, what is such a machine’s cultural underpinning, what is its cultural and aesthetic situatedness, especially if it’s meant to act as our primary medium of societal and individual reflection.
Being among the only Indian artists working with this medium, one of my large goals is to bring Indian aesthetics and art to the mix of what is seen internationally as AI art.
Therefore, in this series, i ground this new Artificial Intelligence artist collaborator in a broader, much more diverse view of visual culture and art drawing inspiration from Indian art forms and figures, which rarely find representation in art datasets digitally available. i work with a variety of Buddhist Thangka paintings as his source, alluding to the cycles of transcendence which we undergo as a species, continuous cycles of trying to become something more than ourselves, which we are now channeling through the evolving role of AI in our lives. i use an AI algorithm called Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) as his primary tool, however, i stack several of these GANs in a sequential custom manner, piping the output of one to the input of the next to produce these final outputs.
Machinic Situatedness 1. 28×28 inch. Archival Print on Paper. 2018.
Machinic Situatedness 2. 28×28 inch. Archival Print on Paper. 2018.
Machinic Situatedness 3. 28×28 inch. Archival Print on Paper. 2018.
Machinic Situatedness 4. 28×28 inch. Archival Print on Paper. 2018.
Machinic Situatedness 5. 28×28 inch. Archival Print on Paper. 2018.
Machinic Situatedness Video Work. Dimensions Variable. This video is created through arbitrary zooming on the dataset and training the GAN on that. 2018.
Mockup of Machinic Situatedness 4 in an Interior Space.
Mockup of Machinic Situatedness 5 in an Interior Space.