Artist Sahej Rahal says that the aim of AI art is to imagine better worlds with the non-human minds that we have created. Pic/Nimesh Dave

Bengaluru-based Fabin Rasheed, a product innovator at Adobe, working in the sphere of AI and creativity to reimagine the future of machine-learning-based creation tools, calls himself an adventurer rather than planner. He says it was the element of surprise that attracted him to AI art. “We really couldn’t predict a lot of what would come out as output. We find surprising new expressions created by the machine, which we can then ‘curate to create.’”

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One of Rasheed’s first AI art projects was Auria Kathi, a social media bot that wrote a poem, created an image based on the poem and finally styled the image. This was then automatically posted by the bot to social media. It was created in collaboration with friend Sleeba Paul and exhibited at the Florence Biennale 2019.

Sahej Rahal, finalforest.exe, 2021. Still taken from interactive AI simulation. Pic courtesy/The Artist And Chatterjee & Lal

The inception of AI art, believes Harshit Agrawal, took place around 2015 with the release of the Google DeepDream, a computer vision programme interpreting drawings and generating very surreal outputs that people hadn’t seen before. “That, I think, in some sense gave birth to this modern-day AI art movement,” he says. The programme brought a new element of collective understanding to the process. “It piqued my interest in the subject for the ability to create art for the first time based on the collective understanding of things with data. We could find out how a million people thought of a certain concept and then use that understanding to create art. There was also the fact that you could teach this other agent [the machine] this collective understanding.”

Agrawal, who divides his time between Mumbai and Bengaluru, studied design at IIT Guwahati and has a Masters degree from MIT Media Lab. He has been working with AI and other forms of emerging technology for a while, keen on going beyond its utilitarian purpose to find the poetry behind technology.

Auria Kathi, an AI social bot which writes a poem, creates an image from the poem, styles it and posts to social media for a year, by Fabin Rasheed and Sleeba Paul. And Formless, a 3D sculpture investigating the entity behind the myriad masks that we see around us and its relation to technology, by Fabin Rasheed and George Boya. Pics courtesy/Fabin Rasheed

Agrawal speaks of a political influence of the global north even in the arts space, there being more representation of artists from the West along with better archiving of their work. “AI art started having western European aesthetics, which is why I was inspired to incorporate Indian art into AI art conversations,” he says.

Agrawal developed the series, Masked Reality, around the theme of face painting cultures in India, working with Theyyam and Kathakali dance forms and the intricate face painting rituals before these performances. He explains that he trained a machine to understand that visual language, so that it could transform any facial input into a masked face, enabling audience members to see themselves as the dancers. The result, he says, was an immediate sense of connect with a very traditional Indian identity. Moreover, audience members saw themselves in female (Kathakali) and male (Theyyam) forms simultaneously, resulting in a performance on gender along with one of art. Agrawal further points out that Kathakali was traditionally meant for the higher castes, while Theyyam, performed by tribal dancers, was kept outside worship spaces. Technology was thus used in the project not only to bring traditional visual languages to contemporary audiences, but also to challenge pre-existing societal reservations.

Fabin Rasheed and Harshit AgrAwal

Agrawal, who was the only Indian artist at Nature Morte’s Gradient Descent exhibition in 2018, the first ever AI-only exhibition in a contemporary art gallery, is also the curator of Intertwined Intelligences, Terrain.Art’s AI NFT show that opened on July 31, exploring the importance of a natively digital future and our deep involvement with technology. “The artists in the show are working with common themes like plants, landscapes, human figures and portraits but seeing how these common realities can be co-imagined as alternate digital realities moving forward,” Agrawal elaborates. “AI doesn’t only treat digital as a tool of creation, but becomes a co-creator in the dialogue.”