By Sukant Deepak
New Delhi, Feb 10 (IANS) When diverse things that do not necessarily get along, come together, there is a possibility of an enigmatic arrangement. ‘The Impossible Bouquet’ also proves order and beauty can emerge from chaos.
“Well, impossible is a beautiful word, and when new technologies and new ideas come together, the impossible becomes possible,” internationally renowned multi-disciplinary artist Raghava KK, whose 94,500 Dollars NFT at Sotheby’s set a new record for the Indian art scene tells IANS. The artist, along with his brother created the world’s first art exhibition and a gallery of AI artists.
His latest exhibition ‘The Impossible Bouquet’, curated by Feroze Gujral in association with Volte Art Projects opened on Friday at 24, Jor Bagh (Feb 10-16), marking the occasion of Gujral Foundation’s 15th year. The exhibition is an official collateral event of the ongoing India Art Fair 2023 and a highlight of the fair’s VIP Collector’s Programme.
With an extraordinary new wave of word-to-imagery AI disrupting the art world, the exhibition engages with prompt engineering to ask the question — can we shape our collective future using this disruption as a springboard.
The artist, who has been engaging with AI for a decade now and has been consistently fighting against it to stay relevant, says the show has made him realise that it is not AI versus him.
“AI is a tool that enables me. In order for me to allow it to enable me, I have to let go of what I thought is possible, and what I think is possible. So, while working with it to create images, the process goes like this — first an AI is shown my impossible bouquet painting, it learns my brushstrokes and the composition of my bouquets, then it is asked to make its own bouquets, but it is restricted, it is exposed to a restricted training set of images that come from hidden parts of our body. It uses those hidden parts of the body to create impossible bouquets, inspired by my impossible bouquets that the AI was trained on. Now that it has created these bouquets, I manipulate various elements of the AI to make it look beautiful or create a particular aesthetic and then I come up with an image that is stunning, beautiful, evocative, huge, and mysterious — it has all these elements that I want. I can print that image or display it as an NFT.”
However, when he printed that image, he realised that it was flat, an image is like a ghost after all, desperately looking to create a body. Raghava then started painting on these prints. While some of the artworks felt intimidating, they felt complete, and he had to contribute close to nothing to complete them. But some were incomplete and he had to imagine a body for them.
“So each work is a conversation, a series of conversations from an AI learning my style and me learning from AI, to painting on it, responding to its strokes. The truth is that both AI and I have learned from each other, that was the process of creating these works.”
The artist, who works in different mediums, says each one is like a new language with its own resistance, friction and personality, and that engaging with any one of them is akin to finding one’s middle ground with its temperament.
“I typically spend 4-10 years on one medium before into another. Sometimes it happens parallelly and they inform each other. I see technology AI, bio-tracking oil, and conceptuality as mediums and tools.”
This Brooklyn-based artist says the place has left an important impression on his life.
“I came back to India during the first year in Brooklyn and did a show in Mumbai called ‘Brooklyn bound our Train’. It’s really interesting because Brooklyn was just going through its gentrification phase, and at all points like starving artists in New York, I could afford to stay only on the fringe of that gentrification. What is beautiful is that Brooklyn’s fringes are still inhabited by artists, musicians, poets, writers, and theatre people. If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, Brooklyn is a safe landing spot. It felt less pretentious, it was not scary like Manhattan and is open to new ideas. Brooklyn is starting to play an important role in advancing conversations in post-contemporary painting practices especially.”
Stressing that creating NFT history is always a perspective from the outside, and for him, true history has been done repeatedly, for the last decade, he says, “I take great pride in some of these crazy beliefs that we had a decade ago and had the opportunity to manifest and engage with contemporary reality. So it’s really exciting to have a dream and see the whole world moving in that direction — it feels blessed, rewarding or surprising. I think the future is AI and humans coming together. I think we need to pick an attitude toward these two binaries, we do not have to look toward the West because it is well-versed in identifying binaries and studying them as binaries. I think we need to look at both the West and the East to bring the binaries back together. It is an exciting time to be alive because the cyborg where the tools we created are starting to show that they are creating us.”
He feels NFTs have managed to generate the interest of a generation, and what is really interesting is that it is a generation that understands collectibles, identity and identity in the metaverse.
“And this one (generation) has these ideologies about democratising information, decision- making, etc. We need to look at the internet as in itself a generation and think of the different generations that are interacting with it.”
(Sukant Deepak can be reached at sukant.d@ians.in)
–IANS
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