Can creativity, originally considered an innate human ability, be mimicked by technology? A new breed of artists are using Artificial Intelligence and art to co-create alternate digital realities and futures
Image from Harshit Agrawal’s series titled Masked Reality, created around the theme of Kathakali and Theyyam traditions. Pic courtesy/Harshit Agrawal
Which song will we sing to the future? How will the future listen to the present? What would the conversation be like between humans and post-human beings? These are some of the questions that have occupied Mumbai-based artist Sahej Rahal as he has worked with Artificial Intelligence (AI) programmes to create art, the aim of this collaboration being to collectively imagine better worlds. Rahal, a long-time fan of sci-fi films, who graduated from the Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Art, Mumbai, and is one of the fellows of Digital Earth’s 2020-2021 fellowship, creates fictional, mythological worlds which take the shape of sculptures, performances, films, comics and paintings. What led him to AI programmes, he says, was the question: what would happen if the creatures that he was creating had an active role in the narrative.
“Imagine that there’s this multiple-limbed creature and each of its limbs has a script attached to it,” Rahal explains. “These scripts are capable of listening to sounds from the computer’s microphone and that audio feedback interrupts the motion of these creatures.” Rahal invited Hindustani classical singer friends to sing to the programmes, and says that the creatures responded differently to the music, appearing once to bow down to each other to an abstract rendition of the raga Bhairavi. “The interaction that is produced is randomised and changes each time with new inputs. So essentially, what you have are a set of virtual worlds that are capable of listening to our world.”
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.’”
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.