While artists blend physical art with Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their works at the 9th edition of the recently concluded Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF), featuring more than 1,800 artistes/200 projects across 22 venues, at the first AI Mini Lab this year at SAF, the AI wasn’t a ChatGPT awaiting prompts but rather was based “on pattern recognition, learned relationships and algorithms” and reiterated that though “AI might be able to produce outcomes that surprise, inspire or resonate, the processes will always be based on human intelligence”. As the founder patron of SAF, Sunil Kant Munjal, says, “I see the fear that technology will take over my job/role less in the art world than in other professions.”
Book massage, s’il vous plait
Here’s Sarnath Banerjee’s Chainpreet’s Sofa, from where one can complain, where rants become art. There’s LN Tallur’s sculptures and wall pieces born of a meeting of absurdity and anxiety.
Shailesh BR at his Let’s Make a Choice (Swayamvara), makes you sit as an AI machine showers brown rice on you, like a newlywed bride does before parting with her birth family. There is a varmala (garland) on a machine waiting to be thrown on you, simulating the action of a bride and groom at a wedding. Tradition meets technology. Here, musician Talvin Singh becomes an artist while Pollinations.ai offers a “Book Massage”, where you listen to an audiobook of your liking while getting a machine gives you a shoulder massage. It literally plays on how reading a book can be like a therapeutic massage for your brain and soul.
Curators Thukral & Tagra, comprising Delhi artist duo Jiten Thukral and Samir Tagra, brought under one roof visual art as disparate as chalk and cheese, blurring the lines between the host/artist and audience, thereby rekindling the 20th century genre of ‘interactive art’ with “Multiplay’: a sandbox of collective experience at the Old GMC building in Goa’s Panjim, part of the recently concluded Serendipity Arts Festival 2024, December 15-22.
Who killed Dara Shikoh? History in the age of disinformation
At stone’s throw away is Kala Academy, where a project co-commissioned by LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Parag K Mital’s The Game of Whispers, an interactive and generative video game, drew parallels between the political intrigue of the Mughal Empire during Shah Jahan’s reign and the role of AI-driven disinformation in today’s world.
There are five panels, each — Mumtaz Mahal, the empress; Javed, the gardener; Aurangzeb, the prince; Dara Shikoh, the prince; and Khadija Banu, the confidante —giving each individual’s respectove reasoning for, propelling of, or questioning the killing of Shah Jahan’s eldest son, Dara Shikoh.
Non-playable characters (NPCs), i.e. game characters (not controlled by players but by AI) and modelled after figures from Mughal-era miniature paintings in LACMA’s collection. These NPCs are driven by advanced large language models like those powering ChatGPT, allowing them to engage in lifelike conversations that create new layers of intrigue and deepen the cycle of disinformation as the characters spread rumours.
Our forests are dying: Radhika Agarwala marries art with AI
Kolkata-born Radhika Agarwala, 39, moved her base to Goa a year ago. During her academic pursuits of art, in Kolkata, London, Florida, and later in Bangalore and Goa, Agarwala strolled into the jungles to collect materials for her art. Their gradual erosion, depletion and destruction became the subject of her installation ‘Frequencies of the forest’ at the Directorate of Accounts building in Panjim. An immersive, interactive installation combining sound, video and natural environments — without any wiring. It’s all AI-generated.
Up to four people are allowed in the installation space at a time. The first video talks about the forest which is thriving, the minute a person begins interacting within the work, stands on a trigger zone, a patch of stones/pebbles in a forest-like simulation, they are indulging in that forest. The human touch/pressure gradually leaves its negative impact. As two people enter, you start seeing traces and trashes of humanity. As three enter, there are slight hints of destruction. And when four people engage with the work, you completely see a pandemonium, an inferno, almost like Dante’s Hell.
“In Radhika’s work, around the corner, you have to enter the landscape into this kind of AI-generated machine to change the landscape,” it was part of the show “Ghost in Machines”, “which looked at how we as individuals/humans interact with the more-than-human or the more-than-human interacts with us,” says the Zurich-based curator Damien Christinger, who spends a lot of time in India.
The other artists in the “Ghost in Machines” show included the works of Swiss photographer Herbert Weber; Anuja Dasgupta’s plant-based art from Ladakh; Sonia Mehra Chawla’s photographic look at production in the paat or jute factories in Kolkata; and ‘Opera of Trade and Commerce’, an AI-technology reinterpretation of the huge wholesale electronics good department store in Shanghai, and the invisible foot-soldiers of the gig economy.
Agarwala, who’s been an artist for over two decades, displayed her work at Serendipity for the first time this year. “Frequencies of the Forest is completely site-specific, from the living landscape, which is embedded on the floor to the imagery and the sound in the video, it talks about who is the ghost in the machine. Is it us? Will the forest ever thrive as they grow sparser and sparser? The work is embedded in four different stages of ecological degradation, where the idea is that every time there’s human presence and interaction with nature, the habitat is always disintegrating and crumbling in front of our eyes,” says the artist, “Even in a place like Goa, because of massive tourism and influx of people coming in.” Which also includes her, in a way.
“I live in almost a forest and all the footage that I have captured is from there. I didn’t want to talk about ecology and alienate the spectator from the work, rather wanted them to be participating with the work and engaging in this way where they become the storyteller and the messenger as well,” she further adds.
It’s been a complex work for Agarwala because this is the first time she’s intersected technology with ecology. And her first brush with AI. The artist usually works with sculpture, printmaking and painting. “I wanted the technology to be the binder. Sophisticated and simple, so that the engagement between the work and the spectator remains compelling, impactful and true to its nature,” she says.
By and large, her work talks about ecological preservation, decay, and most importantly, human behaviour and consciousness. “Artists are messengers, storytellers, not problem solvers. But, at this point, when dystopia is not a mythology anymore, it’s our reality, this is the message I wanted to give with my practice, in a platform like this,” she says, “Over the years, my studio has extended into the garden, and now to the forest or the altering forest. And, it has become the muse and the material for me. And I’m deeply inspired by my endless walks and personal encounters with nature, with the micro species that are living around us but are also dissolving around us.”
The recently released 18th biennial assessment of India’s forests, “India State of Forest Report (ISFR) 2023”, released by the Forest Survey of India, reveals a major drop in the country’s dense natural forests. With wide swathes of the dense natural forests in biodiverse regions like the Western Ghats and the Northeast besides mangroves and others having either been degraded or diverted for non-forest purposes. Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Assam and Gujarat lost their dense natural forests in Recorded Forest Area (RFA). Outside the recorded forest area, India lost around 64 sq. km of Dense Forest and over 416 sq. km of Mid-Dense Forest.
Data shows that around 93,000 sq. km of recorded forest areas have degraded into Open Forest (OF), Scrub and Non-Forest (NF) between 2011 and 2021. In 40,709 sq. km of forests, density degradation took place from Very Dense Forest (VDF) and Mid-Dense Forest (MDF) to Open Forest (OF). The Western Ghat Eco-Sensitive Areas, which are also global biodiversity hotspots, registered an overall loss of 58.22 sq. km in forest cover during the last 10 years.
Agarwala also pokes at “how we interact with nature, I think that has become the biggest problem.” Unlike in America and England, where she’s lived for 13 years, and where the entire landscape is completely different because “it is historically very manicured, because of geography and also how people communicate with it responsibly. And the government ensures of that.”
“People have had parks to go in India, now we hardly that many parks. Maybe in Delhi which still has gentrified parks to walk but look at a landscape like Kolkata, Goa or Bombay, where are the public parks? The Lake (Rabindra Sarobar) in Kolkata is filled with debris, people are trashing things in it all the time. So, with this work of mine, I wanted to really get into the psychology of the human brain, where they come into this compelling small space but as they enter, they are thrown away with the reality of our landscape today of India,” she says.
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