Digital art that is interactive, particularly involving artificial intelligence, was one of the biggest themes of the art curation programme at the recently concluded ninth edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa.
One of the exhibits at South Asia’s biggest multidisciplinary art event was the AI MiniLab, a space designed for creativity and exploration, inviting viewers to experiment with AI-driven image creation. Offering hands-on experiences with cutting-edge AI tools, the lab allowed visitors to engage in interactive dialogues with ChatGPT, sharing ideas that the AI crafts into stunning images and videos.
One of the exhibitions, Art x Machine, is another interesting case in point. Showcasing ground breaking works from five visionary Indian AI artists, it explores the intersection of traditional art and modern technology. The one-of-a-kind exhibition features AI-generated artworks, including paintings, digital installations and interactive pieces that challenge traditional artistic perceptions. The project highlights India’s position at the forefront of AI innovation, demonstrating how technology serves as a catalyst for creative expression and exploring the evolving relationship between human creativity and machine learning.
Mumbai-based filmmaker, ideator and AI artist Varun Gupta is known for using innovative storytelling to blend futuristic concepts with daily life in India. A key milestone in his career is designing the world’s first female AI cover for Vogue Singapore. His work for the exhibition, Akashganga, reimagines the sacred flow of the Ganga, reversing its journey and returning it to the cosmos. He portrays the city of Varanasi defying gravity, with its temples and homes soaring like celestial vessels. “The floating structures mirror the Ganga’s fabled descent, only now ascending, as though the divine calls them home to the heavens,” he explains.
Screenwriter and AI artist Prateek Arora’s work explores the impact of popular culture on memory and identity, the role of technology in contemporary Indian society and the potential of genre cinema as a medium for repressed and censored ideas. In his work, he creates a fictional industrial town called Rocketganj located on the outskirts of Delhi across the Yamuna. The primary inspiration for the town comes from Arora’s personal experiences of growing up in the suburb of Patparganj across the Yamuna in Delhi. Its name is derived from the rocket-building and testing facilities that employ most of its residents.
“The people building these rockets don’t get to partake in any of their voyages. They are always looking for new ways to capture a slice of that thrill,” he elaborates on the concept. Another theme that calls out to him is how new technology always seems to remake society and its structures every time, and not always for the better. “The citizens of Rocketganj literally build, and at great personal hazard, a part of the future that many of them can only look at from afar and will likely never be able to experience – but maybe their kids can,” he adds.
Google Arts & Culture’s first artist resident in India, Harshit Agrawal, is a pioneer in AI and technology based art who held the country’s first solo AI art show at Emami Art Gallery in 2021. In his video artwork series, he juxtaposes traditional forms of art with machine aesthetics. “Can we teach machines the aesthetics of abstraction?” he poses the question through his work. 3D artist Goji explores the fusion of photography and AI-driven animation by capturing the tangible world through a camera lens and enhancing it with artificial intelligence. “AI allows me to bring hidden dimensions to life, blurring the line between the real and the imagined,” he said. Further, New York based graphic designer and visual artist Khyati Trehan develops visual systems and experimental tools at Google Creative Lab. Her work at the exhibition, Phantom Frameworks, explores the creative potential of a generative AI video model by inviting it to extract figurative patterns from still, traditionally drawn modular vector art compositions.
Other exhibits in similar vein at the festival included The Game of Whispers, by Parag K. Mital, an internationally exhibited artist and interdisciplinary researcher working between computational arts and machine learning practices for nearly two decades. In collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it features an interactive video game that draws 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. Set within a rendition of Delhi’s historic Red Fort, it analyses how rumours, manipulation and shifting power dynamics mirror the way modern technology, particularly AI, distorts the truth.
Needless to say, the future of art, like everything else, is AI.
