Artistic Intelligence

Most dictionaries still don’t have an exact meaning for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Simply put, these are irreplaceable pieces of art and/or media that are created, bought and sold using blockchain technology - usually, cryptocurrency. Despite the Indian government’s current stance on this mode of currency (not technically illegal, but still unregulated in India), the country’s art scene was quick to take up the mantle of revolutionising creativity in the digital age.

Terrain.art, a blockchain-powered online platform from Delhi that focuses on art from South Asia, is exploring the burgeoning relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and creativity with India’s first AI NFT Art exhibition titled, Intertwined Intelligences. It features six global artists pioneering AI - Pindar Van Arman, David Young, Scott Eaton, Harshit Agrawal, Sofia Crespo and Feileacan McCormick from Entangled Others Studio - this exhibition is on display till August 20. And domestic buyers can use more traditional methods to purchase pieces they are interested in.

Aparajita Jain, Founder of Terrain.Art, has been part of the art industry for 15 years and, realised the scene in India due for an upgrade. “Art was very elitist, not accessible to everybody. Abroad, the art ecosystem, with the museums and college courses, is decentralised and more democratised. In the US, you can study art along with computer science. In India, you have to pick one. So, art coming into the digital medium is making it accessible to everyone - whether they live in a city or a village or what profession they are in - and also letting anyone promote their own work.”

Agrawal, who has curated the show and featured some of his own works in it, explains that working in tandem with AI is giving artists new frontiers to discover and cross. “We feed our own raw creative inputs into something called GAN (generative adversarial network), which is a set of machine learning systems that interpret the artist’s inputs into visual media, which then the artist can reconfigure. It’s a lot of back-and-forth with the system, but humans have the final say.”

More simply put, it is a jugalbandi wherein GANs, which are algorithmic architectures, use two neural networks, pitting one against the other in order to generate new data. 

Jain showcased India’s first Al show at Nature Morte in August 2018 titled Gradient Descent, where all the featured artworks were made by Al in collaboration with artists. Three years on, Intertwined Intelligences on Terrain.art has introduced another layer by presenting works that have physical and digital counterparts that are secured on blockchain using NFTs.

Jain explains, “AI has evolved exponentially since that show in 2018. I love the potential of how interactive these artworks can be. We are presenting 3D creatures that resemble life forms but generated through algorithms, and the augmented reality feature allows viewers to truly engage with these digitally native creatures.”

Artworks by Agrawal and other creators use a medley of human inspiration and experience along with machine learning and artificial intelligence to create an ouvre.