AI with a message

Behooda Series

AI art is controversial among the artist community, but one cannot deny the fact that the set of commands do finally come from a human artist. Here are four such artists who have gone beyond prompt commands to make us pause and consider what we are looking at.

Behooda Series

In his The Behooda series, Varun Gupta expresses pervasive corruption and unethical practices that are commonplace in many societal institutions. "Each figure," says Gupta, "the politician, businessman, police officer, lawyer, and news anchor symbolises different sectors of society that are often marred by such behavior. However, the series also aims to provoke self-reflection by including a mirror in the final piece. The use of blood and gore in depicting these figures as zombies stands for moral decay. The idea is to emphasize that corruption doesn't just harm society, it strips individuals of humanity, reducing them to zombies driven by greed and dishonesty."
>>>
@aalsiyoulater; Instagram

Love in the time of satygraha

Naman Jain's use of AI to make art has piqued a lot of curiosity. An architect by training, Jain posted star-crossed lovers kissing or just looking into each other's eyes against the backdrop of India's Independence struggle. "I always saw blood and violence in photographs," he says, "I thought that there maybe so many who lost their lovers, partners and family during the freedom struggle..."
>>>
@seaorangutan25; Instagram

Family secret

Prateek Arora has tickled our imagination with his monster family series. He has inserted a red-skinned, teeth-baring entity in the middle of a quintessential Indian family photo. We found it to be telling about secrets that lurk within a seemingly happy clan. "I like using horror imagery to explore themes that may be otherwise considered taboo," he says.
>>>
@_prateekarora; Instagram

Life ka ras

Praful Mishra, a digital artist, recently posted an experiment with the AI graphic site Midjourney. Mishra had captioned the post [paraphrased]: I asked AI to generate faces of human emotions. Each prompt to MidJourney led to a face which packaged them onto juice packs and here, I present to you, 100 per cent pure and pressed Navarasas! "I wanted to see what would come put wth prompts of the nine rasas, i.e anger, joy etc," says Mishra. "These very tribal looking forms were the result, but since they are ‘rasas' (juices), I wanted to package them as juice boxes."
>>>
@sojaonaman; Instagram