Srividya Kannan Ramachandran “A.I. Generated Art”

Viridian Artists, Inc.

[Image: "There is a human inside each one of us" Giclee print on fine art paper, Unframed, 40 x 50 in.]

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Viridian Artists presents “A.I. Generated Art”, our first solo exhibition of AI-generated images by Srividya Kannan Ramachandran.

“A.I. Generated Art” is a collection of images that were generated from an A.I.’s consciousness. All but one of the images (can you guess which?) in this show were entirely created by artificial neural networks. Like a parent or teacher teaching art to a student, Ramachandran trained the artificial brain with her pre-existing corpus of abstract art. After the training process is complete, the A.I. is free to generate new art in the same style that it has learned. The promise of imbuing a machine with creativity opens new vistas for “art” as we define and know it.

For decades now, computers have been used to automate routine and tedious tasks. But what lay beyond the ability of computers, was to simulate the human intelligence, and even beyond that, lay artistic creativity. Technology has evolved to a point where A.I. can now “learn” from an artist and generate new art by itself. What then is the meaning of art? This ground-breaking work by Ramachandran, a data scientist by day and an artist by night, at the intersection of technology and art, seeks to redefines aesthetics for an A.I. dominated future.

In Ramachandran’s words – “The purpose of my art is to delight those who set aside searching for purposes in life, if only it be for the brief time they spend gazing at my work. Beneath the ever-running reductionist outer mind, we all possess a silent mental substratum. Reposing in this substratum – termed ‘chitta’ in Sanskrit – yields a serene sense of bliss and also an effortless identification with a universal transcendent self. Our innate propensities embedded in our sub-conscious prevent us from resting perpetually in this tranquil state. Instead, these propensities impel us to react to all inputs in Pavlovian reflexive fashion.”

The aim of Ramachandran’s art then is to gently attenuate these propensities by using abstraction to directly color the chitta and induce in it a sense of “impersonal” delight that is distinct from the usual responses of either joy or disappointment. Art perceived by this inner intuitive self, escapes the confines of being the artist’s work solely and is uniquely reborn in every gaze on it within each distinct individual.

The artist will be speaking about the technical details of creating these works at MLConf 2018, a machine learning conference in San Francisco on November 14, 2018.

This will be Ramachandran’s first solo show at Viridian Artists. She was initially invited to become a part of Viridian after being one of 30 artists selected for the Director’s Choice exhibit, a juried exhibit that happens periodically at Viridian. We look forward to your seeing these wonderful new artworks.