FUTURE FRONTIERS

A new wave of AI artists is creating exciting visions of indofuturism while drawing from the past

- NIDA NAEEM

If you’ve been on the gram at all over the past month or so, you’ve seen what looks like an Indian joint family portrait, but with a deeply unsettling touch – some of the family members have a demonic air to them, quite literally taking on characteristics of rakshasas and other fabled monsters. Their eerie blue skin and empty eyes somehow contain a piercing melancholia, as they gaze at you from an unmistakably Indian living room. Welcome to Prateek Arora’s cinematic universe.

This series of portraits, titled Granth Gothica or The Goth Family, was created using AI and has been viewed and shared many times on social media. Arora, a screenwriter and producer by profession, has shot to popularity for his AI-synthesised visions of desi sci-fi. It’s a great time for generative AI and the possibilities for creative world-building that it brings. And nowhere is this explosion more visible than on Instagram. Accounts that champion South Asian creativity such as Anita Chhiba’s Diet Paratha are especially keen on riding this wave of AI-generated art that has a distinctively Indian aesthetic.

Arora is among this new crop of visual storytellers who utilise popular AI imagery tools such as Midjourney to give tangible form to all the crazy crossovers their minds can concoct. Midjourney, and other popular softwares such as Stable Diffusion and Dall-E, all work on the same model – they are trained on huge visual datasets comprising everything from stock images to celebrated paintings so that the AI can produce comparable ‘original’ artworks when fed text prompts.

NEW NOSTALGIA