Reimagining history with Art and AI

Welcome to It’s All Desi - a monthly newsletter dedicated to spotlighting South Asian voices and pop culture. If this is your first time reading, hit that subscribe button to follow along for future editions! Let me know in the comments - do you think AI will be good or bad for artists?

Emerging Artists in the world of AI

As AI starts to increasingly become a tool for artists to uplevel their content and make the process of creating more accessible for everybody, I’m excited to see how artists adapt to this new world order. It’s been awesome to see historical reimaginations in art, especially as I’ve been loving the Empire podcast to get a better understanding of South Asian history. For this edition, I wanted to spotlight to two artists absolutely crushing it in their own way:??

First is Sam Madhu - an artist based in Berlin/Chennai, who just did a solo exhibition called “Reincarnations: Ghosts of a South Asian Past”, which uses CGI (not AI!!) to reimagine what the South Asian women of the past would look like in a future where India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka weren’t colonized. These are meant to be futuristic versions of photographs taken from pre-colonial and colonial times – really pushing people to think about how South Asian women would look different 2000 years from now – in terms of beauty, jewelry, tattoos, and more. She walks through her process in one of her latest Instagram posts - check it out!

Second spotlight is on Varun Gupta - a director for WeCreateFilms who has been doing a ton of AI + Art experimentation with Midjourney. I really liked one of his posts on what the Mughal Empire (richest/longest dynasty that ruled India for 300 years) would look like if they had the concept of racing like in “Need for Speed” or the Olympic Games. Excited to see what else he has coming!?

More from the last few weeks

• If you didn’t know, Sept 26 was National Chai Day! As part of the celebration, Kolkata Chai was giving out free chai out in Soho along with music and a special visit from comedian Hasan Minhaj .?
• Kartik Research – a fashion brand known for high quality, vintage, artisanal Indian garments is coming to NYC for a popup throughout all of October. Check out the launch event at 6pm on Oct 3rd if you’re in NYC!?
• I recently had a chance to visit Somnath Bhatt’s latest Screenprint launch party at Enorme - super talented artist with a knack for drawing feelings. Learn more about him here and check out his digital prints.?
• For furniture heads – I just discovered Arjun Singh Assa ’s latest piece “Sitting with your Vices and Virtues” - a wooden bench crafted to illustrate spiritual roots in Sikhism. On display now at the London Design Festival.?
• Couldn’t go without talking about Hanumankind - it’s been a while since his song “Big Dawgs” has come out but love the virality it has gotten - congrats to him for going #1 in Global Viral Songs.?
• One of the songs of the summer “Taka” by Ahadadreams, Priya Ragu, Skrillex, and contra got featured as the song for Apple’s latest iPhone advertisement - congrats to all of them for making such a fun one (but still not planning to upgrade to the new iPhone).?

Thanks for reading and please share feedback/leave comments about other cool things I should be checking out!