Artist Spotlight: A Conversation with Connie Bakshi
Instruments of Virtue by Connie Bakshi
Connie Bakshi is an artist, classical musician, and engineer based out of Los Angeles. Working predominantly with artificial intelligence, she unfolds lore and rituals of the past that would collide with dreams of post-colonial futures. Her works mediate between digital memory embedded in AI and collective consciousness emerging on the blockchain to question the relationships between past and future, humanity and technology. Her previous work includes a generative opera derived from DNA, an LED lighting series based on the ancient craft of Japanese urushi, and brand strategy for Rivian Automotive. She has won the Red Dot: Best of the Best Award for industrial design, the International Takifuji Art Award, and has exhibited at SaloneSatellite in Milan. She is an alumna of NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art, technology, and design. Connie is descended from the ancestral shamans of Taiwan.
Connie is one of ten emerging digital artists selected to be part of the Next-GEN LA: Digital Artists to Watch exhibit that is currently on view until 22 January 2023.
Her work can also be viewed and collected through SuperRare here.
And the Gods Laughed by Connie Bakshi
You have a unique background! We are interested in how your classical music training and biomedical engineering studies intersect with your art practice. What inspired you to start exploring digital art tools?
My entry into digital art actually comes out of a lifelong, complicated relationship with language. I grew up in an immigrant household with two first languages, which really meant I learned both and neither. And when you live between words and worlds, there’s a lot that goes unspoken — whether it be things that go on in the household or outside of it. So I spent much of my early life saying very little, simply because I didn’t have the language for it. And so I found other means of expression — first through music as a classical pianist, then as a biomedical engineer working in neuroscience where I worked with songbirds to understand how language develops in the brain.
It was only when I began working with AI that I found a new vernacular to start talking about the silence between words and the experiences of otherhood that go unsaid and unseen.
I merged with AI in 2021. It was peak pandemic shutdown, so I was cut off from the resources and venues that were critical to my transmedia practice at the time. That was about the time that my friend Phil Bosua was working with some of the most cutting edge AI models at the time. He invited me to join his art-meets-tech AI incubator, and put some custom models in my hands.
Working with AI is inherently a digitally native process, and I’ve devoted a lot of time shaping an approach that brings elements of my physical and experiential craft to a collaboration with the machine. I lean on manipulating language within AI conversational and image synthesis models to sculpt tangible manifestations of the themes of otherhood I often explore.
We are interested in your style development. How would you describe your visual language?
I have a hard time self-assigning a visual language. I think it evolves with my conceptual lines of inquiry. A large part of my process stems from a constant examination and re-examination of the boundaries between light and surface. In retrospect, this may come from a lifelong love for religious art across cultures and time — specifically in how light is manipulated to reflect the relationship and experience between the human and the divine, the exiled and the exalted. I’d like to think my visual language comes out of this lens and process.
One could say that working with AI is a conversational process. How has this shaped / influenced your exploration of post-colonial identity narratives?
“Conversational” really is the appropriate term here. AI models have evolved so much that the human-machine interaction is less about an input-output relationship and more about an ongoing feedback loop. The process of creating a piece of art across these models becomes a long-form dialogue of ideation, translation, and transcription between two collaborators. “Is this what you mean?” is the redundant but necessary question that the machine and I seem to silently pose to one another throughout the creative process.
I think the paradigm of the feedback loop arises from the fact that text-based interfaces increasingly drive so much of our interaction with the machine. But then, for me, these interfaces begin to unearth questions around the nature of language itself — how I perceive and express language, how the machine perceives and expresses language, and what the differences say about the relationship between us. In the world of machine learning and the imitation game, differences in the origin and ‘command’ of language inherently separate the human from the non-human. There is a parallel in our colonial histories, in which language has played a critical role in perpetuating the myth of superiority between colonizer and colonized, legitimacy and illegitimacy, and ultimately — human and other. With this in mind, my process often abstracts, hacks, and deconstructs language within various AI models in search of a vernacular that doesn’t live within these binaries and that flattens the field between me and the machine other.
The digital revolution has had a great impact on how we engage with the world, and as technology continues to evolve, so does our relationship with it and the world. Is there a future state of which you are hoping to accomplish in terms of your collaboration with AI and are there new tools you are currently interested in exploring?
The tools I choose to take on and incorporate in my process are usually directed by the questions and modalities I’m exploring at the time. Lately, I’ve been stuck on this idea of a digital homunculus — considering how our digital entanglement and experiences might be remapping areas of our brain devoted to sensory processing and cognition. When so much of our perception of the world is mediated through the sensory stimuli and kinesthetics of the plane of a screen, window of a browser, or bounds of virtual space, how are our senses being reformed? Do the digitally recessive senses of touch, taste, and smell diminish? Or do they evolve into a phantom experience or synesthesia that blends with sight and sound? At the same time I look at AI, and I wonder how the machine might understand, interpret, and communicate the senses it is not yet able to process – senses that are only based on the collective knowledge with which it’s imbued. I don’t know that there’s any one tool that could address these questions, but I tend to experiment with layering processes across material and media and I imagine this would be a fun series of explorations to wrap my head around.
Would you share with us a few of your favorite artists and influences?
As you can imagine, language plays a critical part in my thinking and process, and I find myself drawn to the poets and writers of Web3 — most notably Ana Maria Caballero, Kalen Iwamoto, and Sasha Stiles. Ana possesses an incredible, invisible craftsmanship that evokes powerful emotional responses with deceptive minimalism. Kalen concurrently elevates both structure and indeterminacy in an algorithmic approach to language I’ve not seen before. Sasha artfully weaves machine intelligence in concert with her poetry and writing to decodify and recodify the definition of human-ness. Each has her own provocative approach to experimentation, abstraction, and deconstruction of language and the word. I avidly follow these women and their work. All three continue to upend my notions of the experiences language is capable of shaping and invoking, and they constantly spark new ways for me to laterally approach my own work and process.
What are your hopes for the future of NFTs?
NFTs are embedded within a larger digital ecology, so I tend to think of the future within the systemic framework of Web3. Web3 is still coming into its own in many ways, so I see it as a ripe playground to collectively reevaluate the behavioral dynamics and socioeconomics that inevitably carry over from the ideologies of legacy capitalism. If we hypothetically view the Web3 creative economy as a microcosm of and beta test for global economic systems, there’s an opportunity to take risks and test different approaches — particularly around concepts of stakeholdership and value. With the latter, I’m thinking about relationships between value creation, extraction, and exchange. These are themes I explore in ‘Instruments of Virtue’, my exhibition piece for the Next-GEN LA show. I don’t subscribe to any forms of utopianism, but I do believe that it’s possible to shift the needle in a direction that is more socially, culturally, and financially equitable for a more plural collective. Should we find some small measure of success within the Web3 beta, I’d like to think the lessons learned can be scaled for broader economies.
Is there anything you’d like to share with digital artists just starting out?
In the context of Web3, I can’t help but think that most of us feel like we’re ‘just starting out.’ I think Web3 is a space where it’s easy to fall into a cycle of the echo chamber, ontologically and creatively. The concept of artistic autonomy can fall flat when our livelihood is intrinsically tied to an economic ecology interwoven with social media and the influencer mindset. If we’re not consciously aware of it, we tend to gravitate toward the same voices and perspectives, reinforcing the echo chamber that is counter to the growth of a unique artistic lens. I’ve personally found that my perspective and creative processes are vastly accelerated and expanded by the diversity of voices and minds I’ve encountered since I first entered the space. I think if we want to sustain growth and challenge ourselves as artists, it’s important to constantly surround ourselves with fresh perspectives, new ways of thinking, and different modes of expression. The benefit of the Web3 space is that the landscape is filled with this diversity — to be fair, it just takes a little more work to dig it out. But it’s well worth the effort.
Photos by @thelittleghost