Title: Gods Generated
Medium: AI-generated image prints 9’ x 9’
Artist: Shashank Satish

Wall text:

With the seemingly unstoppable role of cultural production since the advent of machine learning tools, the gaps between the known and unknown are fast widening. How do we grapple with the unparalleled intelligence of the new super-human future assisted by democratic and artificial technologies? 

This series construes the human urge to externalize shared values that have led civilizations across space and time to look up at the sky, beyond our natural horizons of experience, to look inside and out, imagining supernatural beings of extraordinary powers. Humankind has historically manifested its fears, curiosity, and respect of the intangible unknowns into god-like deities by assigning them to anthropomorphic forms and unsettling familiarity, the Indian subcontinent with its expansive pantheons has long been subject to these aesthetic exercises.

Imaginations have transported the believer into a world of internalization that stands in for the mysteries of the universe and the beliefs of humanity. All this is set to change as Yuval Noah Harari’s forecasts predict “that within the next century or two, we humans are likely to upgrade ourselves into gods and change the most basic principles of the evolution of life by engineering and manufacturing life forms according to our wishes”. 

This Indo-futurism series called ‘Gods Generated’ questions the progressive attitudes of contemporary Indian society by generating a fictional pantheon of progressionist gods from texts and images. Investigating the role of the artist in a fast-changing society, these images are generated by man and machine while appropriating datasets of popular Indian aesthetics and iconography. By externalizing the act of creation to critically examine how the issue of bias creeps into life through technology, we must ask how technocrats and futurists need to be conscious of the role of Artificial Intelligence as we set forth to play the role of gods.

Deity of Time

Deity of Globalisation

Deity of Sustainability

Deities of Equity

Deity of Domestic Peace

Deities of Global South

Deities of Diversity

Diety of Urbanisation

Deities of Democracy

Deity of Decolonisation

Deity of Queerness

Deity of Acceptance

Deity of Artificial Intelligence

Deity of Tolerance

Deity of Climate Justice

Deity of Genetic Engineering

Deity of Space and Deep Sea Exploration

Deity of Renewable Energy