Gods Generated – holycowstudio.in

Title: Gods Generated
Medium: AI-generated images
Conceptual prompts: Shashank Satish

Wall text:

As cultural production accelerates with the rise of machine learning tools, the divide between the known and unknown continues to expand. How do we confront the unprecedented intelligence of a super-human future shaped by democratic and artificial technologies?

This series explores humanity’s timeless drive to externalize shared values, which has led civilizations throughout history to look beyond the limits of their experience—up at the sky, deep within themselves, and out into the universe—imagining supernatural beings of immense power. Across time, humankind has embodied its fears, curiosity, and reverence for the mysterious in anthropomorphic deities, shaping the intangible unknown into recognizable forms. The Indian subcontinent, with its vast and diverse pantheon, has long been a canvas for these aesthetic expressions.

Religious imaginations have traditionally provided believers with a symbolic framework, helping them interpret the mysteries of the universe and the human condition. But this paradigm is poised to shift as Yuval Noah Harari forecasts 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.”

The Indo-futurist series Gods Generated questions the progressive outlook of contemporary Indian society by creating a fictional pantheon of forward-looking gods through texts and images, drawing from datasets of popular Indian aesthetics and iconography. By externalizing the creative process, the series critically examines how biases infiltrate our lives through technology. As we step into the role of creators, it raises essential questions about how technologists and futurists must remain mindful of the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence as we begin to play the role of gods.