Indian AI artist Prateek Arora, inspired by science fiction, cyber culture, Indo-Futurism and horror, is reinventing South Asian figurative imagery

Prateek Arora is an AI artist, screenwriter and digital creator from Delhi based in Mumbai. His virtual dream is to give voice to Indian digital art culture, including science fiction, and to assert the representation of the South Asian human image in the Western and global art-figurative landscape, filling its absence.

Making use of tools such as AI art platform Mid-journey and his vivid imagination, Prateek brings to life futuristic visuals accentuated by horror, sci-fi and steampunk bends and set in the working-class alleys of Mumbai, completely unprecedented in the south asia scenario. As head of development for Bang Bang, an Indian production company intent on bringing Indian images and stories to life globally, the young artist is also working as screenwriter on a spy thriller featuring an Indian man finally as the absolute main protagonist rather than confined to a secondary role, as we are used to seeing.

In other words: Patreek is contributing to reshape contemporary Indian culture, at home and around the world.

Where did this desire to use and implement digital tools to express yourself, and to focus on cyber, sci-fi, and futuristic scenarios, come from in you?

I am a child of the internet - perhaps part of the first such generation in India. It has shaped my understanding of the world, of culture, community, commerce, collaboration, and heavily influenced my aesthetic sensibilities. So when it came time to create - digital tools always made sense. They felt like the most natural path. My first experiments were with digital photography while I was still a student in New Delhi. I found it extremely freeing to be able to edit and visually distort images to make them feel more “me”. A purely objective approach to image making never interested me, neither did I find myself to ever be nostalgic for analog mediums of creation. Even before I knew what I was doing - I knew this.

Can you give us some examples of pre-colonial Indian culture, and how, Indo-futuristically, their reappropriation might be implemented?

There are way too many to name, but I think the principle and the challenge are the same across - unshackled now, where do we take these cultural forms? It is dangerous to dwell too much on the past, but equally dangerous to discard the breathtaking richness of form and emotion and diversity of intellectual thought that we find in pre-colonial Indian culture in pursuit of some idealised bland modernity.

How possible is it nowadays to keep an indigenous behavioral habitus alive in the face of increasing globalization? What is Indo-Futurism to you?

It is not only possible but essential at a time when algorithmic modes of thought try and drive everything to a vapid global mean. There are new modes that must emerge, new ways of engaging with such a world. Indofuturism may be one of those. For now it is early and it is exciting and I am going to resist trying to solidify it too much - but for me, essentially, and rather simply - Indofuturism is Indians thinking about the many possible futures and their place in shaping them. Currently Indofuturism has an identity primarily online, in the realm of fiction and concept art - some of my work is also conscious exploration of this frame, but it holds the potential to go much beyond what it currently is.

What is the degree of appreciation and diffusion of Generative AI in India?

It’s now widely known and applied - we have a very large online population so new ideas travel fast. There are also many Indian entrepreneurs now building localised AI products.

What would you say to a person who can't appreciate the artistic outputs of AI because he finds they look too artificial compared to the figurative products of an analog or digital camera, a painting, and so on? What is it instead that makes you appreciate it so much?

I understand where they are coming from - given the prevalence of online misinformation and the glut of AI-generated imagery over the past year people are wary. The co-existence of art and news on the same exact platform that exists today and hasn’t in the past has led to a sort of context-collapse. Everything is “content” now, whatever be the source or the intention of it, and I don’t think we’ve figured out how to navigate that yet. Most people really don’t have the time or energy to think about context. So they react to everything with a largely similar mental model. This is … not great.

Do you think AI will succeed in developing a form of emotional intelligence?

In the current paradigm of AI development, no, I don’t think so, but to some it might seem like that it will. This question is not dissimilar from that of “can AI create art?” - AI outputs can be artistic and often are, but the AI itself is a tool. It has no agency or intention. The “art”, however amorphous or subjective the application of that term may be, comes from the human being using this tool, and from the human beings experiencing the artwork. In a similar way, we may find applications where humans are able to guide AI systems towards responses and outputs that may appear to be “emotional” in nature, when the emotion is actually coming from the human operator. Actually to rephrase what I said earlier - I think AI art-making is probably a subset of this larger question. Humans are using AI to create work that triggers a strong emotional response, but to the uninformed it may seem like that it comes from the AI acting on its own.

Do you believe that an evolution along these lines could be dangerous? If so, can we imagine a scenario in which AI would become so self-aware that it would conceal this same awareness from humans should they attempt, at some point, to ostracize its development?

No, I don’t think so, for reasons similar to what I said above.

If you could make one of your digital creations come alive, which one would you choose?

I would have to say that it is my series Rocketganj. It is a very personal body of work. I would love to explore it as a project for screen or immersive media. https://www.photoink.net/exhibitions/rocketganj

What is the film, series, book or artist that has influenced you most in the development of your current work?

Probably Jurassic Park, I saw it when I was 10 years old and it fired up imagination and curiosity like nothing else has before or since. When I revisited it later I was able to appreciate the subtle and unsubtle thematic components. The film is essentially a conversation about the perils of the pursuit of wonder. Jurassic Park is the reason I do what I do. Spielberg intuitively understood that a sense of wonder and abject terror often go hand in hand, and if you open yourself to one, you cannot shut out the other. In science, in art, in life.