64/1 and Harshit Agrawal

This artwork helps to understand and showcase how people of India represent gender visually by collecting a dataset of drawings and using AI to generate a spectrum of gender forms as a circular tapestry.

The Artwork

Strange Genders

2020
Archival print on canvas (4x6 feet)
Three books of 200 pages each
Custom dataset - GANs, image classification

A gradient texture of figure forms reveals the spectrum of gender representation when viewed up close. Three books present samples of dataset collected and individual generated figures.

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This work was specially commissioned for the India Pavilion at Artissima 2020 by Myna Mukherjee (founder of Engendered). Due to the travel restrictions in 2020, the work will now be shown at Artissima 2021.

The Books

Book 1: See 200 randomly selected drawing samples from the collected male dataset.

Book 2: This book contains two randomly selected drawings generated by the AI for each percentage—starting from 0% female moving to 100% female.

Book 3: Browse to see 200 randomly selected drawing samples from the collected female dataset.

The Process

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The artists collect a dataset made up of ~2300 hand drawn figures of standing female and male forms by people of India from all walks of life. Every individual contributing to the dataset draws both a female and male figure. Roughly half the collection was done in person (using a black marker pen on two white papers for female and male) and half using Mechanical Turk (mimicking the real-world data collection setup).

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A GAN (NVIDIA StyleGAN 2) is trained on the dataset of gender drawings. The GAN outputs are fed through a binary classifier trained on the collected dataset to classify the outputs as either female or male with a certain confidence level. This spread of gender representation generated by the GAN is used to create the final circular tapestry—from 100% female in the centre to 0% at the outermost radius.

Artist collective 64/1 is Karthik Kalyanaraman and Raghava KK

About 64/1

64/1 is an arts research and curatorial collective founded by brothers Karthik Kalyanaraman and Raghava KK that focuses on blurring the boundaries between art, art criticism, and art education.

Karthik is a conceptual artist, writer, and former academic whose PhD (Harvard) in Econometrics produced key research on establishing causality in statistics. Aside from teaching at UCL he has worked for a top political think tank in the US and has published works on social network analysis and aesthetic theory.

Raghava KK is an acclaimed artist who has worked in multiple disciplines. His work traverses traditional forms of painting, installation, and performance while also embracing new media to express post-human contemporary realities. He figured on CNN’s 2010 list of the 10 most remarkable people of the year and the 2020 Netflix documentary, The Creative Indians.

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About Harshit Agrawal

Harshit is an India-based artist working with artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. He uses machines and algorithms and often creates them as an essential part of his art process.

His work is part of the permanent exhibition at the largest computer science museum in the world, HNF museum in Germany. He was the only Indian among seven international AI art pioneers in one of the world’s first AI art shows in a contemporary gallery—Gradient Descent at Nature Morte. He has exhibited work at other premier venues like the Ars Electronica Festival (Austria), Asia Culture Center (Gwangju Korea), and Museum of Tomorrow (Brazil), among others. His work has also been covered in international media including the BBC, New York Times, and Stir World and he has given several talks on the subject of AI art, including three TEDx talks.

He graduated from the MIT Media Lab and IIT Guwahati. Along with his art practice, he has authored several publications and patents about his work at the intersection of human computer interaction and creative expression.

Instagram | Twitter | harshitagrawal.com

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