Vasudha Kapadia

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Productions will involve long-term artistic research processes of unpacking the artistic genre of landscape, through everyday exercises like walking, and foraging of machine learning image archives, followed by painting and drawing exercises, as well as independent publishing, derived from syntagmatic exercises in relation to AI prompt engineering. Vasudha Kapadia is the Coordinator for this project. 

Vasudha Kapadia is a contemporary artist, who divides her time between Surat and Mumbai. She did her BVA and MVA in Painting from Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara. Vasudha was one of the participating artists in the fifth edition of Kochi Muziris Biennale, curated by Shubigi Rao in 2022. She has participated in many group shows in India and abroad, including Kunstraumarcade, Austria and The Drawing Center, Manhattan. She was the recipient of the Experimenter Generator Grant in 2022. She was a resident at AIR- Artist-in-Residence at Niederösterreich, Austria in 2022 and at Cona, Mumbai in 2019. Given her experience, Vasudha Kapadia is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

This project titled How to Claim the Meaning of a Landscape? will entail developing long-term research into process-based exercises, not restricted to art-making, but extending into realms of walking as remembering and observational research models close to nature, and independent publishing. The project will explore varied interpretations of landscapes, such as technological, observational, interpreted, derived, narrated and written, from multiple sources as a ‘gap/ fold/ lag/ rupture’. Using landscapes as artefacts, the project would concentrate on the conceptual action of ‘bearing witness’ to invisibilised histories, by departing from the majoritarian narrative of landscape and extracting speculative histories, drawing from existing printed materials, through the journeys of images in the archives of AI in the form of independent publishing exercises. 

The artistic process would entail extracting research material from sources such as Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford, tracing the journey of an image in the world of machine learning, then translating research material into different categories in collaboration with engineers, data scientists and artists. This will be followed by making of drawings and paintings in various materials, sourcing images which defy categories and failure of identification by AI, generating text material from ChatGPT, and experimenting with staging the non-usage of auto-correction. 

The outcome of the project will be an inventory of painting of landscapes, a printed visual of unrecognised images from the Google human-challenge tests, independent publishing on various topics related to AI, and an anti-archive of uncategorised images designed in machine learning through Imagnet. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be soft copies of the paintings and image documentations of the artistic processes.   

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it creates a dialogue between pigment, pixel and philosophy, at a time when the self-identity of human as a cognitive being is challenged by non-biological artistic intelligence, where painting becomes a meditative act of deviating from dominant narratives of landscape as a genre.    

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm by convening an online gathering of artists coordinating Explorations projects. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is made possible with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.