Our story
Sushmita and Ganesh are a wife-husband artist duo. The artist couple’s story is presented below in chronological order flanked by contextual nuggets of history.
1950s to 1980s
Permit raj
India was reeling under economic stagnation for decades.
Only a few rich and large businesses were able to navigate government bureaucracy and had better access to capital at the expense of small businesses.
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Anjibabu
An immigrant from Vijayanagaram started working with a publication shop in an entry level position to support his family of seven members.
He rose slow and steady to own one of the most renowned businesses in the city. His grit and amicable nature was passed onto future generations including Sushmita, his granddaughter.
Hamsaveni
Hamsaveni ran her own business to support her family of eleven members.
Her courage in economic adversity, fiercely independent nature, willpower and core family values left a lasting impact on future generations including Ganesh, her grandson.
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Timeless stories. Innovative storytelling.
A film and production company pioneered developing special effects, sound and computer animation. They were best known for creating and producing the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises.
Early 1980’s
Madras Movement of Art
The largest artist commune in India was at its peak heights in a coastal village near Chennai and was instrumental in bringing modernism (figurative and abstract) to art in South India.
Many aspiring artists had gravitated here from the four states of Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu
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Filigree
Sushmita was born in a peninsular silver city, flanked by Mahanadi river to the north and Kathajodi river to the south, to a traditional family of defence corporal father and school tutor mother.
The street-food capital has definitely left an impact on her.
Midichlorian
Ganesh was born near the Siruvani waterfalls (western ghats), to a modest family of banker father and school tutor mother.
No one has tested his midichlorian count till date. But he likes to believe that it is “roughly 18000”.
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Computing revolution
Earliest chipsets designs like Atari 2600 and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) were gaining popularity for computers, game consoles and arcade game hardware.
An advertisement for a graphical user interface based personal computer takes on “Big Brother”. It is today considered a watershed event and masterpiece in advertising.
Late 1980s
Father of Indian contemporary art
Biggest art deal in India was recorded – 100 crore rupees for 100 canvases (~ US$ 12 million in current value).
The artist continued to almost single-handedly drive art prices up in India.
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Bali Jatra
Asia’s largest open trade fair was held every year on Kartik Purnima and had artists from places like Raghurajpur and Pipili. They were home to exquisite fabrics and handicrafts like Patachitra and Applique.
Her interest in the Odia maritime and naval festival at that time were only about devouring the fair’s chat items and spending time with her cousins. Art takes time to sink in!
Force awakens
He grew up hearing epics, folk tales and stories and developed an insatiable hunger for more.
His constant tinkering with toys and gadgets landed him in frequent trouble with “higher powers”.
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World is flat
Walls collapsed, information flew digitally, software & machines collaborated and the outsourcing and offshoring industry in India grew exponentially.
The term “Information technology” started appearing within documents of the International Organization for Standardisation (ISO).
Early 1990s
Rising stock
India saw a surge in private galleries across the country in places like Colaba (Mumbai), Connaught place (Delhi) and Mylapore (Chennai).
The interest in buying Indian contemporary art was also seen as closely linked to the surging stock market.
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Salamander
She regularly visited all the shrines in and around her state with her family and cousins during vacations.
These shrines are themselves architectural wonders. Every inch of their external walls are covered with intricate sculptures and the internal walls are painted with folktales and religious stories.
Fiction world
He was enamoured by the literary world building ability of renowned authors.
His favourites include Kalki R Krishnamoorthi, Thamizhvanan, R K Narayanan, R K Laxman, Arthur Canon Doyle, Isaac Asimov (‘four, no.. not three, fundamental laws of robotics’), Arthur C Clark, Alexandar Dumas and Miguel de Cervantes.
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Economic liberalisation
Foreign direct investments in India accelerated growth in auto components, telecommunications, software, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, research & development, and professional services.
India increasingly integrated its economy with the global economy and started emerging slow & steady as a force to reckon with.
Late 1990s
Multimedia
A new form of communication combines digital media like audio, video, photos, images, text and animations.
Art galleries embraced the new media formats both as display works as well as the presentation style.
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Pandals
She started learning Odissi, one of the oldest dance forms of India, which involved a sublime medley of movements, gestures and expressions connecting the human spirit with the divine soul.
She also enjoyed watching artistic Durga Puja pandals (ceremonial marquees) with distinctive patterns and materials such as bamboo, jute, cloth, glass, silver and gold.
Koch snowflake
His first brush with digital art started with fractal curves using GW-BASIC on a 16-bit MS-DOS based computer system.
He also dabbled with database management systems (dBase IV) and relational DBMS (FoxPro) while he was waiting for his school bus to pick him up after its first trip around the city.
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MMORTS
A leading American video developer launched a massive multiplayer online real-time strategy (MMORTS) game based on ancient global civilisations.
Shader programs made extensive use of graphical processing units to mimic the 3D world. This can possibly be viewed as a precursor to today’s digital metaverses.
Early 2000s
Art funds
Banks and wealth managers started working with art funds to form collective investment schemes (CIS).
They were eventually shut down by Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) citing that the CIS funds were not formally registered with SEBI, lacked regulatory framework and there was no established art authentication and provenance framework at that point of time.
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Alma mater
She studied in prominent universities which boast of an alumni list comprising state chief ministers, civil servants, senior officials at Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI).
Her passion towards art and culture equaled her excellence in commerce and finance subjects.
Finite element
He flunked his maths paper in freshman year. But isometric projections, finite element analysis, computer aided design and operations research remained his favourite topics through the years.
He joined a pioneer in outsourced product development (OPD) space which helped him understand the rigour of software product development processes, platforms, people and technologies.
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DotCom bubble & Y2K
World recovers from Y2K scare and DotCom bubble forces silicon valley to rethink Web 1.0 monetisation strategy.
The rise of new players in the Web 2.0 space was imminent. Social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) technologies converged to drive enterprise and consumer business innovation.
Late 2000s
First Art Biennale
The Department of Cultural Affairs of Government of Kerala approached two artists to help organise an international platform for art in India.
Thus began the journey of India’s first ever successful biennial of international contemporary art with a story unique to India’s current reality — its political, social and artistic landscape.
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Indus valley
She started her career with a bank and was the only “non-Tamil speaking” (non native) member of her Chennai based team.
She quickly learnt the nuances of banking as well as local culture and heritage through her office colleagues and hostel friends.
May the force be with you
He was selling the then poster child of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry across the world.
He started trotting the globe and grasping global art and culture from Metropolitan museum of art (NYC), Museum of modern art (NYC), Natural history museum (LA), Metropolitan museum of Manila, National museum of Singapore, Dubai museum and of course several Indian heritage sites in and around Kanchipuram, Mahabalipuram, Thanjavur and Trichy.
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Subprime implosion
The larger-than-life biennials, recurring exhibitions and subsequent market collapse suggested a twenty-first-century version of an coming-of-age ritual.
In the technology world, some monolith software applications were decomposed to microservices which enabled businesses to easily scale and maintain code.
Early 2010s
First private museum
The first Indian private museum of art was established and exhibited Modern and Contemporary works from India and the sub-continent.
Located in the heart of New Delhi, India’s capital city, it was sponsored by a multi billion leading global technology enterprise whose founding team had roots from Tamil Nadu, India.
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Indigenous art forms
She studied indigenous art forms of India: patachitra, warli, kalamkari, pithora, madhubani, gond, pichwai, fresco, kalighat, mandala and tanjavur paintings.
She also started studying the composition and art elements of old masters, modern and contemporary artists.
Deep tech
He started working with an angel funded deep tech company which is currently valued as an unicorn for its artificial intelligence capabilities.
He subsequently worked with another deep tech firm which was backed by the second largest trading exchange in the world and had launched the first ever middleware platform for global securities and derivatives firms.
Well, he did have a strong ‘maths’ basement to start comprehending the deep tech involved.
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Magic of maths
Mathematics based foundation models, their abstractions and applications were called by different names: artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning and data science. It started dawning on the industry that the underlying deep tech of different domains like audio (speech and music), visual art, medical science, biology, banking and trading had commonalities in algebra, calculus, probability and statistics.
Game developers who could do high volume parallel computing (TFLOPS) by leveraging the power of graphical processing units (GPU) were in demand by every industry including banks.
Late 2010s
GI tags
The Government of India protects indigenous art forms and crafts mastered by many over several generations with geographical indicators (GI) tags.
Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, UttarPradesh and Kerala are the top states which hold the maximum number of GI tags.
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Art market
She joined the second largest stock exchange in the world which helped her understand securities and derivatives.
Her banking, finance and trading background helped her understand the nuances of art market value & fair value analysis, primary and secondary market sales, key market characteristics and value drivers. She also started tracking the day sales and evening auctions with interest.
Digital transformation
His next engagement with a digital transformation startup helped him realise that every other business in the globe was amidst the digital transformation wave. Banks became branchless, legacy businesses automated processes and street hawkers accepted digital payments.
He realised that the art world was fully ripe for disruption and took a leap of faith. He pivoted from his initial “canvas on an easel” art creation approach to “deep tech based generative art” creation approach.
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Web 3.0
Blockchain based non fungible tokens (NFTs) gave creators the ability to read, write and own digital assets in an unprecedented way.
The unexpected pandemic gave rise to virtual galleries and tipped the scale towards online art sales.
2020 – till date
Record sale
An untitled oil-on-canvas by India’s foremost abstract artist got resold for an all time high record sale. This sale brought much deserved cheer to the art industry battered by the Covid-19 pandemic.
World is witnessing growth of blockchain based web 3.o and metaverse art platforms. These platforms could potentially fix all the shortcomings previously highlighted by Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and create a new era for the art industry.
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Following the white rabbit
We took the red pill. We realised that any disruptive innovation requires multiple cycles of learning, unlearning & relearning the basics. These were hitherto unexplored territories which combined generative art technology, architecture, database design, programming knowledge, art market nuances, art forms & styles, art elements and composition and yes… a far more advanced level of mathematics than we initially anticipated. It is proving to be a great roller coaster ride for us.
We look forward to incrementally releasing our artworks created by our own in house deep tech based generative art platform soon.
Cambrian explosion of AI
Generative art based on artificial intelligence, machine learning and large language models have taken the world by surprise.
Most of these software have been pre-trained on billions of images (hundreds of terabytes of data) and probably have parameterised vectors for every single word in the dictionary. The machines can now distinguish homonyms using contextual self-attention mechanisms.
Please accept our heartfelt thanks for reading till the end.
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