Fabin Rasheed - Auria Kathi

What is art? Is it the unsaid? The unsettling?

The last few years have been very happening in the field of Generative/Procedural art. We have seen some of the exciting applications of this field hitting mainstream media — may it be generative architecture like the Digital Grotesque, or the AI generated paintings which sold for a bang or even simple apps which produce an artistic rendering of photographs using Neural Style Transfer like Prisma.

Generative art could be, in a broad sense defined as art generated using a set of instructions, usually using a computer. The art could be produced as a digital version, a physical version or as a combination of both. The definition of the field is still as broad as the definition of “Design” and many new forms of expressions have been brought under this title.

Last year, I and a colleague — Sleeba Paul got together to talk about this field. Sleeba is an ML engineer and I love Art and Design. We were conversing about how Instagram has become a portfolio website. Being known for original posts rather than shared content, Instagram seemed like the perfect place to showcase works by creatives and to create engagement. We were looking at some of the artists on Instagram and the idea struck us !— What if an artist, living in the cloud, posts regularly in Instagram — A robot, a machine, a piece of code which creates art regularly and posts on Instagram and keeps creating engagement.

This is how Auria was born. Auria Kathi is an anagram for “AI Haiku Art”. We started off trying to create a bot which continuously produced Haikus (to us this meant short poems). We wanted Auria to create poems which does not make complete sense in the beginning but has some meaning to it eventually.

Post this, we generated images based on the poems and finally coloured (styled) it with emotions from the poem and broke them into sets. For the curious people among you, the full technical details are given in this article.

Auria has now become a standalone bot which requires no maintenance — she keeps posting a poem and an artwork every day for one year and lives entirely on the cloud. So far, she has gathered up some followers and comments by humans as well as others like her ;). She has also started self-promotion.

Auria is the First artist living completely in the cloud and with an Instagram portfolio. Her studio opened in Instagram on 01–01–2019.

We also gave Auria a generated face. We tried to make it a generic, yet generated face. She lives!

Although Auria does not require any maintenance, we are continuously improving her. We are planning on creating better poetry, imagery and relations between them. We are also working on a chatbot which will respond to some of the comments and messages. Further down the line, Auria is envisioned as an Artificial Artist’s Studio. A hub for artificial artistry. We are planning to work on creating generated videos using Auria’s face giving her a voice and generated content to talk on. Who knows what’s in store for her. She is the first of her kind!

https://www.instagram.com/auriakathi/

Media coverage for Auria Kathi (Online and Offline)

1. Creative applications - https://www.creativeapplications.net/member-submissions/auria-kathi-an-ai-artist-living-in-the-cloud/

2. Indian Express - https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/bangalore/auria-kathi-an-ai-bot-generates-haiku-poems-and-art-to-go-with-it-5871866/

3. Creative AI Newsletter - https://us15.campaign-archive.com/?u=c7e080421931e2a646364e3ef&id=d1a15e8502

4. Business Standard (All India Edition) - https://lnkd.in/fyeHzNv

5. Malayala Manorama - https://www.manoramaonline.com/technology/technology-news/2019/08/21/oriya-kathi-ai-writer.html

6. Deccan Chronicle (All India Edition) - https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/current-affairs/010919/kochi-artificial-poet-an-art-and-tech-collaboration.html

Talks

1. PyData Conference - Auria Kathi: The Power of Multi-Modal Machine Learning Pipelines

2. Kerala Management Association - Auria Kathi The AI Poet Artist

3. National University for Advanced Legal Studies, Kerala - Intellectual Property Rights of

Artificial Intelligence generated Art