Imagining the unimagined through the lens of art has always inspired newspaper cartoonist, storyteller, influencer, artistic producer, motivational speaker and world explorer Raghava K.K. The Bengalurean now teams up with his brother to stage the world’s first Artificial Intelligence art show in New Delhi on August 17. Raghava is also among a few artists in the world to have had embraced multi-disciplinarity and artificial intelligence in his work. He tells Ralph Alex Arakal how art is undoubtedly the most powerful tool of expression.
Finding new ways bridge art with a new, seemingly unrelated has kept multi-faceted artist Raghava K.K. on his toes for decades. Hacking, brain mapping, world exploration – if Raghava is to be believed, art has a role to play in all these things. Well, that’s just a taste of what the 38-year-old Bengalurean has been working for since he decided to give up on a formal education two decades ago, choosing instead to become a newspaper cartoonist.
Having lived and worked in the United States for many years, Raghava is making his return to the country to team up with his brother Karthik Kalyanaraman. Titled 64/1, the international movement will begin with India’s first tryst with Artificial Intelligence-powered art show - an explosive beginning. It will bring artists, scientists and technologists from around the globe under a single umbrella in India.
“It is essential for artists to think like scientists and be rigorous in their perception and thought process. At the same time, scientists need to be more creative in how they look at the world. We thought it is very important to bring these worlds together for a better tomorrow,” Raghava says.
The first show of 64/1 which is scheduled to take place in August in Nature Morte, a gallery in New Delhi, will feature seven artists, one each from Turkey, New Zealand, England, Germany, Japan, USA and India. “This will also make India the pioneer of the world’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) art show and we are very excited to make this happen,” adds Raghava. The campaign will also be their outreach towards discovering the ‘cyborg age’ which will also see an official launch at the Kochi Biennale later this year. The duo with New York based Ben Tritt is working on using AI to paint alongside a human artist.
The first artist to be inducted as a National Geographic explorer, Raghava, who began his career as a newspaper cartoonist has already progressed in his career as a newspaper cartoonist, storyteller, artistic producer and much more.
Ask him what inspires him to expand the horizon of his professional career cutting across various disciplines and he says embracing the possibility of transcendence in the modern world is all what he aspires for. “There is a part in each individual that is unsettled and craving for more. The realisation that we are not defined by who we are, but by who we will be is what inspired me to embark on my journey of life,” Raghava says, proving just why he is a motivational storyteller and a four-time TED speaker.
Flashback to 1998 when he chose to leave formal education for good, Raghava recalls with a smile how he convinced his father Kalyanaraman Durgadas, a retired entrepreneur and now author (who won best debut author award at the recent Pune Literary Festival) to let him explore the world himself. “As an 18-year-old who had just completed Class 12 in Science at Bishop Cotton Boys’ School, I was brainy enough to use his philosophical arguments against him. The world will be my classroom, I said, and promised him I would be both emotionally and financially independent to make a difference in the world and keeping my health and mind alert. And then began my new journey,” he says. While his father taught him how to lead a respectable life, he credits his mom Leela Kalyanaraman with inspiring him to see life and art though the lens of love, compassion and commitment.
Raghava, still a teen, then approached a top tourism department official in Delhi used his convincing skills of mediation to ensure that his first ticket expenses to Strasbourg, France were met by the central government itself.
“My pitch for cartooning people in Europe in an Indian backdrop, to make them feel like they’re revisiting their home won me that. Once that happened, meeting new people and associating with them for different causes added a global perspective to my thoughts and ideas, later contributing to me settling down in New York till early this year when I chose to shift my base back to Namma Ooru,” he says.
On being asked which avatar of his life he likes living, the witty-yet-thoughtful Raghava pauses for a moment before saying, “I have no idea what be the next one is likely to be and I guess that’s my favourite as of now.” The same reflects further when he explains why training children at school to express themselves using art and cartoons is essential to look at the world in a better, more optimistic way. “As cartoons make one laugh before it instils the need to think, their impact is huge. Teaching children how to laugh, to break free and to imagine is quintessential as it hands them a powerful tool right from their formative years,” he said.
Raghava who has trained more than 5,000 children in more than 20 countries, is also an active part of the #SaveGovtSchools campaign taking place in Karnataka at present.
Also a father to four children Rudra (10), Anaga (8), Jaya (5) and Aadya (3), Raghava believes that life with his kids and his wife Netra Srikanth, an educator acts as a force in life that teaches him new things constantly. “As my work has evolved to become more whimsical, as a person I have become more serious in terms of what value I try to bring to the world,” he summed up as he got back to a busy and serious preparation session for his talk titled ‘Human 6.0: Fall of the Homo Sapiens’ to be delivered at IIMBue Leadership Conclave later on Friday evening.
