First and foremost, each artwork is new and unique having been generated by a mix of layers extracted from the original portraits created in the 1940s. We are enthused to retain the immense colour palette of the artist and the detailed texturing in his drawings. This detailed texturing is also what hugely differentiates this project from the simplistic doodle-based profile picture projects. The project is in collaboration with the Artists' Estate, which includes the due transfer of Copyright for these works to the project (this is huge!). We start from a set of around 50 'Avatars' - which are art works that the artist created in the years 1948-1951.
The usage of the word 'Avatars' did not come from the artist or the artist's estate, but from us as curators. We took note of the NFT Avatar craze that happened in the 2020's and beyond - digital profile pictures that focused on a characteristic or a trait - our point being that such experiments have already been done and much earlier in fine art [1]. For the definition of Avatars please refer to the images below from the Gobardhan Ash Retrospective exhibition. Note that not all of the art works created by the artist are 'avatars' or 'profile pictures' - they can be landscapes while some others are hazy and we have poor images of them from older catalogs and therefore are not usable. We have had to rely on a limited set of images.
Note the caricature, the traits, the stereotyping - the chiseled nose and the chin and the classic (Parsi) hat. You know you are looking at a quintessential Parsi from Mumbai in the above image - and therefore an Avatar! [6]
THE ORIGINAL ARTWORKS - THE 'AVATAR' LIKE WORKS
Exhibition View
The entire exhibition can be seen elsewhere [3,4].
References
1 - Modernism - "The First of the Avatars"
2 - "Analytical Models for Vehicle/Gap Distribution on Automated Highway Systems", H.-S.J. Tsao, R.W. Hall, and Indrajit Chatterjee, Transportation Science, Vol. 31, No. 1., pp. 18-33, 1997.
3 - Gobardhan Ash Retrospective Exhibition @ Kolkata Center For Creativity
4 - Interviews from the Retrospective Exhibition
5 - The Revolutionary Wall of Artificial Intelligence
6 - Decoding Gobardhan Ash's Avatars
7 - Position: Categorical Deep Learning is an Algebraic Theory of All Architectures, Gavranovic´, Lusard et al.
p.s. The Italian Consul General in Kolkata who visited the exhibition had a great idea. As the images have been derived from art works with titles/roles/traits. Maybe the same information can be used to find an appropriate name for the image. In technical terms essentially means a Language Model add-on to the GAN (easier said than done though) [5]. Stay tuned!
