‘The human mind is my favourite tool’: Artist Shilpa Gupta on AI, morality and what matters in art

“The human mind is my favourite tool” says the artist who believes we should set our morality aside, and see AI for what it is just technology. In conversation with Suchismita Ukil.

You don’t like to be recorded.

I am not able to articulate myself as well as I am in my writing.


How would you introduce yourself to a stranger?

Artist, mother, daughter.

How did you start and where you are now?

I joined art school in 1992. The country was just opening to the world. From black and white television we went to nonstop colour channels overnight. Bombay, a migrant city, a city that imagined itself as cosmopolitan was waking up to the nightmare of communal riots following the Babri Masjid demolition. Within a few years, Bombay became Mumbai.

There are some old questions, some new questions. Between looking and seeing and learning and knowing and being told what it is, there are all these filters. Here’s my hand. You put a red filter in front of it and can change the way it looks. Perception is one of the earliest concerns that has continued in my practice.

Numbers, labels, signs, maps, stamps, microphones—things that frame our world—stay with me. An early childhood memory is going through the glossy pages of the World Book Encyclopaedia I had received in eighth grade and stopping to stare at the blue hand stamp squeezed into its margins, every time an India map appeared. It said the boundaries were neither correct nor authentic. The book was published overseas. That was the first trigger. In fact, one of the oldest objects in my studio is a DIY stamp kit. I used it a lot in art school. Maps have often appeared in my work. They are hand drawn and rarely match.

Life took me to border areas. When you look at the nation state from its edges, it looks different from when you’re in a city centre. From here (a metro) the border looks clear, but when you are in, say, Kashmir, it looks different.

I spent a lot of time in the eastern border-lands, where illegal trade is far more than legal trade. That tells you about the relationship between the state and the individual, and how representatives of the state might think differently from the state itself.

When you zoom into something, it blurs. There was an early internet artwork where you could click on my body—I photographed my entire body. The images were so magnified that you couldn’t tell what is what. Distance shapes perception.

That’s a work about body, but then you cut it to lens, take the lens to another, to land. And you’re unable to tell. Works like ‘Blame’—that bottle right there, it’s got simulated blood. If you read the instructions, it tells you to separate the contents by nationality, by religion. I’ve been on trains offering it to people. It raises questions about looking and perception, and the relationship between power, structure, and agency.

What took you to all these places?

Chance. It was the post-art school days where you had a lot of time. One day I found myself in Srinagar. My cousins were also there, and they stayed in the tourist area, and I was visiting a friend in the city. We were hardly far apart in terms of geography, but in terms of experience, it was completely different.

I later made 1:14.9 (2012), a ball of thread wound in the ratio of the length of the fence between India and Pakistan. While researching it, I came across another astonishing figure—over 4,000 kilometres, the length of the India–Bangladesh border, a large part of it already fenced, encircling Bangladesh. Despite that, the illegal trade far exceeded the legal trade. The series of works that emerged explored the relationship between structures of power and everyday life when such porosity persists.

What role does technology play in your work?

Technology has been one of many mediums in my practice because it shapes the way we look at the world. I’ve worked with digital printing, photography, websites, touch screens, and interactive video. In 2006, I created a series of immersive video projections in which visitors interacted with their simulated shadows alongside those of other people and objects. The work explored the unseen world we constantly negotiate, especially in a media-saturated society.

What about artists who use AI and do not disclose it?

There are two parts to that question. One is disclosure, which is a question of morality. Leaving that aside, AI is another medium. Artists will increasingly use it. What matters is what they do with it.

What is your favourite tool?

The human mind. It’s that simple. In the ’90s, I anonymously numbered, stamped, and mailed ink drawings to strangers. There was a drawing on one side, and a stamp on the other that said ‘dispose after use’, along with, say, ‘This is the 160th form I’m mailing. I’ve made 115. I’ll mail 140 more.’ There is somebody before you and somebody after you. And that none of your experiences can be the same. You got this postcard and you didn’t see the artist’s name. Do you think it’s art? Do you keep it? Do you throw it? I posted this out using Jehangir Art Gallery’s mailing list. This was 1995–96.

Which part of the artistic practice is the most rewarding?

The journey of making. Unlike other artists’ who work within a particular medium, mine keeps changing. So, I often have to begin at the very beginning. Example, For, in Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2017–18) based on 100 poets who were imprisoned involved months of recording and editing—it was a very slow process. Between writing the proposal and arriving, a project could take two years or more. Listening Air, which began before the pandemic, took even longer as it went through multiple technical challenges.

There is a part of the process that is vulnerable, tentative, and often elusive as one moves between research, tests, and daily life. Beneath these mundane acts, another very thin layer hovers. Until suddenly it all comes together. It’s joyful, painful, traumatic—all at once.