Artist Interview: Connie Bakshi

Connie Bakshi is an LA-based artist who often uses artificial intelligence to create art that re-codes language, lore, and ritual. Through her art, she explores the relationship between human and nonhuman, synthetic and organic, and material and immaterial.

She is descended from the ancestral shamans of Taiwan, and trained as a classical pianist and biomedical engineer. Immersed in digital technologies and using code and digital software since early ages, the artist deconstructs binaries of machine intelligence and highlights this technology to recode the larger narrative.

We asked Connie about her art, creative process, and inspirations.

*Digital Art by Connie Bakshi: Metaphorphosis, 2022 AIAD*

Can you tell us about your background as a digital artist? How did you get started in this field?

I was introduced to digital environments from a young age. My dad was a mechanical engineer and my mom was a computer scientist, so both were firm believers in the pervasive future of digital technologies and fully invested in my and my siblings’ computer literacy. My first computer was a Commodore 64, followed soon after by an IBM running on DOS where my childhood go-to program was PCPaint. I would continue using code and digital software throughout my education and early career — from coding and testing engineering simulations, to illustrating in Adobe, to modeling 3D architectural environments with Rhino and Grasshopper.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that digital art took the forefront of my career. At the time, I maintained an experiential practice around installation and performance art, rooted in physical environments. That was about the time that the pandemic hit. When my experiential venues and fabrication resources shut down and the future of site-specific art was uncertain, I embraced the time and opportunity to re-evaluate my practice and focus on conceptual lines of inquiry outside the bounds of medium. I shared my journey and thinking with my friend Phil Bosua, who was working with early AI language models and text-to-image generators at the time. He generously handed me the reins to a series of custom models and invited me to develop data sets, build my own creative workflow, and play. The work and process that came out of that time blurred my thinking at the boundaries between the synthetic and organic, the material and immaterial, and the human and non-human. While digitally native, my practice continues to explore and expand on these dualities.

Digital Art by Connie Bakshi: Medusa Uncut, 2023, curated in Wild And Newfangled of MOWNAxOBJKTONE

“Deep in the recesses of the earth, she sits cloaked in the darkness of her serpentine locks which remain uncut from the day of her birth. She lives in solitude but for her sisters who tend to her, for she alone carries the weight of her hair, heavy with memories of pasts and futures she is bound by oath to keep. In the light of the full moon, the sisters together unbind the hair to wash, then braid handfuls at a time — ensuring that not a strand is lost. For each strand carries the living dreams and nightmares of their mothers and their mothers before them. Within the silence of her stone cavern, the braided tendrils whisper their secrets to her, echoing across chasms of time.

Many would travel across sea and land to seek her wisdom and look upon her, only to face their own reflection in the polished bronze of her mask.

‘Medusa Uncut’ is synchronous lore, written and visualized in collaboration with AI, that rereads the eastern tradition of the Comb Sisters (自梳女, zìshūnǚ) together with the western canon presented by Ovid’s Metamorphosis.

Original track composed and performed by Connie Bakshi.”

Connie Bakshi is also featured in 10 Digital Artists: Human meets AI to expand creativity

What inspires your art? Are there any particular themes or subjects that you enjoy exploring through your artwork?

Having lived a life in code, I’m drawn to where the binaries start to break down. As seamless as our technologies appear to be, they tend to fray at the edges and blur over the gaps hidden in embedded data. I see an analogue in how we talk about our deeply ingrained colonial histories and the lived, minoritized experiences that have been silenced by dominant narratives. My work is conceptually rooted in confronting these histories, and my process deconstructs the binary of technologies like AI to bring this minoritized data to the forefront and recode the larger narrative.

Digital Art by Connie Bakshi: Subliminal Species, 2023, curated in TECHNOTERRAIN of ExpandedArt x OBJKTONE

“SUBLIMINAL SPECIES by Connie Bakshi embarks on the spiritual odyssey of a fragmented DNA strand—the residual echo of a species lost in time. Guided by an unseen synthetic divine, the life form journeys through time and space, navigating between assimilation into and detachment from a continuously evolving landscape.

Seeding a LAION-trained generative AI model with a minoritized data set, the process for creating SUBLIMINAL SPECIES leans on a recursive digital dialogue to negotiate the territories of influence between an obscured source and the imposition of a dominant code. Each successive generation reflects a boundary condition on which the concept of ‘becoming’ is contested.

SUBLIMINAL SPECIES draws from the aboriginal histories and artefacts of the artist’s Taiwanese heritage, reflecting on themes of identity, erasure, and reclamation in a world shaped by the echoes of silenced narratives.”

Can you tell us about Orientalis Exoticum I — what was the creative process like, and what’s special about it?

Orientalis Exoticum I lives in the world Metaphorphosis, a body of work I began in 2021 and continue to develop that unfolds the boundaries between dominant western canon and the marginalized narratives of the ‘other’. As I developed the series and world, I was examining prevalent lore and folktales around transformation — needless to say, Ovid’s Metamorphosis was especially ripe research material. In these stories, transformation was divinely inflicted, beyond the agency of those being transformed, and more often than not overtly motivated by punishment, escape, or memorial. But the pervasive through-line was this concept of transformation as a deliberate act of silencing. My work with Metaphorphosis draws on this concept, but focuses on the lived experiences in a world that exists in the aftermath and consequences of transformation.

Orientalis Exoticum I is one of a series of works that explores themes of hybridity, commodification, and fetishization that emerge within this larger narrative. To create the art and its corresponding poem, I toggled between a series of AI GPT, GAN, and text-to-image models to form the narrative and visual language. This work in particular took on a sculptural process, where each model I worked with shaped a layer of the stratum — from concept to language and syntax, to material, to form and composition.

Digital Art by Connie Bakshi: Orientalis Exoticum I, 2022 Orientalis Exoticum I is one of the featured artwork for DAB’s virtual exhibition “We’ve been dreaming about a magical jungle” at The Wrong Biennale! — *Digital Art by Connie Bakshi: Orientalis Exoticum I, 2022*
`Orientalis Exoticum I is one of the featured artwork for DAB’s virtual exhibition “We’ve been dreaming about a magical jungle” at The Wrong Biennale!`

How do you balance technical skills with artistic creativity in your digital artwork? How do these two aspects complement each other in your work?

I find that the technical and creative aspects of artistry go hand in hand. Art is inherently bred from an ideology or a world view, and this filters into every aspect of process — from the tools and technologies I choose to incorporate and how I choose to work with them in service to a concept. As I work with AI, the technical aspects of the process often cast a critical gaze on sociocultural issues embedded within or relating to the technology itself. For instance, this might take the form of creatively ‘hacking’ or reappropriating AI models to reveal blind spots in our language, code, and/or data sets — pointing to larger blind spots in our collective consciousness. In that sense, I would argue that the technical and creative aspects are one and the same.

Can you share an example of a challenging project you've worked on recently? What were the obstacles you encountered, and how did you overcome them?

Earlier this year, I was invited to be part of the XENOSPACE exhibition, a group show curated by Peter Wu+ of EPOCH Gallery. When Peter first shared his vision for XENOSPACE, there were a lot of themes that jived with my lines of inquiry — the notion of an ‘unusual or unfamiliar environment’, uncanny repetition of familiar frames of reference, and the use of AI to expand on these narratives. EPOCH creates bespoke virtual worlds for each exhibition and XENOSPACE had a unique architecture that featured a shifting context of AI-powered environments derived from a server room, and the sense of disorientation that should be felt as a person moved through the world. The primary challenge for me was to create an installation that expressed my own perspective on the concept of ‘xenospace’ and that responded to this shifting environment.

The work itself was largely a byproduct of a collaborative process between artist and curator, where we each had the freedom to work independently, but also in parallel, and intersected our processes at key moments throughout the development of the exhibition. As I developed my installation, I thought about how elements of the XENOSPACE architecture were site-specific expansions of my piece and how my piece was an art-specific expansion of the XENOSPACE world. Throughout the creative process, I focused on the idea of repetition, and how I wanted this to interplay with the repetition embedded within the world.

The resulting installation, ‘My silence would be as stone’, consisted of a suite of three objects, each working in concert with a dimensional or sensory cue of the space: a floating film, a sculptural object, and a floor piece. The installation existed in two different 360 panoramas hidden within XENOSPACE — the first simulating a Gothic cathedral, the second drawing from the topologies of a stone quarry. To create each piece of the installation, I combined a series of recursive processes between AI conversational and image synthesis models, drawing on the petition-and-response structure of the litany. By leaning into this idea of repetition, I sought to reclaim the invisible hopes and fears across the colonial history and generations of my lineage, a concept consistent with my larger body of work.

Digital Art by Connie Bakshi: My Silence Would Be As Stone, 2023, curated in XENOSPACE of EPOCH Gallery

How would you define the digital art space in where you’re based?

I consider myself especially fortunate to be a part of the Los Angeles scene, where I live in awe of both the brilliant talent and the wealth of computer and digital art history that constantly surround me. But I think LA is best defined by a spirit of community, forged from the love of art. ‘Community’ is often a vague and slippery word to use, but here it manifests in the depth of resources and support, dedicated programming, and incredible venues — all in service to deepening and elevating the conversations around digital art and culture.

NFTuesday, VellumLA, bright moments, ArtCenter, and LACMA are just a few organizations that come to mind when I think of the benchmarks of community and the LA digital art scene.

Digital Art by Connie Bakshi: Ikebana Paradox, 2023, curated in INTERREALITY by bitforms x PR FOR ARTISTS

“The dream of a cut flower. IKEBANA PARADOX emerges from artifacts and photographic histories of Bakshi’s indigenous Taiwanese heritage, text prompts developed from abstract translations between the Hokkien and English languages, and recursive mechanisms of AI image synthesis models. Seeding a consumer-grade generative AI model with a minoritized data set, the workflow leans on a recursive digital dialogue to negotiate the territories of influence between an obscured source and the imposition of a dominant code. Within the recursion of the AI model, each successive generation of image reflects a boundary condition on which the concept of ‘becoming’ is contested, questioning invisible power dynamics in systems rooted in colonial legacies.

IKEBANA PARADOX is a meditation on the artist’s ongoing examination of themes around indigenous identity, diaspora, and manifest destiny.”

What is a fun fact about you?

Once upon a time, I sang with the birds. Before I was an artist, I was a biomedical engineer in neuroscience, where I worked with songbirds to understand the development of vocal language in the brain. I maintained an early fascination with the intricacies of language and the web of interactions around the formation, expression, and comprehension of written and spoken language. Much of this experience and outlook continues to influence my current work with AI, where language persists as the primary interface by which to communicate with the machine.

What advice would you give to aspiring digital artists who are just starting out? Are there any resources or learning materials you would recommend to help them improve their skills?

When it comes to learning new skills, there is an abundance of resources accessible on and offline. If you commit the time and discipline, it can be fairly easy to gain or improve on any given skill set. I’ve found it’s more difficult to understand and clarify your point of view as an artist. That’s what uniquely informs and drives your art. While this inarguably requires the process and feedback loop of making the art itself, I think this self-awareness also comes out of time, reflection, and reading. When I’m not creating art, I spend a lot of time reading. Introducing my mind to new ideas, confronting viewpoints I don’t agree with, chasing a lingering question — these are all things that help me shape what I believe and highlight gaps in my evolving understanding. Reading across time, culture, and discipline is central to this. To be fair, I think that developing your worldview is a long-term, maybe even lifelong, pursuit for any artist. But it’s the pursuit that makes the difference.

Digital Art by Connie Bakshi: Still, I Search, 2022, curated in FEMGEN by VerticalCryptoArt x RightClickSave