Dear Readers,

I’m writing to let you know that my friend Philipp Schmitt and I are participating in the Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair, which is taking place online from today (Feb 24th) until February 28th.

You can find our “booth” here https://akkapeddischmitt.pmvabf.org/ And you can find the main page for PMVABF here

I am selling a new flipbook I made using a machine learning model I trained on stills from Bharatanatyam footage.

I trained a machine learning model on stills from youtube videos of Bharatanatyam (the oldest Indian classical dance originating in Tamil Nadu). This double-sided flipbook shows interpolations between machine generated dancers. I have been interested in Indian classical female dancers as cultural motifs in colonial, post-colonial, spiritual and diasporic contexts. I also have a personal relationship to Bharatanatyam because I learned it when I was young.

I am also selling Risograph prints made using a machine learning model trained on my family photographs and photos from S.T.A.R.S.

Ancestral Apparitions uses machine learning to evoke simultaneous feelings of familiarity and distance in a meditation on diasporic identity and more broadly, the tension between collective and individual identity within the archive. A Generative Adversarial Network is trained on family photographs from my own personal archive as well as images from The Studies in Tamil Studio Archives and Society. The machine learning model is then able to produce its own ghostly “family photographs.” I’m selling a few other prints as well so please check out our “booth”….

IRL or AFK, we would have had sliding scale prices. So if you want a print/book and feel the cost is prohibitive, please reach out as I am also open to trades and slightly different prices.

On that note, I should also say I’m in search of ways to lower the cost of production specifically on the Bharatanatyam book through finding a cheaper printer. If anyone has any advice, or a printer in NYC they like let me know! As is, I’ve been printing the pages myself (ink$$$) and hand binding them.

Ok I think that’s all for now in terms of pitching my own stuff! I strongly encourage people to check out the schedule for PMVABF as there are some interesting workshops and live music happening.

Sending you all lots of love,
Aarati