Today we’d like to introduce you to Connie Bakshi.
Hi Connie, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was a classical pianist for the first half of my life. But from a young age, I was fascinated by the web of interactions that make up the formation, expression, and comprehension of language. I would go on to study biomedical engineering at Duke University, where I was shaped by the experience of working with neuroscientist Erich Jarvis, who was investigating the development of vocal learning models in songbird brains, the closest analogue to that of the human brain.
At the time, I recall feeling that the successful communication of both written and vocal language required a precision and specificity that excluded the nonverbal experiences felt only in the invisible mechanisms beyond language. I went on to explore the idea of invisible experience during my studies at ArtCenter College of Design, where I pursued a degree in Environmental Design. This was a unique program that empowered an ability to wield a broad span of physical and digital media in service to an experiential narrative.
I formalized a transmedia practice soon thereafter, focusing on experiential installations and performance art. Then in 2021, I merged with AI. It was peak pandemic shutdown, so I was cut off from the resources and venues that were critical to my practice. That was about the time that my friend Phil Bosua was working with some of the most cutting-edge AI models at the time. He invited me to join his art-meets-tech AI incubator and put some custom models in my hands. I began creating written and visual artwork with AI. AI continues to be an integral part of my practice today, where I use the technology to re-examine the code and binaries of our colonial legacies.
I’ve since extended this work into sculpture, VR, AR, and film media and have had the privilege of exhibiting and speaking internationally — including at ArtBasel Miami, Prague, New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and most recently Berlin.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
A lot of my work stems from my complicated relationship with language. I grew up in New Jersey in an immigrant Taiwanese household with two first languages. While I learned both English and Hokkien, my daily life was guided by a broken language somewhere between the two. In a similar vein, I felt my identity lived somewhere between an American culture and an ancestral Taiwanese heritage. That being said, I often seek to reconstruct language to find a way to express the subjective experiences that come with living in the otherhood between words and worlds. This manifests in my art practice in which I’ve been working with artificial intelligence, where text is the main interface by which I communicate with the machine. It was through AI that I found a new vernacular to start talking about the invisible aspects of language, as well as the social constructs to which language is inextricably bound. It’s usually through the de-codification and re-codification of the mechanisms of language that I distill meaning and expression from the machine.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’m an artist who works predominantly with AI to question the power hierarchies and ingrained codifications that shape our collective social dynamics. I see AI as a digital archive of our documented collective knowledge, ways of thinking, and memory of experience across time. So, I hack AI to trigger anomalies that suggest blind spots in our perceived realities. My art often lives in the context of ritual and lore, vehicles of repetition that bridge multiple points across time. I feel I owe some definition here. A ritual is a series of actions performed in a prescribed sequence. Lore is a body of tradition and knowledge, often transmitted in narrative form. One often accompanies the other. Ritual and lore are core to our sense of identity. They reflect the values and social code that we’ve deemed acceptable and worth repeating.
The repetition of ritual and lore through time can ingrain and amplify the values they represent. But then this repetition can also render values static over time, reducing active intention to involuntary Pavlovian response. But these values, frozen in time and out of context, continue to silently reinforce cognitive codes that form our identities and relationships with one another. Our societal lens goes through a process of recursion across generations, and I believe the code embedded in our rituals and lore needs to dissolve and shift accordingly. I play with this in one of my earliest series, ‘Birds of Paradise’, where I reinterpreted prevalent mythologies as the lost dreams of a nonhuman ‘other’. In another piece, ‘still, I search’, I blend an ancient divination practice with the modern search engine, where invisible power dynamics mediate the search for truth.
In collapsing the binaries ingrained in our technologies and collective memory, I think I’m looking for a more plural truth in the values of the present and in the promise of an equitable future.
We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
‘Success’ often implies a sense of arrival or a final destination, and that can be limiting. In my work and in my life, I seek fulfillment, and that’s a daily practice. I first embarked on an artistic journey because I had itches to scratch — existential and sociocultural questions I couldn’t begin to find answers to without going through a process of making and expressing and then asking more questions. For me, fulfillment takes the form of chasing the lingering questions and sustaining the means to do so. Sustainability, in turn, is an ecosystem of holistic wellness. Here, I’m talking about bodily and mental health, financial stability, and a foundation of supportive relationships. Needless to say, fulfillment is not always an easy thing to cultivate.
But if I can wake up each day with a question to chase and be able to devote myself to that — I think that’s a pretty amazing thing.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.conniebakshi.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conniebakshi/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/conniebakshi
Image Credits
Photograph by Benji Bakshi. Connie Bakshi, ‘Metaphorphosis’, 2022. Courtesy of the artist. Connie Bakshi, ‘still, i search’, 2022. Courtesy of the artist. Connie Bakshi, ‘Bird No. 05’ from ‘Birds of Paradise’ series, 2022. Courtesy of the artist. Connie Bakshi, ‘My Silence Would Be as Stone’, 2023. Installation view: ‘XENOSPACE’, EPOCH Gallery, Virtual. Courtesy of the artist. Connie Bakshi, ‘Subliminal Species’ (Still), 2023. Courtesy of the artist. Connie Bakshi, ‘Subliminal Species’ (Still), 2023. Courtesy of the artist. Connie Bakshi x P. Scott Cunningham, ‘GRAY’ (Still), 2023. Courtesy of the artist. Connie Bakshi x Ronnie Angel Pope, ‘Leitmotif, Nihilist, Epitome’ (Still), 2023. Installation view: ‘POÈME SBJKT’, theVERSEverse x L’Avant Galerie Vossen x Librairie Métamorphoses, Paris. Courtesy of the artist. Connie Bakshi x Ronnie Angel Pope, ‘Leitmotif, Nihilist, Epitome’, 2023. Courtesy of the artist. Connie Bakshi, ‘Instruments of Virtue’ (Still), 2023. Installation view: ’Next-GEN LA: Digital Artists to Watch’, VellumLA, Los Angeles. Photograph by Kelsey Hart.
