Parag Kumar Mital

“The Surge” is a music video Mital developed for music producer, composer, and performer Sanaya Ardeshir (Sandunes) using procedural image generation techniques to create immersive and responsive visuals.

Mital’s artwork “The Road to Bareilly, Pt. I” is part of a new series of video works exploring themes of diaspora and immigration. The work follows the artist’s trip with his family to visit his mother’s hometown in India.

Mital’s “Abstractions” series represent the next stage of evolution of the audio and visual models he’s been building for the past 15 years. With access to increased computing power, Mital has been able to build much more detailed syntheses, allowing the output of incredibly high resolution, immersive artworks. The series explores the nature of everyday reality, presenting new, meditative visions of the banal.

“Discrete Figures” merges the performing arts with mathematics, exploring the relationship between “the human body and computer generated movement (simulated bodies) born from mathematical analysis.” Incorporating drones, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, the work challenges conventional notions of emotional expression through movement and aims to illicit new methodologies and techniques in dance.

Celebrating the centennial anniversary of the LA Philharmonic, Mital designed and built multiple AI and machine learning algorithms that were used to analyze and present a century of archival data – over 45 terabytes of information – in various forms including generative images and bespoke video artworks. The work culminated in a public art symphony projected onto the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

“Pixel Records” is a speculative record label and interactive music experience created with Google, Boiler Room, and Rob Thomas. Participants recorded clips of their voice and images of themselves which were processed into custom AI generated musical compositions and album artworks.

“The Big Dream” is a music video for filmmaker and musician David Lynch about the unique ‘moment’ the film is released in. It describes our collective dream and the collective consciousness of the ‘right now’ by generating procedural visuals based on images from the current day’s news cycle.

YouTube Smash Up attempts to generatively produce viral content using video material from the Top 10 most viewed videos on YouTube. Each week, the #1 video of the week is resynthesized using a computational algorithm matching its sonic and visual contents to material coming only from the remaining Top 10 videos. This other material is then re-assembled to look and sound like the #1 video. The process is not copying the file, but synthesizing it as a collage of fragments segmented from entirely different material.

“Memory Mosaic” is a generative audio mashup tool for iOS devices developed by Mital as part of his doctoral thesis research. The app listens to and learns sounds, either from your microphone or your music library. It saves unique sounds as “memories” and plays them back when it hears something similar.

“Baptiste” was generated from Mital’s early experiments in visual synthesis. An example of the unique combination of his artistic and scientific practices, “Baptiste” presents a novel approach to representing human form through color, geometry, and texture.

Bronze Format is an experimental format for recorded music in which the recorded material is transfigured to produce a unique version for each listening.

Responsive Ecologies, an artwork in collaboration with the Zoo Society of London (ZSL), Musion Academy, and fellow artist collective captincaptin (Jonathan Hall and Gareth Goodison), is a public installation environment that questions our understanding of nature and our role in the disturbing shift in many ecologies due to the effects of climate change. It was installed at Waterman’s Art Center in London, UK in 2010 and features green screened slow moving animals as captured from the ZSL taken out of their environment and digitally placed into the CAVE of the show.

Early experiments from Mital’s research in resynthesizing images and videos.

Mital’s Daphne Oram Browser is an archival tool, an educational resource for archivists and scholars, and an instrument for exploring Daphne Oram’s vast and newly recovered collection of audio, lectures, and various notes. The browser was developed with the intention of learning more about the iconic musician/composer/inventor’s legacy by providing an alternative to file browsers that is more suited to examining audio information.

In collaboration with hand-blown glass sculptor Agelos Papadakis, Mital’s artwork “Memory” explores the representation of a neural network in an immersive augmented sculptural installation with responsive, real-time projection mapped visuals.

“Attention – The Experimental Film” is a generative film composition and installation environment premiered in 2008 in Edinburgh’s Teviot Row House, exploring how eye-tracking could be used to algorithmically edit new films, using sound and video databases.

This course explores the past, present, and future of how artists engage with digital media through its remix and adaptation of increasingly more automated algorithms.

UCLA DMA

This course guides students through state-of-the-art methods for generative content generation in machine learning (ML) with a special focus on developing a critical understanding surrounding its usage in creative practices. We begin by framing our understanding through the critical lens of cultural appropriation. Next, we look at how machine learning methods have enabled artists to create digital media of increasingly uncanny realism aided by larger and larger magnitudes of cultural data, leading to new aesthetic practices but also new concerns and difficult questions of authorship, ownership, and ethical usage.

CalArts

This course guides students through using openFrameworks, integrating audiovisual interaction and machine learning into their practice, by using real-time processing and interaction as a guiding framework.

Kadenze Academy

This is a course program in state of the art Deep Learning algorithms, led through a creative application of the algorithms. This unique course gets you up to speed with Tensorflow and interactive computing with Python and extends the introductory course into state of the art methods such as WaveNet, CycleGAN, Seq2Seq and more.

Lecturer, Department of Computing @ Goldsmiths, University of London.

This is a 10-week Master’s course covering Mobile and Computer Vision development using the openFrameworks creative coding toolkit at Goldsmiths, Department of Computing. Taught to MSc Computer Science, MSc Cognitive Computing, MSc Games and Entertainment, MA Computational Arts, and MFA Computational Studio Arts students.

Lecturer, Digital Studio, Sackler Centre @ Victoria & Albert Museum.

Lecturer, Department of Computing @ Goldsmiths, University of London.

This is a 4-week course covering the basics of openFrameworks taught to MA Computational Arts and MFA Computational Studio Arts students.

Lecturer, Department of Computing @ Goldsmiths, University of London.

This is a 5 week course covering Gesture and Interaction design as well as Computer Vision basics using the openFrameworks creative coding toolkit. Taught to MSc Computer Science, MSc Cognitive Computing, MSc Games and Entertainment, MA Computational Arts, and MFA Computational Studio Arts students.

Lecturer, Center for Experimental Media Arts @ Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology.

Taught during the interim semester, the course entitled, “Stories are Flowing Trees”, introduced a group of 9 students to the creative coding platform openFrameworks through practical sessions, critical discourse, and the development of 3 installation artworks that were exhibited in central Bangalore. During the first week, students were taught basic creative coding routines including blob tracking, projection mapping, and building interaction with generative sonic systems. Following the first week, students worked together to develop, fabricate, install, publicize, and exhibit 3 pieces of artwork in central Bangalore at the BAR1 artist-residency space in an exhibition entitled, SURFACE, textures in interactive new media.