Harshit Agrawal is an Indian artist who works with artificial intelligence, virtual reality and interactive installation to examine how technology reshapes contemporary life. His 2019 interactive work Masked Reality used facial-recognition AI to transform a viewer's expression into that of a Kathakali or Theyyam performer, drawing on the caste histories behind those two performance traditions.
Agrawal studied at the MIT Media Lab and IIT Guwahati before developing an AI art practice centred on what he calls “the poetics of technology”. In 2018 he showed alongside Sang-won Leigh at “Otherly Space / Knowledge”, a group exhibition on data and public space at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea. This exploration continued in the series Machinic Situatedness, which used generative adversarial networks trained on Buddhist painting styles to probe the cultural assumptions built into AI, referencing Nam June Paik's video work TV Buddha. Presented by ARTXCODE as the exhibition “Machinic Situatedness”, the show included Masked Reality, which Agrawal tokenized on the platform SuperRare.
