Laya Mathikshara (Indian, b. 2008) is a digital artist from Chennai who works across generative art, 3D animation and augmented reality, exploring the intersection of art, technology and science.She began in traditional art forms before turning to creative coding during the Covid-19 pandemic, and her work has since ranged from a reinforcement-learning artwork released on Art Blocks to augmented-reality pieces about climate change.,,
In June 2022 her work was included in “Immutable”, a group show of generative artists staged by Vellum LA and GEN.ART in Los Angeles.That winter, one of her pieces was featured in the Refraction Festival as part of Miami Art Week 2022.In February 2023 she released Cerebellum on Art Blocks, a collaboration with Santiago in which a reinforcement-learning neural network trains live in the viewer's browser, its evolving behavior rendered through interactive, layered 3D visualizations.,The idea began with Mathikshara, a longtime admirer of Santiago's work, who reached out to propose combining on-chain reinforcement learning with 3D visuals, using Andrej Karpathy's ConvNetJS library to build the underlying neural network. Santiago and Mathikshara describe Cerebellum as one of the first on-chain works driven by a neural network.
Breathe In Breathe Out addresses the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the wider impacts of climate change, using 3D animation and data mapped into visual form. Metamorphosis of Earth, an augmented-reality piece viewed through VR headsets, was exhibited at Heriot-Watt University Dubai as part of COP28 in 2023, imagining future environmental consequences of continued inaction. It was later shown at Art Bat 11, a public art event in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Her work has also been exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art and Ars Electronica, and featured by Fortune, Vogue and Vice.She has been interviewed by Fortune and the BBC, and her work has appeared on a billboard in Times Square in New York.
