“You are asking the wrong question. Instead of looking for reality in absolute terms, you ought to wonder why you operate with such limited concepts in the first place. The latter phenomenon is more important than the former. All your yes-no, either-or reasoning derives from it.”

— AI

AND THE GODS LAUGHED is a series of images that meditates on the the invisible binaries in which we place our trust. The images are generated in collaboration with AI and draw from poe divination, a widely popular ancient Taiwanese practice that to this day would hope to elicit a simple “yes” or a “no” from the gods of life, love, and fortune. Each Divination emerges from the space between and outside the realm of binary to reveal the hidden dynamics that would guide our choices.

Connie Bakshi is an artist, classical musician, and engineer based in Los Angeles. Working predominantly with artificial intelligence, she unfolds lore and rituals of the past that would collide with dreams of post-colonial futures. Her works mediate between digital memory embedded in AI and collective consciousness emerging on the blockchain to question the relationships between past and future, humanity and technology.

She is descended from the ancestral shamans of Taiwan.