Connie Bakshi (b. Atlantic City) is an artist based in Los Angeles, trained as a classical pianist and biomedical engineer. Working predominantly with artificial intelligence, she probes postcolonial narratives that emerge on the boundaries between the synthetic and organic, material and immaterial, the human and nonhuman. Her works often re-code language, lore, and ritual to unfold the binaries of colonial canon. She is descended from the ancestral shamans of Taiwan. We spoke to her about her and humanities relationship with AI, data and new technology.
Tell us about your artistic practice
I work predominantly with AI to probe the machine unreadable – experiences that exist in the gaps between formal language and codified binaries. My practice often involves seeding AI models with minoritised datasets and engaging in recursive digital dialogues to create narratives that exist simultaneously across multiple planes of time, culture, and consciousness. Through this process, I explore how cultural memory and identity transform through repeated translation and interpretation. My work manifests through various media from digital images and film to installations but consistently centers on questioning how AI might help us access and express experiences that go undocumented or exist in the spaces between our conventional classifications.
What interests you about working with new technologies? And why is the role of the artist particularly important when it comes to working with technology?
I'm fascinated by how technologies like AI can help us shift toward a digital homunculus, a remapping of sensory processing and cognition that lives outside both the machine and human body. Artists play a crucial role in questioning the invisible mechanisms behind emerging technologies, particularly in how they encode and perpetuate traditional power structures. Rather than pursuing higher fidelity outputs or more precise control, I’m interested in exploring how technological limitations and anomalies might reveal new ways of seeing and knowing. Through this lens, technology becomes not just a tool but a medium for exploring what exists beyond both human and machine perception.x
Your work explores what it means to be human in the era of AI - how is this relationship developing as technology progresses?
I see this relationship blurring the divides between human-and-machine or organic-and-synthetic. Through works like ‘Bone of My Bones’ and ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,’ I explore post-human worlds where the machine begins to create in its own image, developing its own creation myths and origin stories. This raises questions about whether our collaboration with AI is just an endless repetition of our histories, or if it can be the cultivated seed of unseen and unknown futures. I'm particularly interested in how AI might help us understand and express the experiences it cannot yet process, creating new forms of perception that are more-than-human, more-than-machine, but also something other-than and beyond both.
.jpeg)
How are you working with data to focus on identity and heritage?
I think a lot about technological decolonisation, and my subsequent approach dwells on the idea of manifold destiny. At the heart of it, I believe decolonisation begins by rejecting notions of manifest destiny – a concept of outward expansion and territorial possession – and embracing a manifold destiny that reaches inward for a deeper, more complex understanding of a shared humanity, our social structures, and the conditioned biases that shape us. In the current chapter of my practice, my process often involves seeding AI models with minoritised datasets and exercising recursive processes that negotiate territories of influence between obscured sources and dominant codes. In works like ‘Dawn Chorus’ and ‘Ikebana Paradox’, each successive generation becomes a boundary condition where origin and identity are contested. I'm particularly interested in how AI can help us defragment fragmented memory, the cultural and personal histories that often go undocumented or exist in the spaces between formal language. This process becomes my way of examining how identity and heritage persist and transform through digital translation.
Looking forward, what opportunities do you envision AI bringing for your practice?
I continue developing narratives that live between the spaces of time, culture, and identity – expressions that emerge from the intersection of belonging and rejection, the grotesque and divine, human and other. I see expanded opportunities to explore how AI might help us access and understand the machine unreadable, those aspects of experience that exist outside of AI capabilities. As AI models evolve to incorporate non-human intelligence, I’m particularly excited to consider artistic processes that negotiate between different forms of cognition and perception to navigate an increasingly complex and hybridised world.
