Interview: Adarsh Nellore
Luca Curci talks with Adarsh Nellore during CANVAS INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR, at THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space

Adarsh Nellore is an internationally-exhibited media artist and speculative designer investigating the future of machine intelligence, meta-digital realities, and materiality. He harnesses non-human intelligence as a way to abstract the material, space, and form of perceivable anatomies and objects. He has received an MA and MSc in Innovation Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Duke University in Biomedical Engineerings.

Luca Curci – What’s your background? What is the experience that has influenced your work the most?
Adarsh Nellore – By background, I’m a biomedical engineer and designer interested in machine intelligence, future products, and materiality. Seeing Winged Victory of Samothrace in person at the Louvre has likely influenced me the most. To me, it seemed like more of a product of the Earth rather than a work crafted by humans, mostly due to its towering presence and deep history. This feeling of ‘beyond human’ is one that I try to draw from with my work.

LC – How did you get to your current artistic practice?
AN – My artistic practice has come from the use of design to rationalize my technical learnings in which physical phenomena are matter-of-fact, such as the weight of a rock, as well as techniques and methods of speculating future fictions. When we apply a precise, technical lens to sculpture, for instance, can we produce artifacts that are matter-of-fact, made not by humans, that are discovered rather than crafted?

LC – How is your creative process?
AN – My creative process relies on iteration that continues to refine my perspective and the framework I create my work from. The experimentation is the work itself. Therefore, every prototype, tangible or not, I create is a final work in itself. My objective is to create a body of work that summarizes the framework from which it originated rather than each piece existing individually.

LC – How do you feel when you see your work completed?
AN – For me, the next idea is always born from the last one. As soon as I complete a work, I get a better idea of how to contextualize it and this turns into not only new work, but a slightly new concept. In this way, I’m working on multiple threads at the same time that ends up complementing and altering each other.

LC – We were attracted by your last artistic production, has the artwork presented been created for the exhibition or as a part of preexisting works?
AN – Machine Anthropometry is part of preexisting works, which explore the concept of Abstract Definition, a sculptural response to the never-ending quest for HD (High Definition), a state in which all is supposedly revealed, the reality is fully recreated, no more pixels can be added, and sharp edges can’t get sharper. The machine’s role in this work is to abstract a given form, which in this case is the human forearm. This is done through the process of computational growth, in which the original object is replaced with a representation of itself created through generative technologies.

LC – What are your suggestions about our services? Is there something more we can provide to artists?
AN – Though I feel like the exhibition process is well-run, I think sending some more documentation/images of the works to artists that may not be there in person would be quite helpful to also get their suggestions – maybe on how it should be best exhibited as well.