Kinetic sculptures and AI rituals are redefining the canvas as Indian artists merge the machine with the soul

Ask artist Shailesh B.R. what first attracted him to kinetic sculptures and his answer will come as a surprise. “Electricity,” he says. His remote village in Karnataka was hooked up to the grid as late as 1996, which explains why he is captivated by the magical manner in which a flick of the switch can get things to move, light up or even function. His first contraption was a drawing machine, in which he tied pens to a remote-controlled toy car and drove it across paper on the floor. “It was pure play, and it opened up the possibility of making art through movement—where the machine becomes part of the gesture,” he says. Since that initial foray, Shailesh, 39, has come a long way, including a residency (2024) in Geneva at CERN, the mecca of particle physics.

His solo, The Sky in the Palm, late last year at Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi, was teeming with mechanical devices, critiquing social conventions. For instance, in Let’s Make a Choice: Swayamvara, a machine accepts or rejects the viewer as a suitable candidate for marriage based on its programming. How much agency does one truly have was the question that Shailesh sought to address.

In his kinetic installation Prayer Machine 2.0, a series of connected devices went through the motions of performing sacred rituals such as the ringing of bells and making offerings to the deity. Even devotion, it appeared, could be automated. “I’m drawn to that threshold where an action looks ordinary but its logic becomes questionable when performed again and again. The social commentary doesn’t come from a direct statement but from the machine’s behaviour itself,” he explains.

Shailesh is among a band of younger practitioners for whom technology has helped further their innovation with both material and theme. As more artists experiment with mechanised practices, Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality, the interaction between human and machine is likely to evolve, paving way for new expressions of art.

In an interview with Artsy about trends likely to define art-making in 2026, Jess Baxter, an assistant curator at London’s Tate Modern, noted: “Like it or loathe it, AI has birthed a seismic shift in how we look and trust in what we see. In 2026, we will increasingly be asking ourselves if what I’m seeing is real, so I have no doubt artists will continue to use and/or critique the tools of technological advancement or internet culture as in the work of Hito Steyerl, Aziza Kadyri, or Ebun Sodipo.”

In India, this is evident in Harshit Agrawal’s work. A graduate of the MIT Media Lab (US) and Google Arts and Culture’s first artist resident in India (2024), Agrawal employs technology as a creative tool but simultaneously critiques it. As he puts it, “I work extensively with technology both as my material and subject matter. I use it to make work that brings to attention our evolving relation with it—and its ever-growing integration into our everyday lives and in all spheres of our sociopolitical landscape.”

At the recent Bengaluru Hubba, Agrawal, 34, too used the prism of religious rituals to interrogate spirituality, the automation of creative labour and the considerable resources required to keep data centres running. Ritual Robots—Havan at the Data Kund recreated the Indian ritual of the havan with a twist. Conceptualised as a performance inside an AI data centre, a robotic arm replaced the priest, symbolically dropping offerings into a modified data fire pit (kund). LED strips lined the kund as well as mimicked firewood. The binary code on these strips made a correlation between the amount of data processed by an AI data centre with every cycle of the robotic arm movement and the amount of electricity consumed by it.

A fascination with machines, automation, and systems led artist L.N. Tallur, 54, to create his own interactive works such as Apocalypse as far back as 2010. However, it was during the pandemic that he delved more deeply into digital tools, machine learning and AI. The results of this exploration were on display at his shows, Chirag-e-AI at the Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru, in 2022 and Neti-Neti: Glitch in the Code at Nature Morte, Delhi, in 2024.

“Technology allows us to work with systems such as repetition, error, automation and data. These are the things the human hand alone cannot produce,” Tallur says. “I am also interested in the tension between control and unpredictability: a machine promises precision, yet it can also produce glitches and come up with unexpected outcomes.”

For instance, at the studio-cum-residency space Kaash in Bengaluru in January, Tallur exhibited Mud Pixel, Dead Pixel, in which two whirring vehicle tyres splattered mud on the walls in “designed accidents”. For DataWeave 2025, mounted at Freedom Park at the Bengaluru Hubba, the artist worked with dhokra artisans to create a bronze sculpture evocative of Mahatma Gandhi. Tallur likens the dhokra method of coiling wax thread, layer upon layer, to the additive processes used by a 3D printer. For him this coming together of the handmade, machine-made and the hand-machine-made helps enrich his visual vocabulary.

There is also a clutch of artists who create kinetic artworks that are not necessarily high-tech but are machine-driven. Many are inspired by Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, who used scrap metal and other rejected items to make playful kinetic sculptures. Kausik Mukhopadhyay, 65, turns to discarded household objects and outdated pieces of technological equipment, bringing them together in complex assemblages to voice his preoccupations.

He believes that movement adds another layer to artworks. “I always have a funny feeling about the pretentious seriousness of art, its aura becoming the barrier for people to interact. The movement makes it apparently less cerebral and scary. That is why I use simple machines, always exposed to the viewer,” says Mukhopadhyay.

Like him, Niroj Satpathy too employs discarded objects. For the ongoing Kochi Biennale, he created grotesque kinetic sculptures fashioned predominantly from material gathered from landfill sites as part of his site-specific installation Dhalan.

Art platforms and institutions too are devoting considerable time and effort to understanding the role technology is playing in artistic practices through dedicated residencies and commissions. For instance, the Khoj International Artists’ Association is currently hosting an international exhibition, Are You Human, at Khoj Studios and DLF Mall in Saket in Delhi. According to the concept note, the exhibition “has emerged from the urgency to understand how evolving technologies transform and reorganise what it means to be human, to inhabit gender, caste and other socio-ecological formations, in the 2020s and beyond, globally.”

On display are a variety of interactive artworks that harness virtual reality, facial recognition systems, AI tools and even a drawing game that pits AI against humans. In Gondwana, a durational VR by new-media artist duo Ben Andrews and Emma Roberts, visitors are invited to put on a VR headset. This transports them into the Daintree Rainforest in Australia to experience its wonders but also to understand the implications of human intervention.

As artists push the possibilities of human-machine interaction, they are often confronted with more metaphysical questions. Shailesh for one ponders, “AI pulls me into a bigger question: what comes after AI? If machines can generate language, arguments and decisions, can they also reach something like artificial enlightenment?”

Meera Menezes is a Delhi-based art critic, writer and curator.