Aman Kaleem, former Mittal Institute Visiting Artist Fellow, has returned to Harvard from her hometown of New Delhi, India, to earn a Master in Design Engineering from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science. A filmmaker who specializes in integrating emerging technologies with artistic mediums, Aman has been busy since her fellowship in 2018. We caught up with Aman to hear about her endeavors, including her new film, “Girls.”
Mittal Institute: Aman, tell us about life after your VAF experience! What drove you to continue your studies at Harvard, and can you share more about your Masters focus?
Aman Kaleem: During my time with the Visiting Artist Fellowship, I delved into the realms of film and virtual reality in collaboration with the Harvard Innovation Lab. This exploration sparked a deep interest in the symbiosis between art and technology, propelling me to delve deeper into this fascinating intersection.
In my master’s studies, I’ve been engaged with unconventional materials, including imperfect datasets, deep learning algorithms, the kinetics of human movement, the interplay of light and shadow, the organic growth patterns of moss, the quantification of sentiment, and the intricacies of machine learning.
Aman Kaleem at home in her studio.
My thesis is a multi-disciplinary initiative that resides at the nexus of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and brain-computer interface technology. Leveraging the capabilities of machine learning and generative AI, this project transforms auditory inputs into visual representations of memories with real-time fluidity. It’s a system engineered to decode and visualize auditory signals as living memories instantly. This pursuit aims to investigate the body of memory. By piecing together the forgotten fragments of daily life, it endeavors to weave complex individual recollections into visual narratives, thereby confronting the amnesia of our everyday existence.
Mittal Institute: You have also been busy on the artistic front. Can you share more about the film you released?
Aman Kaleem: “Girls” is a sci-fi film from the MIT Media Lab, notable for its pioneering use of AI within a gaming engine to create photorealistic environments and characters. The film has received international acclaim, securing 12 awards at 18 film festivals in various countries, including Spain, the United States, Ukraine, France, Indonesia, Sweden, and India, with prestigious accolades from events such as the Madrid International Movie Awards and the Swedish International Film Festival. This project marks a significant advancement in the use of AI in cinema by merging generative models with gaming technology, thus creating an immersive, futuristic narrative landscape. “Girls” is a testament to a new era in film aesthetics, transforming intricate text-based prompts into vibrant, complex visual narratives.
Left: The “Girls” film poster; Right: A scene from the film.
Mittal Institute: Likewise, your art installation is permanently installed at MIT. Can you describe the piece, and where our community can view it?
Aman Kaleem: The ‘Precipitation of Life’ installation is set to open in late March at the MIT Nano building. This facility has four floors of ‘clean rooms,’ where the presence of humans clothed in bunny suits is considered the epitome of contamination. My installation confronts this sterile environment by introducing elements of life where they’re typically forbidden. I’ve gathered moss from various locales in New England and examined these specimens under Scanning Electron Microscopes. These images, now living archives, highlight the enduring resilience of life – and will be projected onto walls in the clean room. To complement the visual narrative, I’ve crafted love poems to be displayed in lightboxes. The attempt is to infiltrate life where it was forbidden to exist, to challenge and question the sterility of an environment.
Mittal Institute: What other endeavors are you busy with?
Aman Kaleem: I recently completed a project that narrates the story of people walking, trained on a flawed dataset. It creates color and brightness based on the proximity and direction of the human walking. I chose to train it on a messy dataset where multiple objects were in the frame, and the video was not clear.
We are consistently asked to believe in the sanitization of all data, but the world does not function that way, nor do humans. We are messy, different, and flawed. Simply, how we walk defines who we are. Each body movement is a stamp of how our bodies have been shaped over the course of our existence. It is a story of what the body holds. Exhibited at the Spanish Pavilion of the Wrong Biennale, I tell these stories building from scratch CNNs, they are not just fun exercises; they are an infiltration of art from where traditionally we do not expect it. By manipulating the neural architectures of the models, curating and preparing training datasets, and fine-tuning the post-processing of outputs, I am attempting to tell stories of flawed bodies that choose to be the way they grow.
Views of Aman’s installation, “Sensorial Investigation of Orphaned Clothes.”
Mittal Institute: What advice would you give to artists that are just starting their career?
Aman Kaleem: Art, in its true form, is about permitting oneself to create—something I’ve wrestled with and continue to do. Art gains its meaning when it is allowed to breathe, unencumbered by the judgments of others or the censor within us. It’s vital not to disregard any idea or emotion; they all hold value and should contribute to your work and your experiences. In the early stages of my career, I often muted my expression, preoccupied with what was considered ‘good’ or what would resonate with others. With time, shifted age has brought a change in perspective, and I dwell less on these considerations, focusing instead on what I feel compelled to create. In a world saturated with content, it is the authenticity and individuality of one’s story that will carve out a distinct space for an artist’s work and connect deeply with audiences. So, I advise cultivating that inner narrative, refining it, and letting it guide their creative process without hesitation or fear.
Mittal Institute: How did the VAF experience in 2018 influence your career path?
Aman Kaleem: The Visiting Artist Fellowship I experienced in 2018 marked a significant transformation in my approach to art. It pushed the boundaries of my artistic practice by introducing me to a wide array of non-traditional materials and innovative methods, profoundly influencing my approach to creation. During the fellowship, I attended a conference at MIT Media Lab, where I participated in discussions about NFTs, virtual reality, and cryptocurrency. This experience broadened my perspective on the intersection of art and technology and its continuous evolution. Furthermore, my work at the Harvard Innovation Lab was equally enriching, where I encountered extraordinary VR art that widened my perspective on the possibilities within immersive technology. A defining moment of my fellowship was my exhibition, “Shaping the Ordinary through Love and Dreams,” curated by Prof. Jinah Kim, the distinguished George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art. The installation I presented not only facilitated active audience engagement but also solidified my understanding of the universal applicability of artistic expression and the considerable scope for recontextualizing my work within innovative forms and mediums.
Aman with her ‘Precipitation of Life’ installation, slated to open in late March at the MIT Nano building.
☆ The views represented herein are those of the interview subjects and do not necessarily reflect the views of LMSAI, its staff, or its steering committee.