Nitant Hirlekar was fond of colours and patterns from a young age, but would often find it difficult to put his thoughts into pre-conceived forms and patterns. It was only after he completed his graduation in interior designing that he came across a certain set of artists who weren’t painters but were using programming codes as tools for creating artwork. Once he started exploring generative art forms, block chains and NFT technology there was no looking back for the 33 year old artist as he finally discovered his true calling. Today, after various stints at Kala Ghoda Festival, Mumbai and Netflix show The Creative Indians, he has debuted at India Art Fair 2023’s Outdoor Art Installation segment. It featured a large-scale computational art installation supported by Tezos Foundation in collaboration with Tezos India. He shares with us his point of view about how NFT is being received in the country, and its future.
If you had to explain NFT technology in the layman’s terms, how would you do it?
NFT is just the technology, not an art form in itself and it is related to block chains. Whenever a digital transaction takes place using block chain technology, there are tokens in the block chain that generate a unique cryptographic number. The number triggers different parameters of the code we have generated, hence generating a new artwork every time with the unique input cryptographic number. The code is the art in itself and the outputs are images that are generated from it. Hence, digital art that is tokenised in the block chain is what we call NFT art since it uses the Non Fungible token technology. The artwork is completely digital, and all transactions and investments on it happen completely virtually.
Have people started grasping this technology well in the country? What are the possibilities and its future in India?
A few years back people could seldom think of the possibilities internet could open up for them in the future. The potential of what can happen with a block chain too is limitless. It can make everything decentralised. Block chains doesn’t really belong to anyone and it doesn’t have a monopoly on it, hence with block chains there is a lot of transparency. It is also very progressive for a fact.
Take us through your debut at India Art Fair?
I have been involved with this art form for ten years, but it took me a decade to get into mainstream art since I am not a painter. People often think it is the computer that is making the code but actually it’s not as I am creating the codes and the computer is just executing it. For our project at the India Art Fair, each of the four artists coming together for the computational art installations have written their own codes. There was a 160 feet wall on which we have written the timeline of the computation hence the whole genre is called computation art. We started with the 1950’s when people started using computers, moved on to the 60’s, 70’, and 80’s and to the current times when block chains came into existence. The four artists created different versions of generative art based on different themes, Karthik has worked on landscapes and terrains, Aranya has worked on a theme that uses flow and energy, I have worked on rangolis and the idea of four dimensional elements. KALA has worked on a project called The Yoni Project which thematises female genitals.