Paper short abstract:

A series of short videos in production, reimagining the gods and stories from the Hindu pantheon. Inspired by the massively popular comic book series Amar Chitra Katha, this series uses machine learning generated video and sound to create short works that re-imagine our storytelling.

Paper long abstract:

Saṅkhyā ("number" in Bengali) Stories are a series of short videos using machine learning and media art practices to imagine how we might extend and express cultural knowledge using contemporary tools. The videos take as its inspiration the massively popular Amar Chitra Katha ("My Bright Stories") comic book series, and present a contemporary moving-image catalog that explores Hindu mythology outside the canon, looking for hidden stories in the repository of collectively held mythology, activating the fluid nature of how these stories are told and the beautiful inconsistencies in each telling.

This type of work is part of a larger exploration by artists across the field, summarized recently in the Oxford Internet Institute paper "AI and the Arts: How Machine Learning is Changing Artistic Work" (Ploin, Eynon, Hjorth, Osborne, 2022).