Above image from Raghava KK at KIN Global 2013: Shaking up Perspectives
Do you ever feel like you’re living in the future? When we saw what Raghava KK did, it definitely made us feel like the future has arrived.
Who is Raghava KK?
Raghava KK is an artist. He was born in 1980 in Bangalore. He lives in New York and India. He started his career in art as a cartoonist. His mother knew how to draw and she influenced him towards art. After he drew a controversial comic which was met with sharp criticism, he left cartooning behind and went on to experiment with different kinds of art and painting.
His paintings and drawings use cartoonish shapes and colours to examine the body, society and our world. In 2010, Raghava became a TED talk speaker with his talk entitled ‘My 5 lives as an artist‘ where he tells us how he changed over time and how his art changed with him to make him who he is. Most of what he learned is self-taught. Eventually, he painted flamenco dancers as they danced in front of him and though they were beautiful, he felt like he wanted his paintings to dance as well.
Image Taken From the YouTube Video: My 5 lives as an artist
So he started taking pictures of his friends in front of it and then it looked like his paintings were moving. His paintings became the backdrop for a performance with Velocity Circus in California and he was happy that his paintings were moving.
Image Taken From the YouTube Video: My 5 lives as an artist
It seems like the desire to make art move has never stopped. Though the TED talk took place in 2010, it would be 2 years later that he would speak again. This time, his concepts have gotten more sophisticated and use technology to deliver a new experience for people who want to interact with art. His talk is below.
If you can’t see it, here is the breakdown. Raghava was always perplexed by Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, everyone said that she smiled but he couldn’t see it when he looked at her lips. One day, somebody told him that the smile could only be seen once you look into her eyes. It struck a chord within him and he had his own version of a Mona Lisa that he wanted to smile.
Behold. His Mona Lisa.
So how do you get her to smile?
After meeting a genius hacker named Sean Stevens, the two collaborated to make something that would make his Mona Lisa smile. If you want to make her smile, you have to use your head. That’s where an EEG headset comes into the equation.
It measures brain waves and uses those measurements to transform Raghava’s Mona Lisa 2.0 into a smiling figure or a sad figure or even a crying one. It just takes concentration to make a woman who had a neutral expression before into that of someone grateful to have lived so long.
Concentrate and she smiles for you.
The possibilities for this are endless and we can even see this having commercial applications. Though this talk was given in 2012, in 2017, it has completely impressed us and clearly, we’re not the only ones. Check out this College Humour video of the Star Wars Force Trainer and the official advertisement for the Star Wars Force Trainer II.
We can only begin to consider how many more ways there are to change art with our minds. And if you ever looked into the work of Raghava KK, it seems like he always wanted to change minds with his art and now, it can go both ways.
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