Graduate Student Talk: Kartik Chandra

Join Kartik Chandra, a PhD candidate at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), for a conversation exploring the work of Alison Nguyen in List Projects 26.

This talk is about AI, art, and “AI art,” given in a world where data-driven AI systems can write, draw, and speak with uncanny fluency. But what are the limits of data—statistics—memory—when modeling the human expression of human experience? What is lost when we reduce ourselves to the traces we leave in digital databases?

Recent work at the intersection of computer graphics, literary theory, and cognitive neuroscience suggests that there is something to the artistic endeavor that cannot be captured by data alone. In this talk, Kartik will set this research in conversation with Alison Nguyen’s work, history as hypnosis (2023).

This will be a hybrid event with a live video that can be streamed here at 5:30 PM. 

About the Speaker

Kartik Chandra is a computer scientist studying visual computing at MIT CSAIL. His research asks what extraordinary perceptual experiences—such as illusions and artworks—reveal about human intelligence. By probing them with novel computational methods, he hopes to guide us in architecting robust, flexible, and human-like artificial intelligence. Kartik graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with honors from Stanford University, with degrees in Computer Science and English Literature. He is a Hertz Fellow as well as a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow.

Graduate Student Talks

MIT graduate students explore current exhibitions at the List Center through the lens of their own research, background, and interests. Join us for this interdisciplinary lecture series where we dive into how art and research are overlapping on MIT’s campus.