Excavate with me.

How it started

My own idea. It began in conversation with my older brother Dr. Karthik Kalyanaraman: could the most private experience become data, and could it be sold? In 2019, on stage at FofX, Abhijeet Satani and I promised we would one day capture my orgasm and turn it into art.

The process

In 2021 Abhijeet recorded my orgasm as brainwaves in my Bengaluru studio, on equipment he built. In Mumbai, Harshit Agrawal rebuilt the data in 3D: every firing neuron became one brush stroke. In New York I chose the angle and composed the painting. At the Artmatr lab it went back into matter: oil pigments made in Artmatr's lab in Israel, contours turned into G-code, the robots and my hand on the same canvas. Cyborg Orgasm followed in 2022.

Outcome

La petite mort, one large canvas and three studies, launched at Sotheby's HQ, New York, in October 2021. It sold as an NFT.

How it started

I wanted to see how AI changes my painting technique. Reinventing painting through technology, not replacing it. Feroze Gujral, who had followed my work for years, asked me to do something at Jor Bagh, and she was willing to try this.

The process

I trained an AI on two things, composition and style. The style data was my own brush strokes, sometimes mixed with curated data sets: 10,000 images of cum shots, 10,000 images of body parts hidden from public society, teeth, hair, plastic waste. The composition was an impossible bouquet or one of my paintings; the strokes came from the training set.

Then I learned to paint like it. I trained my hand and my mind on its strokes, bastardized bad versions of my own. Back and forth, until you can't tell who taught who. In the painting you can't tell where the digital ends and where the physical mark brings it to life.

Outcome

"The Impossible Bouquet," one exhibition of the series: eight works at 24 Jor Bagh, New Delhi, 10 to 16 February 2023, curated by Feroze Gujral. Presented by the Gujral Foundation with Volte Art Projects, in the Foundation's 15th year, as an official collateral event of India Art Fair 2023. Exhibition design by Vertex.

How it started

Artmatr is a community of artists and engineers in New York, run by the painter Ben Tritt, working to merge digital technology with traditional painting. In 2015 they built me SOZO: a gantry, stepper motors and industrial inkjet heads that lay my digital layers down on canvas. I wanted to know whether a machine's marks could carry a painter's technique, and what happens to an image when it passes through one.

The process

For two years I worked on a series I first called Sublime Machines and then Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans, Rudolf Otto's phrase for the numinous: a mystery that terrifies and attracts at once. I settled on three things any transcendent experience needs: liberation, the loss of identity, and comfort inside mystery. I fed the same image, a central figure, through Artmatr's three robots, X1, X2 and Sozo, again and again, and painted back into what came out; each pass abstracts the figure a little more. The marks the printer makes tell me there is a relationship between the digital and the real: every time you recall a memory, you alter it. The series is a ritual of letting go, and the figure at the centre of it is someone I was letting go of after seventeen years.

Outcome

MTF opened at Artmatr Labs, Chelsea, on 13 September 2018. That August SOZO itself was crated and shipped to my Bengaluru studio. In 2019 Artmatr and Eric Fischl invited me to a residency in the Hamptons, and the machine-then-hand way of working carried on from there into The Orgasm Project (entry № 01).

How it started

A commission. The Eicher Group Foundation, which runs the Royal Enfield Social Mission, commissioned it from the Raghava KK Studio for the first edition of its festival on the Himalayas.

The process

I built it around the mountains, not the motorcycle. Everything was projected: projection mapping, AI imagery and interaction, set inside the four arched windows of Travancore Palace. I drew thirty mountains and thirty versions of each of four characters, one character to an arch, and Laxita built the interaction: you move the motorcycles along the road with a hand gesture, the main character's face is mapped from your own, and the mountains behind rise and fall. My daughter Rudra made the multi-channel soundscape with the composer Rameshwar Bhatt. You walked through it the way you walk through a temple, or a mountain pass.

Outcome

Shown at Journeying Across the Himalayas, the Royal Enfield Social Mission's first festival, at Travancore Palace, New Delhi, 5 to 15 December 2024. The work is about how fragile the Himalayas are.

How it started

Not a commission. Ram and Madhuri Nene and I have been friends for fifteen years, and the car came out of years of talking about technology, art, cinema, performance, training, imagination and doing hard things as a family. The Nenes race together. When the car arrived, the artwork was the obvious next conversation.

The process

At the centre is the double-headed tiger, the symbol I reserve for the works that matter most to me: the inner world and the outer, instinct and intellect, emotion and engineering. Around it the family, the way I see them. Ram and Madhuri as astronauts, suspended between science and performance. Einstein and Iron Man, for a lifelong fascination with intellect and imagination. A tulip, for desire and value. Arin and Ryan woven through the whole thing, a generation that will grow up seeing identity as something global, fluid and self-made. Keith Wood, the automotive designer in London, took the painting onto the body of a 296 GT3. The roof says TO INFINITY AND BEYOND. The rear says HORN OK PLEASE.

Outcome

The car ran from 18 December 2025 in Bahrain, Qatar and Dubai, in the Ferrari 296 Challenge and the Passione Ferrari Club Challenge with Dragon Racing, as car no. 58 in Pathfinder livery. Ram calls the artwork the family's hero backstory for the Pathfinder launch. Madhuri's history with painters began with M. F. Husain. I know what company that puts me in.

How it started

Kula is a single work made in participation with one family. The family decides who belongs in it. I sit with each person, one by one. Then I paint, in my own hand, each person in their own uniqueness, and the one thing they become together.

Ram and Madhuri and I have been friends for fifteen years, and the Nenes are the first. Their Kula began on the family car, a Ferrari that carries the work as its livery. This painting is the family itself, the first of what I call the Family Bouquets.

The process

Madhuri dances at the centre. Ram is beside her. Arin and Ryan are in it, and the family's dogs, and a road sign that reads NENE CROSSING. The figures the household lives with are in it too, Gandhi and Einstein among them. So are the fitness journey and the music.

Outcome

Ram and Madhuri hosted an evening at their home in Mumbai on 12 September 2026, around art, theatre, health and music, and the three works of mine that joined their collection were unveiled that night. On 12 October Farah Khan took her camera through the house to count the Husains. She got to thirty. Then Ram walked her into the newest room and said, in front of the painting, "This is from my dear friend Raghava KK, and this is our life journey." The video passed six million views in four days.

Kula is made by invitation and recommendation.

How it started

My own idea. In Cambridge I was thinking about anthropomorphism, which I carried from my cartooning days. I wanted to make a painting come to life. I tried painting dancers and bodies. A Harvard student suggested leotards, and a dancer friend helped me buy them. We tested it in Cambridge.

Then I told Kamal Haasan about it and developed it with him. I worked from his home for nearly a year to make it. Then I met someone willing to produce it in California.

The process

I painted watercolour directly onto the dancers' leotards. The choreography moved the painting, so every performance was a new work. It premiered in 1999 at the Taj West End, Bangalore.

Outcome

Lakshmi Pratury is the person who made it happen. She made the introduction and commissioned it for Lata Krishnan, then president of the American India Foundation, for the AIF's California fundraising gala in 2003, hosted by Ann Getty. Maithili Shankaran and Sujata Suresh produced it. It then played San Francisco with Velocity Circus and Cirque du Soleil dancers, and the San Francisco show sold out. In 2005 it was restaged at the San Jose Convention Center as "Anthropomorphism: When Paintings Dance."

How it started

Both had seen my TED talk. Paul Simon was in the room. His son Adrian reached out, and I got to know Paul, Adrian and the family. Erykah Badu came across my work through a friend and invited me to collaborate on a charity event.

The process

Paul asked for a collaboration, then for the cover of So Beautiful or So What. I told him I'm not good at album covers; I do what I feel. I made a cross between a turkey and a peacock. Paul loved it.

With Erykah it started with a long meeting about what each of us cares about. We talked about kids, since Anaga had just been born, and about hair, how central it is to African-American identity. That became the core of the design: her stories and experiences woven into her hair.

Outcome

The label didn't use it as the cover. Paul used it for his concert backdrop and his merch, and the merch sold out. Erykah's shirts sold at a New York fundraiser where she DJed, and I went to her concert.

The original painting was bought by a collector in New York. Later I made another work from Paul's song "Still Crazy After All These Years", and Paul bought it. He has collected my paintings for years.

How it started

My own idea. I started on it when Rudra was one. On Park Street I felt that children's books are full of propaganda, and I wanted to counter it with my own: a book where shaking it gives you different kinds of parents. Deconstructing the ideal, the universal. It was also me confronting my own truths. The book starts with a gay couple raising a child; shake it and you get a lesbian couple; shake again and a heterosexual couple. I can't promise to bring my children up without biases, but I can promise to expose them to as many as possible.

The process

Shake the iPad and the parents change: two fathers, two mothers, or a mother and a father. The child stays the same. Everything was drawn by hand. Above Solutions built it and Dhimant Vyas animated it for touch.

It was going to be a book. Then the iPad came out in 2010, and it was so much more immediate, plus you could shake it. There were no engineers yet who knew the device, so Above Solutions and I learned it together; when it rains outside, it rains in the book. Rudra was the tester, and I was struck by how intuitive kids were with it.

Outcome

Launched at the INK conference in Lavasa in December 2010, on the App Store by July 2011, then shown at TEDGlobal 2011, where I gave a talk about it, "Shake Up Your Story". Kirkus called it “a first-rate mind expander.”

How it started

MUST# was born out of Flipsicle, my startup. It was Flipsicle's art component. The business story is in Flipsicle (entry № 19); this is the art.

The process

The unit is a picture with a hashtag. Swipe right and you get more pictures with the same hashtag. Switch and you get different hashtags on the same photo. So you navigate with visual and verbal cues, and every sequence of swipes and switches is a unique pathway. We aggregated people with similar pathways to predict what people with similar paths wanted to see next, and ordered the hashtags and photos by highest probability. The aim was to show you what you don't know you're looking for.

The interesting part was the empathy algorithm. We looked at the standard deviation of your pathway and introduced new concepts into your algorithm that would slowly keep increasing your empathy muscle. Just like any other muscle, as your exposure increases, your tolerance to it increases, and your exposure to further things gets unlocked.

We invited artists from all over the world to contribute pictures and hashtags and keep growing it, because the system needed people to keep adding.

Outcome

I didn't have enough data to build the algorithms out professionally. I hoped a company would buy them. We couldn't monetize in time, and after four years we killed the company. Flipsicle died, and MUST# with it.

After Flipsicle, in May 2016, Viacom named me one of the first creators-in-residence at its new lab in New York, for up to six months, to explore identity, empathy and new forms of social storytelling.

How it started

The word on my mind in 2020 was relevance. The galleries were shut and I was not sure art mattered to anyone under thirty. I was turning forty that October and had been an artist for twenty-five years, so I called my friend Anto Philip, who co-founded Under25, India's largest youth community, and told him I wanted to launch a work on Instagram, where his audience already lives. First I deleted every post I had ever made there.

The process

Seven topics: love, loss, boundaries, truth, balance, introspection, perspective. Each one in three parts. Side A is one way of seeing it. Side B is the opposite. Play is where the two are allowed to fight it out, and where a personality shows up. One oil painting for each topic, carousels for the argument, mini-podcasts for the voice, videos for the exhibition I could not hold, lives for the opening. I wanted to slow people down. You do not need a PhD to understand art; you need to sit with confusion for a minute.

Outcome

It ran from October 2020 to 7 February 2021 and passed a hundred thousand views. Under25 Studios closed it with a hybrid week of its own, 19 to 23 February. Seven oil paintings, fourteen carousels, seven exhibition videos, ten mini-podcasts, and the lives, which are gone; that was the bet. The essays and reels that remain play on the talks page.

How it started

INK is Lakshmi Pratury's conference, India's answer to TED. When the first edition opened in Lavasa in December 2010, the Fellows program opened with it. TED had its Fellows; India had nothing like it for young people working across disciplines, so Nikhil Velpanur and I put the first one together.

The process

About twenty fellows a year, aged eighteen to forty, chosen from seven hundred to more than a thousand applications from some seventy countries. Travel and stay paid, a week at the conference, and a year of mentoring after it: pitches, storytelling, and the things nobody puts in a pitch. Orientation began with what I called shameless self-introductions. I was its co-chair, alongside Lalitesh Katragadda, who built Google Map Maker, and later Anu Sethuram, co-founder and president of the INK Global Foundation. The program ran under the Ixoraa Knowledge Foundation with support from Tata Trusts.

Outcome

Ten cohorts and more than two hundred fellows, among them Anand Gandhi, Krithi Karanth, Pushpa Basnet, Alicia Souza and Anirudh Sharma. The Fearless Collective started from inside the fellowship. I stepped down around 2020; Anu Sethuram and Shilpa Sharma chair it now. The fellows are listed on INK's site.

How it started

Viswa Subbaraman, conductor and director, wanted to stage Fidelio set in India and asked me to design it. When you look at the story of Fidelio, a wife who disguises herself as a man to free her husband from prison, it really is a Bollywood movie. I wanted to make opera accessible.

The process

The opera is set inside one of my paintings. The props were layers of my Photoshop artwork turned into physical objects, and I worked with them the way I work an image, in layers, alongside Skylight's set and production teams. With Sean Stevens, a hacker and technologist I met at NuVu Studio in Cambridge, I worked on the light and several of the visual elements. A hacked Kinect caught the dancers' silhouettes and threw them onto the video screens as they moved. In the finale Viswa conducted wearing a brainwave scanner, and his signal was translated live into a star map of light across the stage. Deepa Devasena choreographed; David Pountney's English libretto was used.

Outcome

It opened on 20 September 2013 at the Cabot Theatre, Broadway Theatre Center, Milwaukee, and ran to 6 October, with India's ambassador to the United States, Nirupama Rao, in the house on opening night. "No review of this production would be complete without mention of the set design by noted artist Raghava KK," OnMilwaukee wrote. It was my first EEG work on a stage; Mona Lisa 2.0 (entry № 17) had come the same year.

How it started

In 2001 I was at Parsons for a summer program. My professor, Pauline, sent me to Pentagram, who were running the design side of the L!brary Initiative: the Robin Hood Foundation, New York's anti-poverty foundation, was rebuilding libraries in under-resourced public schools with the city's Board of Education, and Pentagram's Michael Bierut and Rion Byrd paired an artist with each library. Lonni Tanner, who started the program at Robin Hood, and David Saltzman, who ran the foundation, gave me a whole library in the Bronx.

The process

In the program the bookcases could be no higher than five shelves, and the band of wall above them was usually the artist's. Mine was not a band. Pentagram gave me the whole room, and chose its colours and its furniture from my art. And I did not sell them the rights to my paintings. I made it as a project instead: a week at the school drawing with the children, their drawings and mine, and that is what went onto the library. Richard Lewis designed the library itself; Dorothy Kresz, Peter Arkle and Lynn Pauley painted the bands in his other libraries.

Outcome

A whole library at PS 169 in the Bronx, its colours, its furniture and the art on it, in a room children still use. The Architect's Newspaper covered the program in 2005 and credited me under my full name, Raghava Kalyanaraman.

How it started

Ricky Kej, a Bengaluru composer who had just won a Grammy, was making a record about the environment for the year the world met in Paris to negotiate on climate. He asked me in as artistic producer: to help tell the story around the music, and to paint for it.

The process

Ricky assembled more than three hundred musicians and actors from around the world, Stewart Copeland, the Royal Philharmonic, the Soweto Gospel Choir and Amitabh Bachchan among them, across twenty-four tracks and four films. My paintings went into the album and its book. After the launch the work went on for another year: through Roundglass, where I was a partner, I worked with Ricky in 2016 on a Bengaluru concert, further songs, a documentary and a children's tour around the record.

Outcome

On 30 November 2015, at COP21 in Paris, Narendra Modi handed the finished album to François Hollande. A record with my paintings in it, passed between two heads of state.

How it started

We bring our biases and our emotions to every work of art we look at. I wanted to make that visible, so I started with the painting everyone already has an opinion about. The first prototype came out of a two-week class Sean Stevens and I ran at NuVu Studio, a studio school in Cambridge; we spent the next year improving it.

The process

You wear an EEG headset that reads your brainwaves, alpha, beta, gamma, theta, and the readings drive her face. When I'm happy she's happy; when I'm sad she's sad. Your brain biases and completes the work. I called these art hacks rather than paintings, and made about ten of them: a Venus who undresses as your brainwaves shift, a Gandhi who responds to whether you agree with him. Satya Hinduja composed the original music. As I said on the TED stage, whether you love it or hate it, I hope there will always be a place for you in it.

Outcome

Shown at TED2013 in Long Beach in February, at TEDMED at the Kennedy Center, Washington, in April 2013, where my talk asked what happens now that I can read your brainwaves, and at the National Geographic Explorers Symposium that June. Sedition released it as a digital edition of 50, a recording of me wearing the headset. The same year the headset went onto a conductor in Fidelio (entry № 11), and eight years later it came back as the input for The Orgasm Project (entry № 01).

How it started

Kulsum Shadab Wahab and I have been friends for years, trading sketches and never forcing anything. Ara Lumiere, which she founded under the Hothur Foundation, works with survivors of acid attacks and burns as designers and makers, not as beneficiaries. When she became the first Indian appointed Women Empowerment Ambassador by Italy's Camera Nazionale della Moda, she asked me to work with the women and take something to Milan. I had already run a workshop with them built on one idea: anyone can create art, and what you create creates you.

The process

My first idea was to photograph the women against a grey wall and paint over the scars. I dropped it. Painting over a scar is covering it, and I did not want to fix anyone's face. A passport photograph is meant to be the most objective image of a person, and an acid attack can make the one in your documents useless. So: if your face can't identify you, what can? Our answer was the hand. Each work starts with a real passport photograph from a public passport studio. I make several interpretations of that one image, digital and physical, and print them; on some prints I poured acid and photographed them again. Then the participant chooses among them and paints directly onto them. Akkyamma was the first. She resisted at first; painting over the photograph felt like damage. Maria, another survivor and an ambassador of Ara Lumiere, sat with her, gave her confidence, and made marks alongside her. We worked between Kannada and Tamil. Akkyamma went on to make thirty works, and at some point she didn't need me in the room.

Outcome

Fourteen of the thirty were shown, each 22 × 30 inches, mixed media on digitally manipulated photograph prints, at Galleria Gaburro in Milan on 26 September 2026, on the official Camera Moda calendar, for the second edition of Ara Lumiere's The Phoenix Circle. Three layers of authorship stay visible in every one: the passport studio, my interpretation, and Akkyamma's final mark. The works are credited to Raghava KK x Ara Lumiere, in collaboration with Akkyamma. The set is collected in a book on the library shelf.

How it started

GQ India named me one of its GQ Heroes for 2026, with Sobhita Dhulipala, Ali Fazal, Huma Qureshi, AD Singh, JJ Valaya and Ajinkya Rahane, and asked us to spend a weekend together outside Bangalore, the city I call home.

The weekend

It started on the golf course at the Prestige Golfshire Club, with the coach Hamza Yunus taking us through grip, stance and swing. I played. Our host was Ambika Anand. The last time we met was two decades ago, when her NDTV series The Big Fat Indian Wedding put my own wedding on Indian television.

The talk

On 10 October I sat down with Sanjana Ray, GQ's culture editor, for a session called Where the Mind Roams Free. My talk was electric with Sanjana. I should have expected her to do her homework and ask me questions about things I have barely spoken of before. I said that technology is a way of going past your own limits. I said that between India and the West, one teaches us how to package ourselves and the other how to deconstruct ourselves, and that where the two meet something new can emerge. GQ India will publish the session.

After

For the October 2026 Heroes issue GQ India asked me to design the subscriber jacket. It folds into a paper hero, one of ten of me.

How it started

The idea came out of Jeff Bezos's Campfire in 2013 (entry № 16), and before that out of Pop-It (entry № 07): if exposure to many perspectives is what builds creativity and empathy, build the software that does the exposing. Every database at that time only had SKUs, not what an image meant to somebody. I was trying to navigate that. Netra Srikanth, an educator, and Adrian Hong co-founded it with me; we called it our fourth baby. Flipsicle has been the most important project I have worked on, I said at the time, and I meant it.

The process

We tried to make it pay in different ways: Flittr, where you ask in words and people answer only in pictures; Bride Talk, a wedding app; planning with images; finding kids' apparel. In 2014 I got a term sheet with a ten-day window to find the rest of the round, so I drove around Silicon Valley while Netra booked meetings from New York, asking every investor for fifteen minutes and asking them in turn what they would do for the company. Gautam Godhwani, John Maeda, Neeraj Arora, Vishal Gondal, Esther Dyson and Linda Stone came in; the round was about two million dollars. We bought a small Stockholm team, Merchii, to build it. Netra and I filed a patent application for a method of social collaborative curation. The art side of Flipsicle was MUST# (entry № 08).

Outcome

It launched in India at INK in October 2014 (YourStory on the launch). We couldn't monetize in time. After four years we killed the company, and MUST# went with it. The startup world wants frameworks, decks, scale. I showed up with mischief, and with questions no one had asked.