- Artist
- Fabin Rasheed · nurecas.com/petri ↗
- Raster
- raster.art/artist/fabin-rasheed ↗
- Practice
- Generative art, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, interactive systems, and creative technology
- In the set
- Petri ↗ · 200 editions
- Links
- Full bibliography ↗
Fabin Rasheed works between artistic production and technological research. A 2020 interview describes him as an artist, designer, innovator, and technologist working at the intersection of creativity and technology. It also records his earlier work at Xerox Research and Adobe, his patents and publications, and his use of artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, gesture, voice, and generative systems.1 This background positions software not simply as production equipment, but as a subject through which creativity can be examined.
Rasheed has repeatedly treated machines as collaborators whose constraints and capacities alter the creative process. In a 2022 interview, he argued that artificial intelligence could augment human creative expression rather than merely automate it.2 That position offers a useful frame for Petri, where code establishes a bounded visual environment while procedural variation gives every output its own organization and behavior.
Synthetic organisms
Released in 2021, Petri comprises exactly 200 editions. A contemporary Art Blocks licensing essay identifies the project and discusses Rasheed’s distinction between licensing source code and licensing the visual output generated from it.3 The project’s animated circular habitats contain luminous layers, membranes, and concentrated fields that suggest cells or microscopic cultures. Its title invokes laboratory cultivation, but the work does not claim to reproduce a particular organism. Instead, it builds an analogy between computation and biological development: rules establish conditions, variation differentiates specimens, and animation makes change perceptible.
The biological metaphor connects Petri to Rasheed’s wider interest in speculative nature. For the 2021 Computer Vision Art Gallery, he presented Nanorganics, a series investigating how a machine might imagine microscopic organisms. The documented process combined BigSleep-generated imagery with the artist’s subsequent photographic manipulation.4 Although Nanorganics and Petri employ different methods, both replace direct observation with synthetic construction. Their organic forms are generated through exchanges between human decisions and computational processes.
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Live on Art Blocks: petri-by-fabin-rasheed ↗
Tools, minds, and participation
Rasheed’s artificial-intelligence projects further complicate the boundary between tool and maker. With engineer Sleeba Paul, he developed Auria Kathi, an AI poet-artist. MAP Academy reports that the system was trained with approximately 350,000 haiku examples, while its abstract images drew on a curated dataset of four thousand artworks.5 Auria Kathi’s poems and images were produced and published daily, making automation part of both creation and public presentation.
Participation is equally important in Rasheed’s practice. The location-based augmented-reality project The Pilgrimage distributed nine three-dimensional artworks across nine international sites. Participants had to travel to those locations and open an associated link to unlock each work, turning geographic movement and collaboration into project mechanics.6 The system was therefore not only a method for generating imagery. It organized how an audience encountered, circulated, and completed the work.
His later projects connect generative media with consciousness and mental health. Dreamcatcher used EEG brainwave data and AI-generated imagery in a three-dimensional sculpture concerned with subconscious experience.7 The Indian Express likewise reported that Rasheed used an EEG device whose signals contributed to the sculpture’s form, situating the work within a broader debate about artists adopting AI tools.8 In 2023, the newspaper documented Memoria and Knots, created with physician and brain scientist Murali Doraiswamy for Art Dubai Digital, as works addressing mental health through three-dimensional and augmented-reality media.9
Art Dubai’s 2024 Digital Summit subsequently presented Rasheed as an artist and technologist exploring philosophy, psychology, and consciousness, and included him in a discussion of Dubai’s digital-art community.10 Across these projects, a consistent concern emerges: technology can give provisional form to processes that are otherwise difficult to see, from cellular growth and machine imagination to participation, memory, and states of mind.
Petri makes computation feel less like command than cultivation.
Bibliography
The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Fabin Rasheed links page ↗.