Fahad Karim

Artist

Fahad Karim · fahadkarim.com ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/fahad-karim ↗

Based

Born 1990. South Asian artist whose life has extended across Switzerland, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, the Philippines, Mexico, and the United States

Practice

New media, generative systems, drawing, interactive animation, machine plotting, artificial intelligence, and blockchain-based art

In the set

Alan Ki Aankhen ↗ · 500 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Fahad Karim approaches computation as a means of carrying embodied knowledge forward. His programs do not simply select motifs or distribute shapes. They encode habits acquired through drawing: how an arch rises, how a building overlaps its neighbor, how a line accumulates texture, and how an imagined city can remain legible while slipping free of ordinary perspective. That position emerged from a practice spanning ink on paper and software, informed by a life lived among several countries and visual cultures. In a 2022 conversation with Art Blocks, Karim connected his art to South Asian roots, extensive geographic movement, and an interest in symbols, dreams, mythology, and the uncertain boundary between artificial and organic forms.¹

His biography makes mobility more than a convenient interpretive theme. Born in 1990, Karim has lived in Switzerland, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, the Philippines, Mexico, and the United States. He studied computer science at Cornell University, while his artistic education also developed through sustained drawing and through the example of his mother, the painter Vinita Karim.² This conjunction matters. Technical fluency and inherited artistic attention do not occupy separate halves of his practice. They converge in systems that ask whether intimate, culturally situated ways of seeing can be translated into rules without becoming generic.

Karim describes technology as his medium and system-building as his method. His broader practice has incorporated self-developed code, generative artificial intelligence, machine plotters, and blockchains, while returning to architecture, folklore, time, and human relationships with technology.² The resulting works are less demonstrations of computational novelty than speculative containers. They hold fragments of observed places, family histories, traditional forms, and imagined futures, then allow those fragments to recombine beyond the artist's direct control.

A machine taught to draw

Alan Ki Aankhen is the decisive articulation of this method. Released through Art Blocks Curated on 27 July 2022, it consists of exactly 500 editions.³ Its title translates as “Alan's Eyes,” invoking Alan Turing and the question of whether machine behavior can become indistinguishable from human behavior. Karim shifts that question into image-making. Rather than asking whether a machine can reproduce a finished drawing, he asks whether software can internalize the decisions through which his drawings come into being.⁴

The distinction is crucial. A scanned drawing preserves an artifact, while Karim's system attempts to preserve a practice. He first studied recurring elements such as eyes, leaves, vines, windows, pyramids, and towers, then parameterized their geometry. He developed modular composition tools that could combine, position, and scale these components. At the largest scale, he converted judgments about whitespace, overlap, layering, and depth into logical constraints.⁴ The code therefore operates at multiple levels, from the construction of an ogee arch to the organization of an entire skyline.

Alan Ki Aankhen does not automate a picture. It automates a repertoire of attention.

Karim's comparison between his private toolkit and widely used creative-coding libraries is revealing. In an Ensemble interview, he explained that he built a dedicated library for the world of Alan Ki Aankhen, then used it to construct different compositions.⁵ This library is both technical infrastructure and artistic vocabulary. Reusable primitives allow variation, but their specificity prevents the system from collapsing into neutral geometric abstraction. Each window or tower belongs to a language shaped by prior drawings and architectural observation.

The project generates otherworldly cityscapes across eight overarching compositional modes: ancient city, crowded city, eyescape, maze of windows, ocean towers, pencil city, rooftops, and upside down.⁴ These modes manage the tension between coherence and surprise. A viewer can recognize families within the collection, yet the placement and interaction of individual elements create distinct spatial propositions. Dense settlements coexist with isolated structures. Monumental pyramids rise behind narrow towers. Eyes become apertures, moons become anchors, and vegetation unsettles the division between building and organism.

Live on Art Blocks: alan-ki-aankhen-by-fahad-karim ↗

Architecture as portable memory

The imagery is rooted in remembered environments rather than a single documentary location. Karim identifies windows from Rajasthan, Egyptian pyramids, New York's density, and the moon as a constant visible across borders.⁴ Their combination produces neither travelogue nor seamless cosmopolitan fantasy. The cities are visibly assembled from discrepant histories. They make migration perceptible as an active process of juxtaposition, distortion, and reconstruction.

This concern predates the Art Blocks project. Karim's 2016 ink series Alternative Worlds imagined cities carried through space by organic vessels, combining machinery, organisms, planets, and recollections from countries in which he had lived.⁶ Its vessels establish a durable premise: civilization is mobile, and the forms that sustain it mutate while in transit. Alan Ki Aankhen transfers that premise from discrete drawings into a generative field. Its cities can recur indefinitely as variations because portability is built into the system itself.

The black-and-white palette also carries conceptual weight. Karim used color during development to diagnose spacing and compositional relationships, but the published outputs retain the appearance of ink or graphite.⁴ This restriction directs attention toward mark, density, and structure. It also reveals a productive contradiction. The surfaces imply patient manual labor, while their arrangement results from an algorithm executed at minting. The viewer encounters something that looks handmade without being a digital imitation of any single handmade original.

Such work complicates conventional accounts of automation as displacement. Karim does not position code as an external agent replacing the artist's hand. Instead, he treats programming as an extended process of introspection. When the system failed, he reportedly returned to the question of how he would solve the problem with pen, paper, and the human brain.⁴ Coding became a way to isolate tacit decisions that drawing usually compresses into gesture. The labor shifted from making every mark to defining the conditions under which marks could form meaningful relationships.

Living systems and historical forms

Projects following Alan Ki Aankhen widen this inquiry into cultural time. Pohualli, associated with Bright Moments in Mexico City, drew on Aztec calendrical and visual structures and was shortlisted for the Lumen Prize's 2023 Metaversal Generative Art Award.² Karim's participation in the Lumen Prize shortlisted artists exhibition placed this work within a wider institutional discussion of art and technology.⁷ The recognition is significant because the project did not treat historical aesthetics as a static surface. It used generative behavior to consider how systems of knowledge persist, transform, and risk misreading.

In 2024, Karim contributed All The Places We Danced to Bright Moments' collaborative Finale project in Venice. His algorithm generated surreal scenes of dancing cacti, with forms inspired by Salvador Dalí and colors and scenery connected to paintings by Vinita Karim.⁸ The work makes artistic inheritance explicit. Family influence passes through code, but not as faithful replication. It becomes a set of chromatic and formal conditions capable of producing new scenes.

The 2025 work NEOCODEX extends the model further. Presented as an infinite generative codex, it addresses transformation in the Yucatán Peninsula through forms inspired by Maya codices. The on-chain work changes page every minute, staging continuity as an unending process rather than a fixed archive.⁹ Its mechanics sharpen a question already present in Alan Ki Aankhen: can a computational system preserve cultural memory without pretending that memory is stable?

Karim's unique interactive animation Searching For Answers On Jupiter, executed in 2024 and offered by Sotheby's in the Lumen Prize anniversary auction, turns from terrestrial architecture toward a shared astronomical journey. Its algorithm reveals changing aerial views of Jupiter while synchronizing the experience of simultaneous viewers.¹⁰ Here the system creates a temporary public, joining distant observers within the same evolving scene. The work retains Karim's interest in never-repeated spaces, but exchanges the crowded city for a planetary expanse.

The generative city as argument

Across these projects, Karim's strongest contribution lies in how he binds cultural specificity to procedural form. The algorithm is not merely a distribution mechanism, and cultural reference is not merely decorative content. Each shapes the other. Arches require geometry; memories require selection; variation requires rules about what may change and what must remain recognizable. The artwork exists within those negotiations.

The 500 editions of Alan Ki Aankhen make this argument unusually visible. Viewed together, they demonstrate that identity need not depend on repetition of a fixed emblem. The series remains coherent because it preserves relationships among texture, architecture, density, and imaginative scale. Difference becomes evidence of the system's depth rather than a threat to its integrity. Contemporary generative art often celebrates abundance, but Karim makes abundance carry the burden of memory.

This is why the project matters beyond its technical achievement or its place in Art Blocks Curated. It treats computation as a cultural instrument capable of holding contradiction: handmade and automated, intimate and distributed, historical and speculative. Its cities do not resolve those tensions. They give them architecture.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Fahad Karim links page ↗.