Gallery Entry
Who Owns the Line?
By Leena Samuel · IN
Who Owns the Line? explores what remains uniquely human when technology can generate almost any image. The work draws on a Warli-inspired visual language of people, animals, trees, movement and collective activity, allowing these forms to travel from an earthy, tactile space toward a fragmented digital field. At the center, a human hand acts as maker, witness and mediator between two different modes of image-making: one shaped by memory, touch, cultural context and responsibility, and another shaped by calculation, repetition and prediction. My interest in this work comes from my engagement with Warli visual culture and its relationship with memory, community, materiality and contemporary adaptation. A cultural line is never only a visual mark. It can carry histories, relationships, rituals, observations and collective experience. Its meaning comes not only from how it looks, but from the world from which it emerges. Generative AI complicates this relationship. A machine can now reproduce rhythm, geometry, recognizable motifs and visual styles within seconds. But the ability to reproduce a form does not necessarily mean an ability to understand what that form carries. This question became the starting point of the artwork. The warmer side of the composition contains Warli-inspired figures and relational scenes within an earth-like surface. These are not copies of a specific traditional painting, nor are they presented as authentic community works. They are contemporary reinterpretations inspired by the broader visual qualities of Warli art: simplicity, repetition, interconnected figures, movement and relationships between people, animals and the environment. As the composition moves toward the digital side, the forms begin to break into grids, pixels, geometric fragments and synthetic color. The shift does not present technology simply as negative. I see AI as a creative possibility that can support experimentation and generate new visual directions. The tension lies instead in the difference between generation and inheritance. A system can generate a line. A human may approach that same line through research, lived experience, memory, cultural awareness, intention and responsibility. The hand at the center represents this human presence. It suggests making, choosing, directing and questioning. It also represents authorship. AI generated visual possibilities during the development of this work, but it did not independently determine the central question, the cultural framework, the relationship between the two visual worlds, or the meaning of the final composition. Those decisions came from me. I developed the concept, title, visual direction and intended meaning, and used generative AI as part of an iterative image-making process. Multiple versions were reviewed and rejected. Some felt too decorative, too symmetrical, too literal or too much like graphic design. I directed refinements toward a more tactile, restrained and conceptually meaningful result. The gradual transition between the two sides was especially important. I did not want the work to become a simple opposition between “human” and “machine.” Instead, the two visual systems begin to enter one another. Organic forms continue into the digital field, while digital structures interrupt the earthy surface. This reflects the reality of contemporary creative practice, where human and machine processes increasingly overlap. The title Who Owns the Line? is deliberately a question. Who owns a visual form that has developed collectively across generations? What happens when cultural imagery becomes part of global digital circulation? What responsibility does an artist have when working with inherited visual languages? And when AI can reproduce such forms almost instantly, where does authorship finally sit? I do not see AI as something that must simply be rejected. The more important question is how we use it, how transparent we are about the process, and how carefully we treat culturally rooted imagery. For this reason, the work is described as Warli-inspired rather than as traditional Warli art. AI is both a tool and part of the subject of the artwork. The final image emerged through human direction, conceptual framing, selection and repeated refinement. The central idea can be expressed simply: A machine can generate the line. It cannot inherit the memory behind it. The work does not attempt to give a final answer to the question of authorship. Instead, it leaves the human hand between two worlds—neither rejecting the machine nor disappearing into it. It directs, chooses, questions and remembers.