Akbar Padamsee is a contemporary painter from India renown for his surrealist style, and his work with the figure. In addition to painting Padamsee is a printmaker, sculptor, photographer, and film maker.
Akbar Padamsee was born in Mumbai, India in the year 1928. Padamsee attended the Sir J.J. School of Art.
One unique style of painting associated with Akbar Padamsee is discussed, the Metascape. These are mental landscapes which are discussed in further detail in this clip:
Price range information: Works range from $5,000 to $1 million. As a painter he uses watercolors, acrylics, and oils.
Below a link to the website of the artist:
Below a curator and the artist talk about a well known work he completed in 1952:
Padamsee is a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The artist has participated in the Venice Biennial multiple times.
What a unique style the artist has created. His metascapes are my favorite for the emotional content they give the viewer.
D
Diattaart Blog 
nannus Said:
on April 13, 2015 at 8:03 pm
Reminds me a little bit of the illustrations by Jaroslav Serych.
diattaart1 Said:
on May 4, 2015 at 1:19 pm
Thanks for your extra input. I hope my next trip to Europe we can view some shows together.
nannus Said:
on May 5, 2015 at 5:13 pm
A few more words about AI and what I think about it (I have adopted some of these views from my friend Kurt Ammon, however, my ideas about consciousness are my own and my views might differ from Kurt’s in some details):
• Personally, I think the Turing Test is not very useful. The ability of a program, e.g. a chat-bot, to fool a human user into believing it is a human, does not say much about its intelligence.
• I do not think that there really is AI yet. There is a research direction “AI” and there are systems coming out of that that are hyped to be “intelligent”, but they are not, in my opinion. Systems like SIRI are collections of special purpose algorithms and these are hand-programmed by people. These systems have no
• Intelligence and sentience are two different things. Some animals might have subjective experiences of some kind and an ability to suffer, without having much intelligence. The same might be true for artificial systems. There seems to be a connection between intelligence and sentience, but it is not clear what it is, although I think it has something to do with reflexivity. Reflexivity seems to be necessary to be intelligent and it seems to be necessary for consciousness as well. However, these are half-baked thoughts.
• In my opinion, in order to be intelligent, a system must be creative. This means the ability to move out of the scope of any formal description you can make about the system. Such a system cannot be described as an algorithm in the sense of a Turing-machine. One can think of this as the ability to compute functions that are not Turing-Computable. Such a system is not describable completely in terms of any finite set of fixed laws, because it can invent its way out of any such description. Such a system is able to extend itself. Such a system is fallible.
• AI (as a research paradigm) has failed to produce such systems. AI has not even tried to. They did not even see the problem. They assume that the so-called Church’s Thesis is correct and thus that everything you can do with a computer is what you can do with Turing machines. I think that Ammon has shown that this view is wrong. Artificial creative systems are possible. AI is trying to create intelligent algorithms, but that is not possible. AI has no clear concept of what intelligence is. They define it in the way of “doing things that humans do” etc. but there is no definition. AI got on the wrong track during the 1950s and 1960s already. Standard AI, in my view, is an example of pathological science in the sense of Kuhn.
• Note that my views of what intelligence is and what artificial intelligence that deserves this name would be are outsider’s views. I am not part of the AI research community and I am not part of the academic establishment of AI. Most AI people would probably regard my views as crazy or nonsensical. I am a total outsider there.
• That is why I am calling what I am doing “creativistic philosophy” rather than AI. It is philosophy rather than science because as long as science is understood as explaining systems in terms of laws, you have a problem when you are trying to describe systems for which every description is incomplete in principle. But that limited concept of science is part of the problem. If you look into cultural studies, the humanities etc. it is very clear that complete descriptions in terms of fixed laws are impossible. Human cultures develop historically. The AI community is ignoring that. It is trying to put psychology into the science-side of the science/humanities divide and that does not work because of the creative nature of human cognition.