Artist Profile: Nikhil Kumar
Nikhil Kumar (
@fullstack_human ) is a nondisciplinary artist often exploring sound, biological forms, and metaphysics. He’s fascinated by non-human scale and uses his art to explore subjects from unconventional perspectives, often synesthetically mixing media forms, art, and science. His career has spanned teaching, cooking, and building startups across a variety of industries. He is the co-founder of
@5x5_collective Collective, an artist in residence at
@blackbrickproject , and likes learning how to make the things he consumes.
On Made By Humans:
This sculpture began as a phrase, “Made by humans,” as the first line in a three part poem imagining a a memory passed to humans 500 years in the future.
Using custom-built software, I translated that text into DNA encoding, then used AI tools to predict its resulting protein structure. Finally, I worked with
@diego_anaya of Black Brick Project and
@en.zo_metal to sculpt metal by hand into that protein form.
Steel has been a medium for transferring human knowledge for millennia. DNA, perhaps the oldest technology to convey complex information in simple code, may give us the best chance of communicating with the future while being understood.
In the distant future, when humanity itself may be a memory, this piece functions as a time capsule written in the language of life
