Proof by palette
experiments exploring bias, structure, and form
by S. Gupta
Swati Gupta is a Massachusetts-based scientist, artist, and photographer. Driven by curiosity about hidden structures — in algorithms, markets, and the visual form — her work interrogates how bias shapes what we see and decide. In both research and art, she uses structure as a starting point to ask: what assumptions are baked in? Her paintings, photographs, and participatory projects explore this through oil, acrylic, pouring, and collective creation. Proof by Palette is her investigation into what art reveals that analysis alone cannot.
INevitability (2026)
This series examines inevitability through both emotional and mathematical lenses by deconstructing a saree, a symbol of tradition and femininity, and using it to color an (a,b)-lattice under strict constraints. As the system evolves, attempts to avoid monochromatic solutions to the equation ax + by = (a+b)z ultimately fail, revealing that certain outcomes cannot be prevented.
The work reflects on the collapse of control, suggesting that true freedom emerges only when inevitability is fully realized.
This is a (3,5) lattice, where each step towards the right increases the number by 3, and each step up by 5. The grid represents a coloring of numbers from 1-33, where the first cell on the top left is 33. No matter how the other numbers are colored, there is no way to avoid a monochromatic solution (x,y,z) to the equation: 3x+5y = 8z. A monochromatic solution is a set of three numbers - all colored with the saree, or none colored with the saree. The beautiful thing about this grid is that each solution to this equation will appear as a right-angled triangle: pick a cell, walk “k” steps to the right, and then “k” steps to the top. You can visually check the coloring I have done on the canvas successfully avoids monochromatic solutions upto 32, but at 33 it is inevitable that there will be such a solution.
PANORAMIA (2015-17)
Experiments with Panorama,
MIT Museum (2015-2017)
Panoramia grew from a question: what happens when you ask a technology to do something it wasn't designed for?
It is a series of explorations that reimagine the panorama feature of the iPhone. Instead of stitching landscape, Panoramia stitches through relative motion between the objects and the observer. The museum exhibit features an application where the observer can stitch their own face —using the motion of the camera. On the right you see a 9-feet photograph that stitched the wake of the boat from the New York Skyline to the Statue of Liberty.
It began as an experiment on a high-speed train, and grew into a collaboration with mentor Martin Demaine and the MIT Museum, and was hosted at the MIT Museum in 2015-17.
Jiyo Re Laado (2014)
Interactive Street Art
Dilli Haat, Delhi (2014),
Media Lab, MIT, Cambridge (2014)
A participatory painting project hosted at Dilli Haat in New Delhi in 2014. We invited strangers to reflect on unconventional gender roles. Their brushstrokes accumulated into a collective canvas—mapping gender, freedom, and what it means to move through the world as a woman. In painting together, the abstract became visible: what we inherit, what we resist, what we question, and what we create when our hands move in shared space.