unthinking
photography

Aarati Akkapeddi is a first-generation, Telugu-American, interdisciplinary artist, educator, and programmer interested in the poetics and politics of datasets. Their work touches on themes of intergenerational memory, loss, and diaspora.

Akkapeddi works with both personal and institutional archives to explore how identities and histories are shaped by different methods of collecting, preserving, and presenting data. They combine code, machine learning and analog techniques (photography, printmaking, & embossing), and often use family photographs and archival images as a source material, creating performative rituals of information extraction.