Illustrations of Indian Technology, 1830 🛺
I found Illustrations of Indian Zoology (1830–34), a book of hand-coloured plates made from drawings by Indian artists in Major-General Hardwicke's collection, digitised by the Internet Archive under a Public Domain Mark. I cropped 8 plates (pheasant, owl, bulbuls, flying squirrel, egrets, tortoise, lizard, fish) and trained a Recraft V4 Style on them. Then I used it to build a fictional archive: modern Indian life catalogued as wildlife. The auto-rickshaw grows bird legs, the pressure cooker becomes a tortoise, the e-scooter turns into an egret, and the delivery scooter is a bulbul with a cargo-box hump. 8 plates in total, each shown next to the archive original it grew out of.