Bangalore Showcase
Smarter Digital Realities (SDR), initiated by
Sandbox Collective in association with the
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, and curated by
Padmini Ray Murray encouraged a range of individuals to reflect on the relationship between technology and the city and how it transforms urban life and how it is lived.
SDR comprised of a series of on/offline workshops with input from facilitators/experts, encouraging participants from four
Asian cities -
Bangalore, Dhaka, Mumbai and
Pune, to reflect on their relationship with the urban and to frame how experiences of the city have increasingly been mediated by the digital - at scale, or for the individual.
We present the works of
nine of the
Bangalore cohort in an offline Exhibition.
The
works include:
- an evocative interactive narrative on ‘belonging’ in the city by Amulya B..
- a glitchy immersive sonic commentary on night-life in Bangalore by Teresa Braggs.
- a visual meditation on the role of balconies played during our enforced lockdown by Devika Sundar.
- a crowd-funded mosaic of Bangalore’s night skies seen through the VR lens by Namita.
- a mapping of how town planning favors the privileged by Sumanto Mondal.
- a collaborative project with waste pickers and manual scavengers that depicts the oppression by dominant castes despite Bangalore aspiring to be a modern techno-utopia by Varun Kurtkoti.
- a reflection on how the collision of contexts, both on and offline conjure new realities by Kruthika and Tejas AP.
- a dance performance that addresses our known and imagined understanding of the city by Talin Subbaraya.
Padmini Ray Murray says:
“The creative mind is endlessly inspired by the world in all its variety - but the abrupt impact of the pandemic forced artists and creative practitioners to find novelty and inspiration in the everyday monotony that lockdown enforced. Technology, of course, played a huge role in the experience of the pandemic: from working from home, to birthday parties on Zoom, to leveraging the power of social media for relief work, it was impossible to ignore how it shaped myriad aspects of pandemic life, especially in the metropolitan cities.
SDR was conducted mostly online, with artists in Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune and Dhaka contributing works that emerged from a few weeks of workshops, which brought them together in conversation with each other as well as with visiting speakers, all of whose practice engages with the urban in one form or the other. In the spirit of the project, the final works were showcased in an online environment (itself created by one of the residents, Anokhi Shah) and a series of online events marked the launch of the exhibition space.
However, given that the pandemic is currently less critical, we thought it would be wonderful to bring these works to a larger audience, in a more traditional exhibition format.''
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