Digital Crafts

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Clients: Multiple | Role: Creative coding, Facilitation, Curation, rapid prototyping

2020 | Digikat

Digikat was a craft-focused "hackathon" I co-organized and participated in with Nien Siao. The series of events offered a convivial foray into the heritage of Ikat through the lens of creative coding. For three weeks, a group of creative coders, designers, and textile experts, convened to craft possible bridges between the two worlds. Each week, for a month, different speakers were invited to share their experience in working with textile artisans.

During this workshop I developed a digital tool that visualized the financial and creative decision making process behind designing Ikat textiles.

Other creative participants included: Praveen Sinha, Ajitesh Lokhande, Yatharth, Salil Parekh, Meilin Siao Bhatt, Meilin Siao Bhatt, Komal Jain, Mike CJ, Natasha Singh


Digikat 2020 project page

2020 | What If Saturdays: Future of Crafts

What If Saturdays is a series of events conceptualized by UNBOX and SPACE10 bringing together diverse experts to ideate on alternative futures.

For the intent of the session, crafts were defined as objects that are made by individuals and tell a story (a very simplified version of UNESCO's definition). This is a loose definition that allowed us to look beyond the idea of tradition that is often attached to crafts and artisanry (and remains an important part of it), to instead focus on their cultural significance across the ages: namely that the practice of crafts can be a means of expressing important stories for future generations, practical problem solving around daily needs, and experimenting with materials and other mediums to invent new processes.

The discussion was followed by a live demo by the VJ Cursorama who walked viewers through his approach to creating visuals in Touchdesigner around the theme of how the craft-er's gesture might get augmented by digital tools. The emoji visuals were provided by me using my PhotoSueding program.

Speakers :

Sumedha Garg, Nitin Bathla - Otherworlds Art

Subodh Jain - Insight Walk

Sahej Rahal - Multidisciplinary Artist

2019 | Museomix Delhi

Museomix is a global event that brings together storytellers and makers of all kinds to reinvent local museums by prototyping new ways of interacting with the exhibits.

The 2019 edition of Museomix in India was held at the Sanskriti Kendra Terracotta Museum. Teams were able to spend time in four carefully chosen rooms, each with their own unique artworks from different regions and traditions.

Museomix is a global makeathon I first heard about while working at nod-A in 2011. I've been wanting to run it since and was only able to do so thanks to the Unbox team's support. Please reach out if you'd like help in setting up your own!

2018 | Digital Reveries

A program created for artist Benedicte-Blanc-Fontenille inspired by her creative process. The program builds layer upon layer of colors and patterns pulled from her analog compositions to create an ever changing composition. As the program runs the artist only controls the choice of color used by the generated imprints. By travelling around the landscape emerging in real-time the artist chooses (with the computer mouse) which colors are drawn from photographs of the artworks saved in the program.

Digital Reveries footage
SEE THE GITHUB

2017 | Future Fiction x EYEMYTH Festival

Publication and workshops hosted at Eyemyth Festival on the topic of Future Fiction. Both formats explored how the introduction of new digital tools might influence storytelling, production, and the way we perceive our reality.

For the publication I collaborated with Eve Wolf to imagine a fictional "Craft Colony" which would have resulted from the Indian government wanting to centralise craft production to optimise and limit its environmental impact. From the project emerged ten fictional innovations, one half being the official augmented crafts produced by the colony, and the other half being the hacks and workarounds created by its inhabitants to compensate for their restricted living conditions .

The workshop hosted in partnership with S+art India, challenged the artists, programmers, and animators, to come together and explore possible applications of AR to bring to life street art. I planned, organized, and facilitated, with the support of two Quicksand creative coders who used Blippar, and / or Vuforia, to help the teams conceive, prototype, and produce installations from scratch, which were then exhibited on the last day of Eyemyth.

Future as Fiction Publication
AR Workshop footage

2015 | An (C)ode to Shibori

Exploring how the patterns created by traditional tie-dyeing techniques called Shibori could be digitized to create new, unique kimono designs. The project was created over a couple weeks for an design competition.

2014 | Windforming

An interactive device created to embed the unpredictability of the wind into your designs. Windforming is a student project I developed over two years, first at Tamabi Art University in Tokyo and then with its own electronics using Arduino as my graduation project at Art Center College of Design. The device espoused the values of open-source, creative coding, future of craft spaces I have long been drawn to.