Ghosting the Machine
An AI Workshop by Sahej Rahal
Supported by the Shared Ecologies program from Shyama Foundation
The Participants and their Projects
Payal Arya
Payal creates site specific and immersive installations that people inhabit blurring the parameters of the room. She explores the concept of nonlinear time and notions of distance, position, and bodily tolerance, to rethink what it means to have agency.
Payal Arya graduated with a BA degree in Psychology and Sociology from Bombay University, 2014, BFA from Rachana Sansad, Bombay, 2013, MFA degree from Shiv Nadar University, Delhi, 2016. She currently is an Assistant Lecturer at Jindal Global University and teaches in the BFA department.
Her exhibitions include ‘When No one is Looking’, Kala Ghoda festival, Bombay, 2013 and her master’s degree show‘ At dusk the sky had turned Violet’, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, 2016. Group shows include ‘Minute per Image’, TIFA, Pune, 2017 collateral to the Pune Biennale, ‘Regimes of Truth’ at Gati Dance Forum, Delhi, 2018, ‘Saavdhaan: The Regimes of Truth’ Kalakar Theatre, Delhi, 2018, ‘The Future is Here’ Bajaj Bhavan, Mumbai, 2019, In search of new names” at Experimenter Viewing room, Kolkata, ‘Immerse’ group show by Carpe Arte in Mumbai, 2022. “Internalising a city” at VHC Gallery, Pune.
Sudhir Ambasana
Sudhir Ambasana is an architectural designer, digital artist and a researcher. He received his MA from Städelschule, in Frankfurt.
His position as an architect could briefly be understood by his interest in using movement to virtually stage subjective consciousness in digitally fabricated environments that pre-supposes critical reading. His work transgresses from the material property of space to the perceptive faculty of human cognition; bringing into concern the dialectical questions regarding mind-body, inside-outside, representation-real, shape-form, image-drawing, machine-human and fragmentation-integration.
The overall portfolio of work could be well situated in the contemporary culture of hyper mediated images and its possible cues into architecture design where the shift is in the making of representations – from drawings to images. He explores design procedures through the use of photogrammetry and other image processing tools to further visualize and design 2D/3D imagery, immersive VR environments and AR applications.
His work has been exhibited at the India Art Fair 2022 (New Delhi), Emami Art Gallery – (Kolkata, currently on-going), Terrain.Art (New Delhi), Nature-Morte (New Delhi) and Städelschule Rundgang (Frankfurt). His film – Scale as Such has been screened at Fringe Art Festival (Bath, UK), Harkat Studios (Bombay) and ArtBuzz Studios (New Delhi).
Sayak Shome
Sayak Shome, born on July 28, 1990, is an interdisciplinary artist from Durgapur, West Bengal, India. He has a BTech degree in Electronics and Communications engineering from the West Bengal University of Technology, India and an MFA degree from the University of Cincinnati, US, where he learned about interdisciplinary art practices/theories.
His work there has been part of several exhibitions or performances, in places such as the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, The Carnegie, Covington and the University of Georgia, Athens in the US, to name a few. He has also taught multiple Art and Filmmaking undergraduate courses in the US, before his student visa ran out. He likes exploring and thinking about the di/in-gestion of stimuli across the digital-real divide/multi(ap)plication.
He sometimes presents his observations, experiments or imaginations in the form of digital files, codes, objects, projections or installations. The idea of oceans(of data) being held in glasses(servers) amuses him. If someday all the digitals were to be made material, would it completely (land)fill up the planet, he wonders. When one becomes a flickering hologram, perpetually displaced across the digital real estate, where time is archived in such a way that existence is atemporal, how do they metamorphose?
Aditi Aggarwal
Aditi Aggarwal is a visual artist based out of Kaladham, Greater Noida.
She received her training in art from the University of Delhi.
In her works, she responds and archives her immediate surroundings consisting of objects and memories while attempting to capture the noise, speed, time, and duration of the urban experience, via mediums including Painting, Digital Photomontages and Alternative Photography Printing techniques.
She was the First Runner-Up for the BMW India X India Art Fair Commission – the Future is Born of Art 2022 – 23.
In the past, she has exhibited her works at Terrain. Art, Art Heritage Gallery, Art Centrix Space, Bikaner House, Experimenter Gallery as a part of the Indo-European Residency Project Kolkata 19, organised by the British Council, the Goethe-Institut, the Alliance Française in collaboration with CIMA and Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, amongst others.
She is also a founding member of Studio A 89, based out of Knowledge Park 2 Greater Noida – A studio that focuses on Analogue and Alternative mediums and approaches to photography.
Pahul Singh
Pahul Singh is a visual artist based in Rajasthan, India. She holds a BFA in Painting from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, and an MVA from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda. She is interested in translation, re-authorship, forms of displacements positioned in and around the book and its contemporary.
Vinit Dharia
Vinit is an Architect / Artist based in Frankfurt-Mumbai. He received his MA from Städelschule, prior to which he has worked as a Project Architect, Teaching and Research Assistant, Artist and an Assistant Curator in Mumbai. He received diplomas in Art, Theory, Criticism (Jnanapravaha, Mumbai), and Film Appreciation Studies (FTII, Pune) and B.ARCH from Mumbai University.
Vinit’s practice oscillates between artistic impulses engaging with ontological questions exploring form, space, time, architecture, image, figure, ground, etc and philosophical / poetic aspirations of investigating epistemological lenses that define varied modes of subjectivity, being, identity, perspectives and movement. Assuming a multi-disciplinary position that mediates through varied analog (text, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation) as well as digital (immersive VR worldbuilding, AR/XR applications, photogrammetry, computational / generative art) mediums and formats, his work seeks to construct apparatuses and narratives that examine closely and expose the structures / mechanisms of perception, cognition, consciousness, identification, language, translation, desire, embodiment, corporeality and other such ‘reality-constitutive components’ of a particular Subject(s)’ mode of Being or Navigation, in time and space. Oriented towards working with different ways or acts of representation, he is interested in an engagement with seemingly dialectical categories such as digital-analogue, representation-real, shape-form, image-drawing, machine-human, body-mind, object-subject, etc while simultaneously radically subverting them, he values/fancies occupying the gaps between such seemingly paradoxical positions. All gestures in his practice are principally driven by political motivations to chart and speculate deterministic and transgressive procedures / potentialities, towards radical emancipation, inclusivity, and solidarity.
Ghosting the Machine
A Shared Ecologies Microsite