Inspired by anthropologist Charles Gabriel Seligman’s research on dreams from various British colonies, this project presents a multimedia installation that blends virtual worlds with historical artifacts. Seligman, who used dream analysis to train colonial officials, discovered dreams that reflected a longing for freedom under oppressive rule.
Drawing on the Upanishads’ insights into dream metaphysics and the transformative themes in classical Indian texts, this artwork features four chapters in a virtual world/game/film format. The stories are controlled by touch-sensitive conductive threads woven into Jacquard loom punch card rolls. Discarded loom punch cards from a factory are painted and embroidered with conductive thread, transforming them into interactive controllers for digital characters. The virtual worlds interweave divine, semidivine, and human realms, driven by a nonlinear storytelling method.
In collaboration with Indian classical dancers and using Rokoko suits for motion capture, the characters’ movements embody a dance vocabulary, creating an immersive experience that merges tangible and digital realms, influencing emotional and cognitive responses.
Payal Ramchandani – Dancer
Bhagyalaksmi Guruvayur – Sound
Born in Bombay, India, Kinnari Saraiya is an artist, curator, researcher, writer and folk dancer based in Gateshead, UK. Many of the key aspects of her curatorial and research practice aligns with the transaltern, post-humanist thinking of the Global South. She is interested in a working methodology that creates intersectional structures and ecologies of interdependence; remembering that we are all parts in a complex moving whole weaving futuristic, ecological, de-colonial and feminist imaginaries.
Through the medium of digital worldbuilding, film and installation, she foregrounds biomechanical and transmedia storytelling as the original technology upon which cosmovisions were stored in ancient bodies, offering a path by which she creates and steps into other worlds. Her research into indigenous epistemology, animism and performance as praxis, manifests in motion captured performances, choreographed in collaboration with dancers of classical training, embodied by virtual characters. These characters inhabit worlds of Unreal Engine and come alive through mechanical controls sewn in paintings and textile works.
Website
www.kinnarisaraiya.com
Instagram
www.instagram.com/kinnarisaraiya
Inspired by anthropologist Charles Gabriel Seligman’s research on dreams from various British colonies, this project presents a multimedia installation that blends virtual worlds with historical artifacts. Seligman, who used dream analysis to train colonial officials, discovered dreams that reflected a longing for freedom under oppressive rule.
Drawing on the Upanishads’ insights into dream metaphysics and the transformative themes in classical Indian texts, this artwork features four chapters in a virtual world/game/film format. The stories are controlled by touch-sensitive conductive threads woven into Jacquard loom punch card rolls. Discarded loom punch cards from a factory are painted and embroidered with conductive thread, transforming them into interactive controllers for digital characters. The virtual worlds interweave divine, semidivine, and human realms, driven by a nonlinear storytelling method.
In collaboration with Indian classical dancers and using Rokoko suits for motion capture, the characters’ movements embody a dance vocabulary, creating an immersive experience that merges tangible and digital realms, influencing emotional and cognitive responses.
Payal Ramchandani – Dancer
Bhagyalaksmi Guruvayur – Sound
Born in Bombay, India, Kinnari Saraiya is an artist, curator, researcher, writer and folk dancer based in Gateshead, UK. Many of the key aspects of her curatorial and research practice aligns with the transaltern, post-humanist thinking of the Global South. She is interested in a working methodology that creates intersectional structures and ecologies of interdependence; remembering that we are all parts in a complex moving whole weaving futuristic, ecological, de-colonial and feminist imaginaries.
Through the medium of digital worldbuilding, film and installation, she foregrounds biomechanical and transmedia storytelling as the original technology upon which cosmovisions were stored in ancient bodies, offering a path by which she creates and steps into other worlds. Her research into indigenous epistemology, animism and performance as praxis, manifests in motion captured performances, choreographed in collaboration with dancers of classical training, embodied by virtual characters. These characters inhabit worlds of Unreal Engine and come alive through mechanical controls sewn in paintings and textile works.
Website
www.kinnarisaraiya.com
Instagram
www.instagram.com/kinnarisaraiya
