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FutureFantastic Festival

FutureFantastic Festival, 2023

Conceptualized by Jaaga’s BeFantastic (India), in association with FutureEverything, FutureFantastic is an exciting and ambition new AI+Art festival as part of the British Council’s India Together UK Season of Culture, celebrating the remarkable bond between two countries and exploring our cultures, our shared planet and our relationship with digital technologies that will shape our future together.

Taking place in Bangalore March 2023, FutureFantastic festival is a public exhibition of artwork and installations created in collaboration with Artificial Intelligence that communicate the urgency of the climate emergency. It is the outcome of a series of international fellowships and collaborations between emerging and seasoned artists and technologists from around the world, each focusing on the thematic focus of climate action, through different forms of artistic practice like interactive installations and performances.

Complementing the festival, will be the BeFantastic dialog series and experts led workshops, that holistically communicate different aspects of the climate emergency while proliferating a certain degree of technological literacy.

You can visit the FutureFantastic online event link here —> https://futurefantastic.in

BeFantastic Within Fellowship & BeFantastic Beyond Programme

BeFantastic Within and BeFantastic Beyond are two online programmes as part of FutureFantastic, fostering international collaborations, exploring AI technologies and creating provocative performance pieces amplified with creative AI. Selected participants have been awarded funding to develop and present the piece to an audience at FutureFantastic festival.

These programmes aim to enable artistic development, creative exchange and collaboration between emerging and established visual and performing artists, focussing on ideas around interconnectedness, climate emergency and the role of art and digital innovation. They seeks to push the boundaries of these new formats of work by bringing together the practitioners at the forefront of this innovation in India and the UK.

After receiving many outstanding applications for the BeFantastic Within programme we’re able to reveal our 25 amazing Fellows…

BeFantastic Within Fellows 2022

BeFantastic Within Winning Entries

BeFantastic and FutureEverything are proud to announce the BeFantastic Within and BeFantastic Beyond winning installations! Drawing on their learnings through the mentorship scheme, their artistic talents, and their desire to address climate action, these creatively diverse teams submitted proposals for powerful, immersive and interactive installations which will be presented at FutureFantastic festival.

We would like to thank everyone who submitted proposals. The high quality entries made it undoubtedly a difficult choice for the jury to select the final winning pieces.

Here are the winners…

Only A Game (?)

Artists: Pritha Kundu, Tiz Creel & Fabian Raith
With support from David McFarlane, Tim Brunsden & Tanya Saxena

A playful immersive installation, ‘Only A Game (?)’ is an interactive game experience where audiences can use their body movements to offset the gradual increase of global warming and co-create generative art in the process. The work conveys concepts underlying climate science, the urgency and reality of climate change, and the role of us as individuals and the power of working collectively.



Asthir gehrayee (Unstable depth)

Artists: Monica Hirano, Sayli Kulkarni, David McFarlane, Jaime Jackson &  Irini Kalaitzidi

Asthir gehrayee (Unstable depth) takes the form of an immersive, interactive, audiovisual digital art installation, inspired by the ocean and its more-than-human inhabitants. Using motion capture to detect audience movement, ‘Asthir gehrayee’ will immerse viewers in the beauty of the deep sea, and bring into their consciousness the scope of the threat to our oceans along with the steps that might be taken to counter this threat.

Where do I come from? Where do I go?

Artists: Malavika PC, Papia Chakraborty & Asli Dinc
With support from Pritha Kundu

Where do I come from? Where do I go?, an AI generated installation in the form of a waterfall abundant with garbage. Created from datasets generated by the performers documenting the equation between them and their garbage, this work will encourage us to address our consumption and the garbage we amass on a daily basis.

ClimateProv

Blessin Varkey, Gaurav Singh, Ranji David & Tajinder Dhami
With support from Monica Hirano & Tiz Creel

ClimateProv is an interactive 60 minute AI theatre performance that provokes conversations about the climate emergency. Human performers work together with an AI performer to improvise live theatrical scenes based upon suggestions and prompts related to climate change and its implications for humanity. Each performance of this show will be unique and different from the previous, due to its improvisational nature as well as the AI generating different prompts every time.

BeFantastic Beyond Winning Entries

Wood Wide Web

Artists: Kanchan Joneja, Kristina Pulejkova
With support from Anupam Mahajan, Cameron Naylor

The Wood Wide Web is a hybrid interactive installation, which will be bringing ancient endangered trees from India and the UK to life through the use of skeletal tracking and AI. The sacred forests get personified and tell their stories, evoking empathy in humans across the globe to inspire more care for the planet.

Give me a Sign

Artists: Diane Edwards(UK) , Upasana Nattoji Roy (India)

Give Me a Sign is an interactive installation, where machine learning and hand gestures from Indian dance ‘mudras’, are used to unlock stories, concerns, hopes and predictions about the living world and our changing planet through a speculative child-like AI called Shunya. Give Me a Sign is an interactive installation, where machine learning and hand gestures from Indian dance ‘mudras’, are used to unlock stories, concerns, hopes and predictions about the living world and our changing planet through a speculative child-like AI called Shunya.

Poetics of Garbage

Artists: Aashna Arora, Bruce Gilchrist, Thaniya Kanaka Mahalakshmi, Chaitali Kulkarni

Based on an interrelation of body, text and ‘predictive’ technology, this project will reflexively produce a commentary on the human-garbage relationship.

Digital Dialogs

Are you curious about the role of the artist in the digital age? Throughout the course of the programme we’ll be sharing online Dialog sessions with Fellowship mentors and creative practitioners from around the globe.

Dialog #1 ‘Creating Techart: AI & Performance’

Media artist Jake Elwes, award winning choreographer Madhu Nataraj, and CyberRäube co-founder Björn Lengers come together in a creative exchange exploring how performance, art and technology can work together.

Dialog #2 ‘TechArt + Climate’

We spoke with Swiss video artist, curator and art theorist Ursula Biemann. Acknowledging the need to understand the distant implications of immediate actions within the climate narrative, we screened three of her video essays as part of an ongoing series of “Climate Conversations” intended to expand our understanding of the ongoing Climate Emergency.

Dialog #3 ‘Intelligence in The Age of AI’

Artificial intelligence systems are proving themselves to be progressively more capable of appearing “intelligent” in ways that might appear beyond the capacities of any individual human being. Is there now a need for humanity to reimagine intelligence or does intelligence signify deeper characteristics of what makes us human?

Watch our session with curator Adrian Notz, artist and researcher Anna Ridler and moderator Veeranganakumari Solanki as we explore in more detail.

The body has always been politicized, but it was not until more recently that we began to pay attention to how bodies could be used as political tools. Bodies, Body Politics, Machines explores this shift in thinking about the body and its relationship with technology. It looks at how these new relationships between humans and machines are changing our ideas about ourselves as human beings—and what this means for society at large.

Join the conversation with Sabine Himmelsbach & Fronte Vacuo.

Dialog #6: ‘Art.Science.Tech Encounters in the era of climate crisis’

Join guest speakers Curator and Head of Arts at CERN Monica Bello, Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences Dr. Mukund Thattai, and Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at University of Plymouth Mike Phillips, as they explore the intersection of deep science and the arts in an effort to expand horizons of thinking and making in era of Climate Change.

Other related news

The FutureFantastic festival and its programming is supported by the British Council. 

FutureFantastic has been conceptualized by Jaaga’s BeFantastic (India), in association with FutureEverything.