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FutureFantastic & The BeFantastic Within Fellowship

The BeFantastic Within Fellowship has begun! BeFantastic Within is an online programme as part of FutureFantastic, fostering international collaborations, exploring AI technologies and creating provocative performance pieces amplified with creative AI. Selected participants have the chance to be awarded funding to develop and present the piece to an audience at FutureFantastic, an AI-Art festival in Bengaluru (India) in March 2023.

The BeFantastic Within Fellowship enables artistic development, creative exchange and collaboration between emerging and established visual and performing artists from around the world, focussing on ideas around interconnectedness, climate emergency and the role of art and digital innovation. It 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 now able to reveal our 25 amazing Fellows…

BeFantastic Within Fellows 2022

Aashna Arora

New media performance and installation artist

Mônica Hirano

Artist, curator, art producer and costume designer

David McFarlane

Musician, facilitator and creative technologist

Gaurav Singh Nijjer

Theatre-maker, creative technologist and arts manager

Irini Kalaitzidi

Dance artist, researcher and educator

Tiz Creel

Artist

Tanya Saxena

Practitioner of the traditional Indian art form of Bharatanatyam

Keerthi Kumar

Indian contemporary dance and Bharatanatyam artiste

Akhshay Gandhi

Dr. Richard Ramchurn

Filmmaker and researcher

Pritha Kundu

Multidisciplinary artist and researcher

Pratyay Raha

Composer, voice artist and poet

Fabian Raith

Artist

Tiny Domingos

Visual artist and researcher

Bruce Gilchrist

Artist and co-founder of the artist group London Fieldworks

Blessin Varkey

Theatre artist and technologist

Ranji David

Theatre director and trainer

Aslı Dinç

Multidisciplinary artist & researcher

Sayli Kulkarni

Contemporary Movement Artist

Tim Brunsden

Film and video maker

Tajinder Singh

Artist working in Animation, Installation, Sounds, and text

Malavika PC

visual artist & a performer

Jaime Jackson

Digital and relational artist

Papia Chakraborty

Contemporary dancer

BeFantastic Within Winning Entries

BeFantastic and FutureEverything are proud to announce the BeFantastic Within 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 in Bengaluru, as part of the British Council India/UK Together Season of Culture.

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.

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.

What is FutureFantastic?

FutureFantastic is a festival conceptualized by Jaaga’s BeFantastic (India), in association with FutureEverything. It hopes to communicate the urgency of the climate emergency by leveraging the novelty and, therefore, the public fascination of artwork that is created in collaboration with Artificial Intelligence. It is the outcome of a series of international fellowships fostering creative exchange and collaboration 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. In its curation, it hopes to further the discourse around climate consciousness while simultaneously informing its audiences of the possibilities augmented and artificial intelligences have to offer. FutureFantastic will also feature artists and collectives whose practices have been pushing the boundaries of TechArt in recent years. Complementing the exhibition of such artworks, would be various kinds of programmes including dialog sessions and workshops with experts in the domain, that might holistically communicate different aspects of the climate emergency to diverse audiences while proliferating a certain degree of technological literacy.

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Open call for the BeFantastic Within fellowship (CLOSED)

An open call out for artists, performers, creative technologists, filmmakers and photographers interested in incorporating Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning technologies into their practice
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The FutureFantastic festival and its programming is supported by the British Council.