Just a few years in the past, at an arts centre situated alongside San Francisco’s seafront, I got here throughout an interesting café-bar that was a museum, library, and residential to a basis established to “creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years”. Literature and concepts intersected with engineering at this eclectic hangout: a clock designed to final 10,000 years vied for ingenuity with the “Manual for Civilization”—a “crowd-curated” assortment of books thought-about important to the rebuilding of civilisation by their donors. The place evoked each awe and nervousness concerning the finish creeping nearer.

this.technology, an ongoing exhibition (December 2, 2023, to March 31, 2024) at Goa’s Sunaparanta Centre for the Arts, stirs comparable emotions. An expansive and seemingly divergent exhibition of code-based practices the place generative artwork impressed by and born of algorithms and expertise meets conventional options for saving our planet, it displays the occasions that we stay in.

In a world the place dizzying advances in expertise are in sharp distinction with the clamour for a back-to-the-basics hands-on ecological mannequin of residing, curator Srinivas Mangipudi attracts parallels between the artwork generated and impressed by each, threading them along with the idea of codes. The present explores this by numerous mediums, starting from poetic and creative expressions by generative code artwork installations to a land artwork poem that grows within the backyard and the collaborative architectural set up of a mud home, amongst others.

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The featured artists (“a mix of established, new and underrepresented voices,” says Mangipudi) are engaged in practices involving blockchain, synthetic intelligence (AI), and new media artwork in addition to in conventional practices like structure, drawing, efficiency, and apparently sufficient, the culinary. A biomedical engineer by schooling, Mangipudi has a background in programming arts and expertise; he additionally works with meals techniques and options that faucet into collective knowledge.

“This exhibition has come about in an effort to communicate and bring into dialogue this critical juncture in our contemporary history where we stand at a crossroads of various interdisciplinary exchanges seemingly connected by a delicate thread of our planetary boundaries and our survival,” he says.

Fittingly, the present opened with a tribute to Sol LeWitt, the originator of programming, machine and algorithmic processes in addition to a celebrated conceptual artist who created directions for wall drawings.

Performance artist Nikhil Chopra’s piece is a rendition in crayon—a vibrant linear band or a group of geometric strokes—of Sol LeWitt’s tutorial drawing #797. Perched on a ladder and wearing a white lycra bodysuit designed with strains that mix together with his drawing, Chopra “performs” acts like mendacity on the bottom, consuming an apple, consuming espresso.

“A lot of generative artists have taken inspiration from LeWitt’s work. This is probably the first Sol LeWitt piece in India,” says Mangipudi.

Breaking the code

‘The total number of black and white icons in a 32×32 grid is: 2¹⁰²⁴ or approx. 1.8 x 10³⁰⁸ possible icons (a billion is 10⁹). At a display rate of 100 icons per second (on a typical desktop computer), it will take only 1.36 years to display all variations of the first line of the grid. The second line takes an exponentially longer 5.85 billion years to complete.”

Having gladly left mathematics behind in school, I struggle to grasp the science behind John Simon Jr’s work, “Every Icon”. Alongside, a display screen shows a grid of clean white squares, a few of them turning black, like a nervous crossword puzzle that can’t make up its thoughts concerning the phrases it needs to cue.

Fortunately, Simon Jr’s walkthrough is a crash course in generative artwork for dummies; it begins with a bunch train that illustrates not solely the idea behind his piece however the very premise and nature of code-based artwork. Participants are given sheets of paper and requested to attract a grid of 5 dots as a framework for their very own artwork. The result’s an array of distinctive patterns, every with the identical skeletal base however vastly totally different in color and design.

“‘Every Icon’ is a mixture of computer programming and conceptual art, trying to understand possibilities. It shows that even when we use the most powerful technology, we can never see everything. Each choice we make is a creative decision about what we will see next,” says the New York-based artist who has levels in geology, earth and planetary science, superb artwork, and laptop artwork. Counted among the many pioneers of software program artwork, Simon Jr has his works displayed as a part of the everlasting collections of museums just like the Guggenheim, MOMA New York, SFMOMA, the LA County Museum of Art, and others.

 “John’s ‘Every Icon’ work is probably one of the most important pieces of programming conceptual art,” says Mangipudi, including that he’s the one one among the many artists at this.technology to have exhibited with LeWitt.

Interestingly, Simon Jr shares the reminiscence of that have as a realisation of the lack of software program artwork and the pc display screen to compete with the physicality and wealthy texture of conventional artwork. “An awakening happened as I stood in front of the LeWitt drawing and stared at the waxiness of the crayon and the roughness of the wall. All the algorithms, I realised, fell away in the moment of looking, when the sensations of the materials [took] over,” he says. This lends an additional edge to the truth that his digital paintings finds, for the primary time, a bodily illustration within the type of an interactive set up at Sunaparanta—a pixel grid with wood cubes for folks to make their very own icons understanding that these patterns, too, can be generated by the algorithm.

this.technology, celebrating the odd juncture of artwork and expertise, foregrounds the artistic coding practitioner. Among the latter is Anushka Trivedi, whose computational poems (to my eye, an algorithmic avatar of the poetry of E.E. Cummings) discover poetic potentialities by phrases, construction and motion. “Coding, even when it breaks, is beautiful,” says Trivedi.

Recipes for change

In stark distinction to the quickly altering digital patterns of code-based artworks is the unhurried tempo and physicality of the installations within the backyard of Sunaparanta. Made up of wildflowers from close by forests, the land artwork poem, “Wildflowers dream wild”, by poet and AI researcher Sasha Stiles, will develop at leisure at some stage in the exhibition, symbolic of the botanical codes that exist in nature.

Meanwhile, “Earth House” resembles a unusual indigenous house. This collaborative construction is the results of a workshop facilitated by architect Tallulah D’Silva, the place the age of contributors ranged from 5 to 75. Built utilizing solely moist mud—lateritic soil from the neighbouring plot of land—and water, with some cow dung, hay, and bamboo, it survived many challenges in its making, together with unseasonal rain.

D’Silva, who specialises in pure buildings, additionally engages communities in sustainable constructing practices. “To tackle climate change, we need to understand how indigenous communities built the way they did, and go back to that style of living,” she says, addressing a bunch seated on the garden across the cocoon-like construction. “Climate has always been changing; we’ve forgotten how to adapt.”

this.technology’s various programmes enable guests to maintain returning, discovering one thing new every time. On one of many days I used to be there, Sunaparanta’s courtyard and Café Bodega served as venues for the presentation of “Climate Recipes”, a challenge by Mangipudi in collaboration with Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi that collates the knowledge of indigenous ancestors, environmentalists, meals writers, activists, city planners, cooks, foragers, and others right into a “guidebook on the survival of our planet”. Contributors embrace Sachin Shetye, a spice farmer and proprietor of Savoi plantation; Paresh Shetgaonkar, founding father of a pure, cold-pressed virgin coconut oil enterprise; Goa’s most celebrated author, Damodar (“Bhai”) Mauzo; meals author Vikram Doctor; historian Fatima Gracias; poet and incapacity activist Salil Chaturvedi; Ayurvedic doctor and agro-forestry advisor, Maryanne Lobo, amongst others.

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Readings from Climate Recipes have been accompanied by appetisers and snacks from “ingredient driven and cuisine agnostic” Goan restaurant Edible Archives (additionally a contributor to the e book). Visitors bought to style chef Anumitra’s “wok-tossed kaate kanaga” (a tuber cultivated alongside the Konkan coast, Goa, and Kerala), “sweet and sour suran” (elephant yam), and Goan bimli (tree sorrel) pickle, amongst different fare.

this.technology is so huge and impressive in scope that it seems like a babushka doll of exhibitions. Sunaparanta’s rooms-within-rooms structure lends effectively to the labyrinth of reveals and accompanying occasions that embrace the geometry of Nasreen Mohammedi’s artwork, books from the Hongkong Photobook Dummy Award, Eva Hauschild’s digital prints titled “Hand Drawings”, charcoal murals depicting the within of a Goan casa by Siddharth Gosavi, Ryan Woodring’s 3D printed sweet, and extra. The exhibition might have included India’s wealthy folks artwork traditions with their intrinsic codes however maybe that’s materials worthy of a separate present.

Janhavi Acharekar is an creator, a curator, and inventive advisor.