Dhvāni is a series of responsive, self-regulating, and autonomous installations driven by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning that advocates for the values of interconnectivity, codependence, network, and community with a decolonial approach. Dhvāni incorporates ritual and traditional practices from South Asia, e.g. temple bells, Buddhist Gongs, wind chimes, and Ghungroo, among others, to bring new perspectives into interactive media arts. The project emerges from an artistic research for a re-listening to and re-telling of South Asia’s listening cultures to the world in the contemporary moment of crisis, informing the AI-driven surveillance and controlled societies of today about the values of interconnectivity, community, and reciprocal ways of life, often found in the ritual practices of the Global South. The work aims to envision a geological equity, rendering the linear curves of Western-modernity-dominated sense of temporality a cyclical one by refocusing on memory, and rituals and redefining the local and traditional arts and indigenous cultural practices. This temporal mélange may help find answers to today’s crises, such as climate breakdown and global inequality. Dhvāni, in its exhibition, aims to create fertile, evolving and autonomous situations, which are relational, performative, and radically participatory, whereby the subjectivity of the audience is considered inclusively to encourage a reciprocal approach in a shared artistic experience through a network of traditional objects, such as temple bells or indigenous wind chimes. As a method, Dhvāni incorporates Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, building a neural-like network of bells in which various sizes and tunings are incorporated to create a collective sounding that responds to the presence of the audience through ambient sound sensors and is activated with a number of robotic arms driven by a custom-made Machine Learning model.
Supported by: Artists + Machine Intelligence Grant, Google Arts And Culture, and Google AI, New York, 2019 – 2020.
Exhibitions: Rewire Festival, Den Haag, September 2021, ISEA2023, Paris, House of Digital Art, Mauritius, 2024.
Premiere (prototype): EXPERIMENTA Arts & Sciences Biennale, Grenoble, February 2020.