Dhvāni Original

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, rituals, and redefining the local and traditional arts, and the indigenous cultural practices. This temporal mélange may help in finding answers to the crises of today, 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 are considered in an inclusive manner 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 method, Dhvāni incorporates Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, building a neural-like network of bells in which various sizes and tunings are incorporated to creating a collective sounding that responds to the presence of the audience through ambient sound sensors and activated with a number of robotic arms driven by the AI. A pre-prototypical pilot installation from the project was exhibited and tested successfully at Experimenta Biennale Arts Sciences 2020, in which a frugally made robotic arm pulled a small, interconnected bell system driven by a PureData patch. From this pilot version supported by Google Artist and Machine Intelligence grant and AI Lab (EU), a full-fledged ML-powered installation with 4 arms was developed under further funding support from Creative Industries Fonds, The Netherlands, exhibited at the Rewire Festival 2021 in The Netherlands curated by iii, Den Haag.