Smarter Digital Realities Exhibition

Smarter Digital Realities invited participants from Bangalore to reflect on digital change and its impact on urban life. Digital technology has found its way into every aspect of the city, changing how we live, work and communicate – transforming the way we relate to the world and each other. We are increasingly living through our devices, a reality exacerbated by the pandemic, when our interpersonal spaces have shrunk to fit the space of the digital interface.

The project comprised of a series of workshops, involving inputs from facilitators, and encouraged participants to reflect on their relationship with the urban and to frame how experiences of the city have increasingly been mediated by the digital – at scale, or for the individual.

Cities are provocative sites to imagine the ubiquitous role of technology, and themes such as the gig economy, the smart city, start-up culture, surveillance: these all form part of the material that participants are working with.

The residents have been encouraged to envision the city and its imbrications with the digital in a variety of ways, and have re-imagined their cities through writing, drawing, maps, dance, VR and film.

Smarter Digital Realities is a project conceived and conceptualised by Sandbox Collective in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan and curated by Padmini Ray Murray.

Curators note:

Our digital realities are now inevitabilities; either by desire or demand, no aspect of our urban existence is untouched by networked, data-driven technology. In this residency, I was keen for our artists to pause, reflect and create responses that explored their understandings and relationships with technology – be that as tool, medium, or context. The spectre of the smart city haunts some of the works: its aspirations challenged by works that engage thoughtfully with those, such as the marginalised and minorities, left behind by its illusory promises. While urban isolation has always been a feature of the modern city, its resonance has been amplified considerably by the conditions of the pandemic, and many of the works address how technology has both exacerbated and tempered this loneliness, through images, sound and film. Navigation, both algorithmically mediated and embodied, shapes some of works that grapple with the exigencies of what environments foist upon us, and how we endeavour to respond, challenge and subvert these systems. It has been a rich and rewarding experience to see these works grow and develop, and I hope your encounter with the works is much the same.

For more information, visit the Sandbox Collective Website.

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