Thanks 2024!
Hello friends and co-conspirators!
As we close out 2024, we are extremely hopeful for the coming year and what it has in store for Ajaibghar! But, we can’t do this without acknowledging the bounty that was 2024.
As always, none of this would be possible without our collaborators, well-wishers, clients and community!
Here are some highlights:
lab59
We started 2024 with an exciting pop-up space in Udaipur called lab59!
While the space was held together with a tape and a prayer, it offered Nanditi, Agat and Computational Mama some time and winter sun together to test our audacious ideas of running an open community space, lab, and residency space all rolled into one.
We had jam sessions, open days, and dosa days! Agat made paper from Banana stems, and we drifted through the city understanding typefaces with Matra Type.
Learn more about our intentions here.
Commissions
A Room of Our Own
This year, we also completed a poignant project for filmmakers Bina Paul, Reena Mohan, and Surabhi Sharma, A Room of Our Own.
A Room of our Own is a memory project led by Bina Paul, Reena Mohan, and Surabhi Sharma with the participation of women graduates of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune.
By excavating personal memories, documenting oral histories and re-presenting photographs from private collections that capture our time as students, we foreground a collective gendered experience that seeks to overturn conventional histories of cinema. While memory is notoriously non-objective and can slip into nostalgia, we hope to use personal memory to interrogate the nation-building vision of a young country that recognized cinema as part of its cultural landscape and built an institute to train film professionals as early as 1960.
The visitor is invited to go through the experience of encountering edited clips of online conversations, photographs from the past and short videos made in the present. We do not seek to make all the material visible and accessible at once; every pathway generated by the viewer is, to an extent, random and unique.
This is a work-in-progress. We hope to continue adding 20-25 women at regular intervals.
Here is a glimpse”:
Check out the project here: https://aroomofourown.in
Client: Bina Paul, Reena Mohan, and Surabhi Sharma (funded by the NYU Abu Dhabi)
Collaborators: Ajith Ranka, Anushka Trivedi
Workshop
We facilitated a wonderful workshop with Goethe Delhi on the city and AI. Aligned with our work on city drifting and last year’s blob labs, we facilitated a 2-day workshop on AI and speculative futures of Delhi.
We explored the creative potential of AI tools to craft speculative audio-visual cityscapes. In this immersive experience, participants drifting through the city to gather sights and sounds. These are combined with AI processing tools to build imaginative audio and visual landscapes.
Client: Goethe Max Mueller Delhi (Ulla Wester and Priyam Gupta)
Collaborator: Sameera Mudgal
Performances
While we didn’t actively have any code.drift workshops this year, we were fortunate that the code.drift alumni were able to perform at two great venues this year! This movement has been invigorating and we have a lot more code.drift stuff planned for the coming year!
September 13, 2024 | code.drift stunt night @ Goethe Institut New Delhi w/ W.I.P Labs
December 6, 2024 | code.drift stunt night @ Indian Music Experience Museum, Bengaluru w/ BLR Hubba (W.I.P alt.fest)
Features
Ajaibghar was featured in the British Council’s Arts and Technologies in India: Reimagining the Future Report (full report is here)
Ajaibghar featured by Inc42 amongst 52 successful ventures founded by ex-Googlers
A Room Of Our Own featured by National Herald
code.drift featured at EyeMyth Media Arts Festival 2024
Other happenings
Nanditi gave a talk at Audio Developer Conference India 2024 at BIC - “Confluence of Code and Classical Music”
Computational Mama travelled to Switzerland thanks HEAD Genevé for inviting her to speak at Assembling Intelligence and ProHelvetia for supporting a research grant!
Nanditi performed with Khoparzi, Hasan Curiouswala, and Shreya as Generative Jugalbandi, an experimental jugalbandi of live-coded music, vocals & AI VJing at Alliance University’s AI & Society Conference 2024.
Computational Mama’s installation Mother Machines with Nanditi’s sound design, development by Jasan Waldura at Bangalore International Centre (BIC) and Alliance University as part of their AI & Society Conference 2024.
Look out for us in 2025!
After a wonderful talk at ADCXIndia 2024, we are part of the organising team of ADCxIndia 2025. Say hi, if you are attending, we highly recommend applying for the Diversity Grant.
Godrej Design Lab Fellowship - Ajaibghar is one of the recipients of the Godrej Design Lab Fellowship for 2025! We will be working on many exciting code.drift-y things throughout the year!
code.drift toolkit and playground - We are also building out a toolkit and playground for all those who want to play with creative coding. If you can contribute to this project please do - https://opencollective.com/codedrift
code.drift summer school - We are also planning an online summer school for those who would like to extend their practices with creative coding!
Get involved
DM us on IG or WhatsApp if you’d like to join the delightful code.drift community of artists, creators, and technologists.
Follow @ajaibghar.co on IG to keep track of upcoming workshops and performances.
Invite us for workshops/talks/performances/mentorships :)
Commission us for interesting web projects!
Contribute to code.drift, click the button below! 👇