RANI is a Room for AlterNative Intelligences. As an expanding digital space, RANI houses research resources, curated dialogues and multi-modal sketches from ongoing processes of artistic research with a keen focus on alternatives to dominant modes of knowledge production.
Roshni Bhatia | Alistair Debling | Kiran Kumar
Concept Note
Where could children mess with deep machine learning? Where would indigenous technologies queer digital encounters? Across the disciplines of art, science, anthropology, philosophy and technology, we find countless examples of local, embodied and critical ways of knowing that rub up against globally and rationally dominant modes of knowledge production. Let’s provide a name and space for these counter currents in intelligence: RANI is a Room for AlterNative Intelligences. As an expanding digital space, RANI houses research resources, curated dialogues and multi-modal sketches from ongoing projects in artistic research, with a focus on alternative intelligences.
Practitioners from various disciplines are invited to co-habit RANI for a stipulated duration during which they share resources, stimulate dialogues and engage in individual and collaborative studio practices. These co-habitations intend to nurture a mutually supportive research environment that ruptures the cocoon of individual artistic residencies and moves us towards solidarity across artistic projects.
The inaugural prototype of RANI is a cumulation of three rooms:
‘Garden of Intelligent Delight’ grows out of feeding predictive machine learning to children’s drawings; hosting artist and art therapist Roshni Bhatia.
‘K(not) a Conversation’ draws from systems of Quipu knotting indigenous to Inka women to develop physical and virtual installations for social encounter; hosting media artist Thomas Heidtmann, technologist Ambika Joshi and material-textile designer Nayeli Vega Vargas.
‘Give me a Sign’ joins hand gestures from ancient Indian dance practices with Machine Learning to make an interactive storytelling tool; hosting composer Shayekh Mohammad Arif, tech-artist Diane Edwards, and anti-disciplinary-artist Upasana Nattoji Roy.
RANI, and its constituent rooms, can be accessed here via the holding room: https://hubs.mozilla.com/r3RSkv5/RANI
Bibliography, References and Tech Stack
- Tim Ingold, Redrawing Anthropology
- Stanley Diamond, In search of the Primitive – a critique of civilization
- Daniela Wolf and Kirsten Einfeldt, Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago
- David Bohm, Implicate Order
- Ruper Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance
- C K Raju, Eleven Pictures of Time
- TJ Demos, Against the Anthropocene
- Louis Althusser, Spontaneous Philosophy
- Francois Laurelle, Non Philosophy
- Agnes Denes, The Human Argument
- Alex Coles, Transdisciplinary Studio
- Shaun May, Rethinking Practice as Research and the Cognitive Turn
- Dalai Lama, Call for Revolution
- Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
- Ajit Mookherji and Madhu Khanna, Tantric Way & Yantra
- Kapila Vatsyayan, The Square and Circle of Indian Arts
- Dorceta E. Taylor, Women of Color, Environmental Justice, Ecofeminism
- Noël Sturgeon, Penguin Family Values: The Nature of Planetary Environmental Reproductive Justice
- Nalini Nayak, Development for Some is Violence for Others
- Alex Johnson, How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Ti
- me
- Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
- Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization is Not a Metaphor
- Andil Gosine, Non-White Reproduction and Same-Sex Eroticism: Queer Acts against Nature
- Daniel Heath Justice Qwo-Li and Deborah Miranda, Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature
- José Sebastian Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
- Rachel C. Lee, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies
- Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World
- Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
- Silvia Federici, Re-Enchanting the World
- Arundhati Roy, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy
- Andreas Pfeiffer, Creativity and Technology in the Age of AI
- Panagiotis Kosmas, Andri Ioannou & Panayiotis Zaphiris, Implementing Embodied learning in the Classroom: Effects on Children’s Memory and Language Skills.
- Marié-Heleen Coetzee, Embodied knowledge(s), Embodied Pedagogies and Performance
- Annemaree Lloyd & Michael Olsson, Losing the Art and Craft of Know-How: Capturing Vanishing Embodied Knowledge in the 21st Century.
- Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe
- Abiodun Alao, The Politics of Knowledge Production
- Steven Shaviro, Post-Ontological Geologians
- Sarah Kember, Animacies, Corporeal Politics, Worm, Web, DNA and More
- Arjan Dubbeling, Religion and Its Other
- Lynette Swan, Web Ecology
- Eiji Takemae, Buddhism and Futurology
- Vivek Dehejia, Let’s Face It: Global Biases in Economics Texts
- Ananda Mahto, Eclipse of the Penile State
- Madan R. Chanana and Vinaya K. Bhave, Co-What? Rethinking Collaboration Between Artists
BEFANTASTIC 
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