BeFantastic Beyond

Collaboratively Create with AI & ML Technologies with a Focus on the Climate Emergency

BeFantastic Beyond brings together artists and creative technologists exploring AI technologies to create pieces of art amplified with creative AI.

This program enables artistic development, creative exchange and collaboration between emerging and seasoned artists and creative technologists from around the world, focussing on ideas around interconnectedness, climate emergency and the role of art and digital innovation. It seeks to push the boundaries of these new formats of work by bringing together the practitioners at the forefront of this innovation in India and the UK.

Winning Commissions

BeFantastic and FutureEverything are proud to announce the BeFantastic Beyond winning commissions! Drawing on their desire to address climate action, these creatively diverse teams submitted proposals for powerful, immersive and interactive artworks which will be presented at FutureFantastic Festival in Bengaluru, as part of the British Council India/UK Together Season of Culture.

Wood Wide Web

The Wood Wide Web is a hybrid interactive installation, which will be bringing ancient endangered trees from India and the UK to life through the use of skeletal tracking and AI. The sacred forests get personified and tell their stories, evoking empathy in humans across the globe to inspire more care for the planet.

Artists: Kanchan Joneja (India), Kristina Pulejkova (UK), Anupam Mahajan (India), Cameron Naylor (UK)

Give me a Sign

Give Me a Sign is an interactive installation, where machine learning and hand gestures from Indian dance ‘mudras’, are used to unlock stories, concerns, hopes and predictions about the living world and our changing planet through a speculative child-like AI called Shunya.

Artists: Diane Edwards(UK) , Upasana Nattoji Roy (India)

Poetics of Garbage

Based on an interrelation of body, text and ‘predictive’ technology, this project will reflexively produce a commentary on the human-garbage relationship

Artists: Aashna Arora (India), Bruce Gilchrist (UK), Thaniya Kanaka Mahalakshmi (India), Chaitali Kulkarni (India)

FAQ’s

What is FutureFantastic?

FutureFantastic is an ambitious festival conceptualized by Jaaga’s BeFantastic (India), in association with FutureEverything (UK), scheduled for March 2023 in Bangalore, India. The festival and its programming is supported by the British Council.

FutureFantastic hopes to communicate the urgency of the climate emergency by leveraging the novelty and, therefore, the public fascination of artwork that is created in collaboration with Artificial Intelligence. It is the outcome of a series of international fellowships fostering creative exchange and collaboration between emerging and seasoned artists and technologists from around the world, each focusing on the thematic focus of climate action, through different forms of artistic practice like interactive installations and performances. In its curation, it hopes to further the discourse around climate consciousness while simultaneously informing its audiences of the possibilities augmented and artificial intelligences have to offer. FutureFantastic will also feature artists and collectives whose practices have been pushing the boundaries of TechArt in recent years. Complementing the exhibition of such artworks, would be various kinds of programmes including dialog sessions and workshops with experts in the domain, that might holistically communicate different aspects of the climate emergency to diverse audiences while proliferating a certain degree of technological literacy.

What is BeFantastic Beyond?

BeFantastic Beyond proposes to bring together artists and creative technologists exploring AI technologies to create pieces of art amplified with creative AI.

Conceptual Brief:

It has been noted that with the strides made in technology in the last few centuries, humanity has compounded into a geophysical force, with our activities influencing topographies, evolutionary pressures and most notably, the climate. Within a century of unprecedented technological advancements and urbanization, it would seem humanity has fatally wounded the planet that sustains it. A multiplicity of intelligences is required to comprehend our path forward. The phenomenal growth of Artificial Intelligence by the side of the climate emergency reveals a possibility of offsetting the scope of damage perpetuated by the Industrial Revolution and its discontents. The question remains to be that of harnessing all possible neural networks to contemplate the crisis.

What are the components of BeFantastic Beyond?

BeFantastic Beyond has three components: CoLab, Dialog & Showcase.

CoLab

> Networking Sessions (30th Aug & 6th Sep 2022):

All selected participants will be invited to attend online Networking Sessions with selected international peers. Portfolios of all selected participants will be made available to each other prior to the Networking Session.

Participants will be encouraged to commit to groups (between 3-5 members each) and formulate a proposal to apply for a production grant towards showcasing an artwork at the FutureFantastic Festival, in Bengaluru March 2023.These sessions are to enable participants to find potential collaborators (both organisations as well as individuals) to draft a proposal with.

> Clinics & Check-ins (Nov 2022-Feb 2023):

Only groups representing successful proposals will go on to attend the clinics and check-ins to work towards the FutureFantastic Festival in March 2023.

Proposals will be chosen based on the strength of its idea, incorporation of AI & ML skills, responses to the curatorial thematic of climate emergency and the commitment toward the medium (AI + Art).

Dialog

Participants will attend a series of public dialogues by international experts to debate and discuss the nascent field of AI and art, with the aspiring practitioners and general audiences.

Click here to watch previous Dialogs.

Showcase

> The FutureFantastic Festival (23rd-26th March 2023)

A culmination of the program that includes a physical showcasing of the works developed by the commissioned groups.

To impress the curatorial theme of the climate crisis and engage diverse global and local audiences in new and experimental forms of TechArt, the Showcase events are open to all participants, as well as the wider public.

Click here to explore previous Showcases.