BeFantastic Within 2022

Collaboratively Learn & Perform with AI & ML Technologies with a Focus on the Climate Emergency.

BeFantastic Within is an online programme as part of FutureFantastic, fostering international collaborations, exploring AI technologies and creating provocative performance pieces amplified with creative AI. Selected participants have the chance to be awarded funding to develop and present the piece to an audience at FutureFantastic, an AI-Art festival in Bengaluru (India) in March 2023.

The BeFantastic Within Fellowship enables artistic development, creative exchange and collaboration between emerging and established visual and performing artists 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.

Meet the Fellows and Mentors

Winning Commissions

BeFantastic and FutureEverything are proud to announce the BeFantastic Within winning commissions! Drawing on their learnings through the mentorship scheme, their artistic talents, and 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.

We would like to thank everyone who submitted proposals. The high quality entries made it undoubtedly a difficult choice for the jury to select the final winning pieces.

Only A Game

A playful immersive installation with an interactive game experience where audiences can use their body movements to offset the gradual increase of global warming and co-create generative art in the process. The work conveys concepts underlying climate science, the urgency and reality of climate change, and the role of us as individuals and the power of working collectively.

Asthir gehrayee (Unstable depth)

Asthir gehrayee (Unstable depth) takes the form of an immersive, interactive, audiovisual digital art installation, inspired by the ocean and its more-than-human inhabitants. Using motion capture to detect audience movement, ‘Asthir gehrayee’ will immerse viewers in the beauty of the deep sea, and bring into their consciousness the scope of the threat to our oceans along with the steps that might be taken to counter this threat.

Artists: Pritha Kundu, Tiz Creel & Fabian Raith
With support from David McFarlane & Tanya Saxena

Artists: Monica Hirano, Sayli Kulkarni, David McFarlane, Jaime Jackson & Irini Kalaitzidi

Where do I come from? Where do I go?

Where do I come from? Where do I go?, an AI generated installation in the form of a waterfall abundant with garbage. Created from datasets generated by the performers documenting the equation between them and their garbage, this work will encourage us to address our consumption and the garbage we amass on a daily basis.

Artists: Malavika PC (India), Papia Chakraborty (India) and Asli Dinc (Germany)

Supporting Artists: Pritha Kundu (India)

ClimateProv: Focus on Climate Change through Improv Theatre and Generative AI

ClimateProv is an interactive 60 minute AI theatre performance that provokes conversations about the climate emergency. Human performers work together with an AI performer to improvise live theatrical scenes based upon suggestions and prompts related to climate change and its implications for humanity. Each performance of this show will be unique and different from the previous, due to its improvisational nature as well as the AI generating different prompts every time.

Artists: Blessin Varkey, Gaurav Singh, Ranji David & Tajinder Dhami With support from Monica Hirano & Tiz Creel

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 programms 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 Within?

BeFantastic Within proposes to bring together performing arts practitioners and creative technologists to explore AI technologies and create provocative performance pieces 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 Within?

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

CoLab

> Primer (16th May-3rd Jun 2022):

The Primer is an online space for a network of selected international peers to engage in collaborative learning and making in response to the curatorial provocation on the climate emergency.

A series of asynchronous self learning modules and simple exercises, will bolster the synchronous, facilitated, discursive sessions where global mentors and participants discuss and debate the content, and come together in small groups to understand each other’s backgrounds, skills and potential overlaps for collaborations.

Through the primer workshop, participants will be encouraged to commit to groups (between 3-5 members each) and formulate a proposal to apply for a mentored, deep-dive Masters module towards a showcasing at the FutureFantastic Festival, in Bengaluru March 2023.

> Master (3rd Aug 2022 – 20th Jan 2023):

Primer participants will apply for the Masters Program through collaborative group project proposals. Only groups representing successful proposals will be invited to attend the Masters sessions and work towards the FutureFantastic Festival in March 2023.

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

Mentors from India, UK, Germany and Switzerland will be on the jury to select groups they will mentor through the Master’s session. Mentors will work closely with their groups of Fellows to develop techart works worthy of showcasing at the Festival.

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

> Preview Online Showcase of Ideas (June 23rd)

At the end of the Primer we will organize a preview online ‘Showcase of ideas’ for an invited audience to convene around our experiments and explorations.

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

A culmination of the program that includes a physical showcasing of the performances developed by the selected groups through the mentored Master sessions.

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.