C3: Codes, Creativity, Communities is a year-long program that welcomes participants from the fields of culture and technology to expand their imagination and creativity through collaborative engagements, toward cultural production and civil society concerns. 

With an opportunity to build on and contribute to open source-based knowledge repositories, it creates the space of artistic freedom to interact and work with like-minded individuals and collectives. 

C3 Grantee Projects:

16 Projects have received funding under this program to develop their projects. For the C3 Open House in October 2022, the projects have been categorized as follows:

EXPERIENCES 1

EXPERIENCES 2

LIBRARIES & ARCHIVES 1

LIBRARIES & ARCHIVES 2

ROUND 1 AWARDEES

Fly by Ear

Understanding and Implementing Game Design for People with a Visual Impairment.

Lead Investigator: Suhit Chiruthapudi

Group Members: Akshay Bharwani (Programming, Unity Developer), Radhapriya Gupta (Music), Suhit Chiruthapudi (Sound Design, Music, Programming), Anjali J R, C. Sangeeta , Ritu M

Fly By Ear is an audio based game, which is to be designed with the aim of exploring new possibilities in game design for people with a visual impairment. The functionality of the game uses three basic parameters of audio – volume, pan (location in the stereo field) and pitch information. The game involves a player who is flying through space, emitting a sound continuously, where the pitch of the sound is determined by how high or low the player is flying. If the player flies upwards, their pitch increases accordingly, and vice versa. Approaching sequentially from a distance, growing louder as they near the player, are tunnels which emit their own sound at a pitch relative to their own altitude. Additionally, each tunnel might be to the right or left of the player as well, and so their sound will play stronger through the right or left speaker/headphone respectively. The objective of the game is to fly towards and through such tunnels by matching their pitch and positioning them in front of the player before they pass by, in order to receive a ‘fuel boost’. The longer the flight, the more the points gained.

Project Link: https://flybyear.itch.io/fly-by-ear-03

The Restoration Toolbox

An open source platform to bring communities together to preserve their heritage in a participatory and secure way.

Lead Investigator: Aishwarya Tipnis

Group Members: Manan Goyal, Marsha Bradfield

Envisaged as the digital infrastructure that enables local communities, city authorities, NGOs and citizen groups, experts and practitioners to come together to preserve their own heritage through the following four verticals. The Technical Assistance, is a participatory platform that diverse connects stakeholders to collaboratively find a solution to a heritage building by raising queries, posting enquiries or comments which can be answered by the right people. The Resource Library is a co-created online technical resource hosting a materials library, manuals, videos resource map, assisting users through a search and use filter. Bottom-up campaign helps users self-organise to create a campaign to save a building through tools such as setting up meetings, content creation for campaign page, uploading videos, picture and creating a campaign using a wizard which can be further shared to social media and crowdfunding campaigns. Buildings at Risk Register is a co-created mapping tool that allows users to crowdsource information on buildings threatened by neglect or demolition, adding photos and information on to the map and cross link to create a campaign for saving it. This will help enable the link between citizens, city authorities and other interested individuals to take collective action for these buildings.

Project Link: www.therestorationtoolbox.com

The India Arts Funding Forum

An open-source community-led forum for Indian artists to discover successful funding proposals, receive feedback on their funding applications, find funding opportunities and contribute towards a transparent arts funding ecosystem in the country.

Lead Investigator: Gaurav Singh

Group Members: Gaurav Singh, Varoon P. Anand and Winnu Das

The India Arts Funding Forum seeks to address siloed knowledge, opaque networks and scattered information in the arts funding landscape of the country. With a community-led approach at its heart, it is envisioned as a digital portal accessible on the web and mobile with Indian artists across disciplines, locations and experience levels as its primary audience. On the forum, artists can: – Upload successful funding proposals – Consent to be contacted by other artists for feedback and guidance – Receive feedback on draft or unsuccessful funding proposals – Explore a real-time list of funding opportunities by theme, discipline and other filters – Create and engage in discussion threads about arts funding-related topics The forum relies on crowd-sourced materials (proposals, opportunities, threads) and peer-led activity (discussions, feedback, submissions) to open up knowledge, networks and information for artists.

Project Link: www.artsfunding.in

The Reading Room

The Reading Room is a platform for location-based participatory storytelling to create multiple readings of a city. It will provide tools for immersive transmedia storytelling including augmented reality-based storytelling.

Lead Investigator: Neeti Sivakumar

Group Members: Anushka Trivedi, George Panicker, Arindam Manna, Karen Haydock, Oshin Padhye, Ishwari Arambam, Shreya Pidikiti

A web platform that becomes the digital version of a public space. It will be co-constructed through participatory storytelling. There are three aspects to the project: The Stories The platform will showcase the stories in multiple mediums. While we believe most storytellers already have a story to tell, however, we intend to provide a set of questions and prompts so readers engage with their city and start conversations. Submissions can be in the form of text, photographs, video, sound recordings, animation, and 3D models. The categories for contribution include: Streets of the City; Invisible Labour; Childhood Memories; Conflict/Protest; Snippets of Daily Life; Within the Home The Platform There will be three ways to view the stories: an interactive map, location-based playlist, list of stories The Tool Our goals involve ensuring accessibility in some way to all demographics through transmedia storytelling (text to speech, video to sound recordings, etc.) and creating a multimedia platform to facilitate storytellers. The project will embark in phases: Collecting stories, Tool for Accessibility: Language, Medium and Devices (For example, feature phones), Tool for Multimedia: Drag/Drop Story Building with Templates, Augmented Reality-based Storytelling. The process is not linear and will consist of iterative prototyping while we work closely with our first set of storytellers.

Project Link: www.thereadingroom.online 

Delta Lives

Delta Lives is a multi-dimensional project where we build a participatory, interdisciplinary creative framework to address social and gender justice within marginalized, indigenous societies (chiefly occupying ecologically fragile ecosystems) whose cultural and occupational identities and practices are drowned by mainstream media narratives. During the C3 program, we are building an interactive web platform (specifically suited for use on low-cost mobile phones in poor bandwidth areas), connecting residents of the Sundarbans with global stakeholders, partners and other island/ecologically fragile communities through open source methodologies of engagement like community-sourced locative media narratives (multimodal) and infrastructural aids (facilitation to access and navigate digital/web spaces).

Lead Investigator: Barnamala Roy

Group Members: Barnamala Roy, Sarvesh Singh, Shreyans Iyer, Vinayak Sankeet, Pritha Kundu, Mihir Kathpalia, Anushka Trivedi, Neeti Sivakumar

Through Delta Lives, we are initiating an open source network of connection and collaboration between ecologically fragile societies and global partners and cultural investors. We aim to bring a narrative shift by portraying the people of island communities (starting from the Sundarbans) familiarly and humanely rather than exoticizing or othering them through mainstream media and Call to Action narratives. We facilitate the Sundarban locals to develop their own stories powerfully enough to convey their dreams and desires and find support and partnership globally for fulfilling them. We believe that fulfilment of dreams and desires is integral to achieving health and happiness, and healthy peoples create and maintain healthy ecosystems. Thus, we aspire to create a space for free expression, engagement and empowerment. By influencing global perception about the Sundarban communities through our interactive web platform (codesigned with community ethos), we aspire to have culturally invested stakeholders who find a resonance of their own problems (large global issues) within the micro-stories from the Sundarbans by engaging meaningfully with them. We exchange methodologies of website design/development and participatory engagement (conversations, workshops, performances, etc.) with our collaborators/stakeholders by documenting and coding the processes in tool kits and guides that can be readapted for other ecosystems (outside the Sundarbans). Similarly, we use and adapt toolkits, codes and software offered by our collaborators (currently, we are testing Canberra-based Non-profit, Treecreate’s toolkits of community engagement). We sustain a self-reflexive model, wherein we continuously test our processes and the web platform so that these are accessible to and by communities within and outside the Sundarbans.

The Colour App

The goal is to explore human relationships with colours, data, art, and how it can all come together in creative collaborations. Every 24 hours the user will get a choice of 1 of 3 colours. In the background the app will collect various data from the user – location, time, age, gender etc. We will use all possible data we can collect to create a digital composition every 24 hours.

Lead Investigator: Akanksha Vyas

Group Members: Akanksha Vyas, Rabeeha Adnan, Suhit Chiruthapudi, Mihir Kathpalia, Neeti Sivakumar, Catherin Schöberl

This project is investigating how much technology has given us in ways how we create, interact, and share, and how much it has taken away in terms of privacy. It is simultaneously exploring co-creation and ownership in digital art. Through the Color App, people can reevaluate their relationship with technology and decide their response to the use of their information. We are building an App where every 24 hours the user will get to choose 1 of 3 colours. We will consolidate this along with other information including location, time, sound-bites, gestures – basically everything we can legally collect. We will use this to create a multi-media digital composition and turn that into an NFT. With colour as the centre, we can layer the different dimensions of information and intertwine them across mediums to generate digital composition. The goal is not to find bizarre relationships and patterns hidden within it. We also think that access to data is not necessarily a bad thing. This interactivity through data, along with refined aesthetics should encourage the user to not only engage with the project but also be curious about the outcome. The project is under the GPL 3.0 Licence https://github.com/vyasakanksha/the-colour-app

Pooja is Calling

Raising awareness about digital frauds and scams through immersive experiences and music.

Lead Investigator: Hasan S.(creative technologist and educator)

Group Members: Radhapriya Gupta(Experimental composer and sound artist), Hasan S

Hasan came across a scam recently where you matched with a girl on a dating app and received a video call from her. She will be half-naked and will message you asking to do the same. Once you show yourself naked on the camera they record the video and blackmail the victim to transfer the money or go viral. This is just one example of countless digital frauds and scams people are facing every single day. We are proposing to create an open-source AI powered platform which allows you to experience such scams in a digital sandbox. At the end of the immersive experience you’ll receive guidelines about how to spot and avoid such scams. Also a catchy jingle that summarises one such scamming incident in a fun, memorable way. A contemporary take on a real ‘urban legend’ through storytelling+songwriting. 1. Transfer the format of the immersive experience to different scams and other awareness modules. 2. Invite collaborators and developers in the spirit of open source to co-create these experiences. 3. Build vernacular support for regional dialects to reach a bigger base. 4. Develop algorithmic frameworks to help automate the user flow and decision making process for the developers.

Project Link: poojaiscalling.com

Simulating Plant Evolution

We will create interactive simulations in which users explore how a virtual plant population evolves through the processes of natural or artificial selection.

Lead Investigator: Karen Haydock

Group Members: Anushka Trivedi and Neeti Sivakumar

A virtual population of about 10 plants of the same species will be shown over many generations. Each of the 10 plants will have some small variations from every other plant. Over many generations, the population will evolve differently, depending on which plants are used to seed each next generation. Evolution by natural selection will be simulated when different kinds of environmental changes are introduced by the software. For example, a virtual flood may wash away all plants except those that happen to have longer roots. If floods keep occurring, after many generations, a population of plants with mainly short roots may evolve to become a population of plants with longer roots. Evolution by artificial selection will be simulated when users interactively select plants to seed each subsequent generation. For example, if users select plants with larger leaves to be the parents of each subsequent generation, after many generations, the population may evolve to become a population in which most of the plants have larger leaves. Every time the simulation is run, the results will be different because it will depend on some random variables, as well as the particular selections the users may make. The objective is for users to explore evolution by interactively creating evolving artworks of abstract ‘plant’ populations.

Project Link: https://evolvingplants.itch.io/mustard

Threads

A digital archive of events with social significance.

Lead Investigator: Mihir Kathpalia

Group Members: Mihir Kathpalia, Rabeeha Adnan, Sujay Mukherjee, Guruvinayak Singh Budhwar

Threads is a digital platform archiving events important to civil society.The archives will be created by a group of collaborators in the medium of their choice including but not limited to video documentation, images, sound recording, comic strips, poetry, illustrations etc. The contents of the archive, to begin with, will be sourced solely by the collaborators. The content will be verified by cross-checking sources and referring to the original source when possible. We’re looking to cover events such as the Indian CAA protest 2019, the Indian migrant labourers’ crisis 2020, Indian farmers’ protest 2020 and instances of Islamophobia in India over the past two years, to name a few. The platform will consist of a public database and a web client to present said database. Anyone can view/download the database. The web client will serve to make the database accessible to non-tech savvy/everyday readers.

Project Link: https://mihirk98.github.io/threads/

Theatre via Streaming Technology (TST)

In recent years, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions for older people (aged 65+) in India have been increasingly focusing on leisure and educational activities, as opposed to healthcare assistance. This project aims at developing an easy-to-use Information and Communications Technology (ICT) platform to deliver cultural and educational content to older people via video streaming technology. This content will be provided through customized interfaces and will include events such as theatre plays, concerts and opera performances.

Lead Investigator: Sohini Basu

Group Members: Sohini Basu, Barnamala Roy

Experiments with online performances, that connects with remote audiences have emerged and become part of a new way of “doing theatre”. Borrowing from this idea, this project is conceived to find a remedy to problems hindering the participation of older people in theatres through the employment of ICTs. The main goal of the project, in fact, is to design and develop an easy-to-use, cross-device ICT platform to deliver videos of Bengali theatres and plays (to start with) via streaming technology that can be easily accessed by older people at home in Kolkata where an Internet connection is available. In its initial phase, the project is concerned with defining user requirements, which will be analyzed and implemented in the platform design and development activities. To this end, two questionnaires will be prepared and administered to selected groups of possible older users, in urban Kolkata, India who will volunteer to be involved in the project. The first questionnaire will aim at outlining a general user profile by collecting data about personal information, health conditions, education level, attitudes and cultural interests. The second one concerned users’ preferences in reference to the TST application graphical user interface (GUI). It will be administered jointly with mock-up images of the GUI.

ROUND 2 AWARDEES

M19 Initiative – O2 Repair Camps

A decentralized repair and reuse ecosystem for medical grade equipment, starting with oxygen concentrators in India

Lead Investigator: Richa Shrivastava

Group Members: Richa Shrivastava, Vaibhav Chhabra, Anool Mahidharia

India has entered 2022 with a surplus of broken medical equipment that is in urgent need of repair. Much of this equipment was imported during India’s punishing waves of COVID-19 transmission in 2020 and 2021. During this period, an estimated over 150,000 oxygen concentrators were deployed and recent reports suggest that a large number of machines are not operating. We are proposing a decentralized & open source repair ecosystem for medical grade equipment, starting with oxygen concentrators in India. Starting with communities in three states (Goa, Punjab, and Maharashtra) and in three stages to build local networks of skilled makers supporting local hospitals to maintain vital medical equipment, beginning with oxygen concentrators. Our initial research and repair data supported by the European Union shows reasons for broken oxygen concentrators – 80% physical damage due to transportation and shipping, 10% humidity-related issues due to zeolite, and 7% electronic-related issues. This project is not limited to oxygen concentrators but will help us create the first level of mapping of unorganised repair ecosystem in India and how can that be strengthened with open source knowledge, skilling and community interventions.

Project Link: https://makersasylum.com/m19-initiative/

India Arts Education Forum

An open-source, community-led platform that democratizes access to arts education and training in India.

Lead Investigator: Gaurav Singh

Group Members: Gaurav Singh, Varoon P. Anand, Kritika Dey

The Indian Arts Education Forum seeks to bring together information, resources and networks around arts education in one single place. Students can find up-to-date information about artistic courses, training and programs across artforms, locations, duration and commitment as well as a place to interact with arts professionals, course alumni, arts foundations and more for knowledge exchange, capacity building and collaborative approaches. Additionally, institutions and organizations offering training (both formal and informal) programs will be able to manage their institutional pages and publish updates as well as engage potential students through the platform. Foundations and arts institutions can also leverage this platform to administer scholarships and student support programs in their arts portfolios.

Project Link: www.artseducation.in

Climate Art Taskforce

The climate art taskforce is a global alliance of interdisciplinary digital artists against climate change. The open source platform has a focus on creating artworks that address a broad non-expert audience to create maximum awareness and action on climate change.

Lead Investigator: Alexander Doudkin

Group Members: Alexander Doudkin, Jannek Kroehl

Based on an open source platform, the climate art taskforce curates and publishes digital artworks & publications with the aim of making climate change accessible and approachable for a non-expert audience. With it’s open source concept the climate art taskforce aims to be inclusive towards all kinds of artists and art formats relating to climate change, everyone is welcome to contribute. So far, a first project outline has been established through a web-platform (www.climatearttaskforce.org) with an open-source code base, freely accessible for everyone (https://github.com/ikarosstudios/climatearttaskforce). The contributors should be able to directly contribute to this code base. The project initiators aim to proactively spread the platform throughout digital as well as physical curation formats such as live as well as online exhibitions, events and other awareness-creating campaigns. The aim is to find international artist to contribute to the project as well as bring the artworks to a broad audience to create a high awareness and impact.

Project Link: www.climateartcollection.com

MIXED SIGNALS noisy radios in silent archives

Creating an audio-visual web interface for discussing and collecting the history of radio in India as well as providing a platform to exchange further tutorials for sound equipment/technology (with a focus on the entanglement of Art and DIY practices).

Lead Investigator: Dina Boswank

Group Members: Dina Boswank & Hasan S

The accessibility to both historical narratives, its creative and open availability is a main issue. Old archival footage, sounds and pictures from the G.D. Naidu Museum (Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu), the place where India’s first and cheapest radio was invented, is meant to become the base to develop browsing categories for the website. The users will be able to navigate through images transformed by sound experiments and old letter conversations on an intuitive level. We want to create a shiftable experience leading to re-use of the proposed material in an art-tech understanding of it . To ensure a good repository of tutorials in the beginning it is planned to connect to the workshop materials of the Indian Sonic Research Organisation.

Project Link: https://mixedsignals.works

tektome.cc

tektome.cc is a participative repository of Traditional Ecological Knowledges which is designed to be a tool for climate action.

Lead Investigator: Jones Benny John

Group Members: Jones Benny John, Vinayak Sankeet, Pranav Radhesh, Aayush Wykes, Ishwari Arambam

Tektome.cc is a participative contribution platform and public forum that hopes to represent traditional knowledge systems from within the communities they originate from. It hopes to incentivise knowledge sharing by predicating it on the availability of funds that would be mobilized through various forms of fundraising. Articles would be read-only with the provision to append/edit subject to a majority consensus from internal stakeholders that would represent the cultural origins of the knowledge in question. Membership of potential contributors would be subject to invitation from or approval by existing members of tektome.cc who would be initially onboarded through partnerships with relevant organizations working with indigenous communities and/or climate action initiatives from around the globe. While the repository would not easily lend itself to further editing following the acceptance of articles, through an automated electoral process that would be facilitated via blockchain, each article would have an adjoining message board to enable discussions around each subject, and a general forum where members of the community and the general public can discuss and collectively mould potential conversations on the platform.

Whale Tales

An immersive audio visual narrative experience highlighting carbon sequestration of whales through empathetic game play, using real life whales as main characters. The online and physical artefacts are interconnected with audio visual pieces, choice based games and augmented reality experiences.

Lead Investigator: Uma Khardekar

Group Members: Uma Khardekar, Sayak Shome, Arnab Chakravarty, Padmanabhan J, Nikita Sarkar

Today the whole world is connected through technology creating stronger connections between people across the world. And changing the way we interact with others. As humans, we always relate to the true stories of individuals or the stories of animals. Within this connected world, we now have opportunities to make the same connections between people and individual animals. Other than wildlife enthusiasts, most people simply read about climate change, whaling, epidemics or loss of habitat thousands of miles away from where it is actually happening. They react with sadness, but rarely stay actively engaged or understand what is in their power to impact. We have also grown weary of hearing about what is wrong and the seeming hopelessness of the situation. The prevailing pitch to get support tends to be the most negative, generate the most pity, and prick your conscience into opening pockets to donate. With this project we look at changing this negative perspective through the use of interactive games and education that bring forth already existing data/stories on real animals, specifically whales. The conscious intention of focusing on whales was due to a recent report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where it stated that protecting whales could be one of the most effective ways of combating climate change. Whales help to mitigate climate change by capturing and storing carbon which is the most significant climate change-causing greenhouse gas. Through our project we intend to spark the imagination and energy of people in the same way that the movie ‘Free Willy’ did for Keiko (star whale of the movie). We want our artefacts to make a lasting impression and celebrate the lives of these magnificent animals.

Project Link: http://whalesforclimate.org/ 

About the C3 Program

C3: Codes, Creativity, Communities invites applications from artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers, coders, and creative cultural practitioners from all fields. The program aims to build on and contribute to existing open-source knowledge platforms and resources, extend existing communities, networks, platforms, and databases with a collaborative approach, and move towards innovation efficiently. 

C3 is developed with the basic understanding that there is already an existing network and community around it for every collaborative project, every open-source initiative, most operational and moving forward. The program aspires to become a bridge between these different communities and to catalyse collaborations within these communities themselves.

While communities are spread globally and belong to diverse cultures and countries, technical language remains universal bridging all differences. Mastering such a language allows creatives to grow and to reach more people, thus furthering the reach of the program.

During this year-long engagement that commences upon their successful selection, participants would be able to take advantage of regular meet-ups, brainstorming sessions, workshops, and impulse sessions. The structure of these meetings would be adapted to the requirements of the cohort. 

The primary aim of this program is to bring together creators from across the regions of South Asia, Tehran and Germany, to: 

  • Understand and master the (un)written rules of open knowledge and digital communities
  • Explore and extend existing communities, networks, platforms, and databases to create active collaborations within cultural, academic, and technical spheres that are of common interest and deal with civil society
  • To work within open source to contribute to its larger ecosystem and at the same time develop locally relevant projects by using available resources, and contribute to  lowering the entry barrier for new participants

The program would enable participants to: 

  • Master digital tools and interact with professionals from different areas of interest
  • Develop ideas in small continuous steps through active networking and knowledge exchange
  • Explore and experiment in the true sense of its spirit without the  pressure to “complete” a project as C3 defines success more in terms of progress and contribution to the field rather than the commonly encountered linear manner with a predefined “result”

Requirements:

  • A basic understanding in all three components: tech, arts, and societies. Each participant would have core expertise in one of these fields but should be familiar with the two other domains
  • A desire to volunteer and contribute a part of their own work, under a suitable open source license 
  • Contribute at least one personal project that is developed during the program with co-participants 
  • Allocate approximately 30 hours of their time to attend the different sessions organised during the year 

Methodology: 

  • Participants are expected to attend the carefully crafted and curated meet ups organised under this program 
  • After three sessions, participants could seek collaboration partners from within  the cohort in order to develop proposals
  • Only applications for projects that fall within a general premise of the project would be considered 
  • A first pitch and feedback session would be organised in mid November 2020 for collaborative project ideas 
  • Proposals could request project support grants in order to develop the project. A grant of a maximum of €2000 would be allocated per successful project proposal based on submitted budgets in the proposal.
  • Successful applications would proceed to develop the work
  • There will be a second pitch session in March 2022, for ideas developed after November 2021 
  • It is not obligatory to develop a project, participants can also be part of C3 in order to contribute and exchange knowledge and networks, and be part of a creative community
  • At the end of this year-long engagement in August 2022 the Goethe-Institut would present the work created. The format of the presentation would depend on the restrictions prevalent at that time 
  • Depending on the projects developed, GI and ZKM may also invite members of the cohort to be part of other initiatives, for example conferences, exhibitions, concerts etc 
  •  It is also possible to integrate projects developed within this program into other large initiatives of the Goethe-Institut and ZKM. 

C3 focuses on the organic development of creative ideas and processes.  It intends to be a safe space for practitioners to collaborate, ideate and develop ventures. The program seeks to enable easy yet structured sharing of ideas by working with open-source principles, to lend itself to creating synergies across disciplines, and to build on existing projects without reinventing the wheel.C3: Codes, Creativity, Communities is initiated by Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai and Zentrum für Kunst und Medien ZKM, Karlsruhe, and further developed in collaboration with BeFantastic. 

Watch the Info Session know more: https://youtu.be/rKQBzM4FKoA

MEET OUR C3 COMMUNITY

FAQs

What is Open Source? 

When creators publish their work online with an open-source license, potential collaborators can build on or modify, systematically and always with proper credits. There are various kinds of licenses available, choice of license depends on the material being published and the author of the work. The program will guide participants in this regard as projects get developed.