M R Vishnuprasad is a poet and performance artist currently based in New Delhi. Political objects and material spirits equally become the subjects of his work and he draws ideas from the verbal and nonverbal networks of everyday ecologies. Since 2016, his text works and poetry performances have been shown in galleries, including Kochi Muziris Biennale, Survey Exhibition, Durbar Hall Art Centre, Cochin (2022); Durbar Hall Art Centre, Kerala Lalitha Kala Academi, Cochin (2022), Goethe Institute/Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi (2020 and 2019), KHOJ International Artists Association, New Delhi (2018); Italian Cultural Centre, New Delhi, India (2016).
Ignaz Schick (*1972) is a Berlin based sound/visual artist, composer/performer, and curator of festivals/events. He also performs as an instrumentalist on turntables, objects, live-electronics, alto saxophone & flutes. In his youth he studied the saxophone and since his teenage days performed in free jazz and avant rock bands. At the same time he was getting obsessed with multitrack tape machines, record players & effect boxes & he started experimenting with different electro-acoustic set-ups & sound making devices. After college he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich & worked for several years as an assistant for the contemporary composer Josef Anton Riedl. Since 1995 he lives & works in Berlin where he became an active and integral force of the so-called “Berlin Nouvelle Vague” and the blossoming “experimental” music scene. He has been also prolific as curator (Festival für Andere Musik, Erase & Reset, Time Shifts, TITO- The International Turntable Orchestra 2009 & 2019, Echtzeitmusiktage 2010, Flux Festival 2018, Fuchsfest 2021, Reflux Festival 2022, …) & runs the experimental music label Zarek.
Schick has toured worldwide solo or with various groups & ensembles & has collaborated with more than a hundred international sonic artists – amongst others with Mwata Bowden, Don Cherry, Douglas Ewart, Sven-Ake Johansson, Paul Lovens, Toshimaru Nakamura, Charlemagne Palestine, Andrea Parkins, Keith Rowe, Akira Sakata or Martin Tetréault. In parallel to his experimental music and performance practize he has been making sound installations, experimental objects, visual collages, text scores, concrete poetry, graphic scores and drawings. Since 2016 he has received several composition & research stipends [Cité des Arts Paris, Cultural Exchange Stipend for South-East-Asia, Villa Aurora Los Angeles & Kulturakademie Tarabya Istanbul, Goethe Institute Kolkata] for writing & producing new pieces and researching the local scenes and is currently traveling/touring India.
The Orca live coding session will be performed by heck (switzerland) as part of the hack4play week in Forplay Society. The Orca system will be presented and used for a live audio visual performance. Lighning sessions / Flashtalks will be merged into the programme!
Find more on our Call for Participation: https://md.ha.si/hack4play:CFP
The event is community-driven, non-commercial, un-conferenced and bar-camped; organized voluntary, there is no budget besides contributions: Everything just happens if someone is actually taking hands on it based on the love, joy and curiousity!
People donate time, skills, talent, knowledge and tools (and money); coming together and encourage each other to contribute. Lets have some days of Utopia \o/
All interesting beings are invited coming over to exchange, share, listen, learn, care, teach, create, break, discuss and develop interesting things and thoughts!
Find more on https://md.ha.si/hack4play
Calendar/Schedule of each events: https://md.ha.si/hack4play:cal
Some of the scheduling will be done on a rolling base (barcamp-style), so especially also look at the current proposals here:
https://md.ha.si/hack4play:CFP#Current-Proposals
As this is an event where everyone can contribute, we are still open for talks & presentations, workshops & hands-on-sessions, discussions & debates as well as installations and performances ...
We are especially interested in sessions that explore intersections
between technology, hacking & making, art, music, society and Utopia!
Find more on our Call for Participation: https://md.ha.si/hack4play:CFP
Alwin Weber; Soldering electronic instruments and noisemakers “CircuitCircle” – behind this synonym stands Dresden-based musician and media artist Alwin Weber. Participants in the workshop use soldering techniques to create various electronic instruments and noisemakers. Free Admission, all creatures welcome.
A photographic tracking of the intensely subtle body of the Japanese dance form of Butoh, performed by celebrated dancer and actor, Min Tanaka
Date: 28 – 31 January, 2023 Time: 11:00 AM – 8:00 PM Venue: Forplay Society l Opposite Kaycee Corporation l Bazar Road l Mattancherry
Manoj Parameswaran is a visual artist and photographer. His attempts to capture stories in stills, encompasses an expansive range of subjects – stories of real-life people, art, life, and culture.
Manoj’s interest in performing arts photography was shaped by his travels and journeys across India, where he spent long lengths of time observing and exploring the field of performing arts and artists from a diversity of disciplines and dimensions.
The past decade has Manoj patiently documenting and restoring the ancient works of Koodiyattam, Kerala’s traditional performance art which combines complex elements of dance, ritual and theatre; with scholar, performer and exponent, G. Venu of the performance laboratory, Natanakairali.
‘Dancing Min’ is Manoj’s most intimate body of work, where he spent time tracing and tracking the sensitive contours of the ancient Japanese dance form Butoh through the performance body of Min Tanaka.
Forplay is a non-commercial independent artist run performance space, residency and community driven experiment founded by Seljuk Rustum, that has existed since 2016 in Kochi. This variation in a society form is an autonomous extension for the celebration of the arts and a spontaneous action based union facilitated by artists and curators, Seljuk Rustum (Kochi), Andreas Ullrich (Dresden) & Vivek Chockalingam (Bangalore). This is a collaboration based on trust, sharing of resources, organizational abilities & common interests within the community; with Forplay Society, C. Rockefeller Center & Walkin Studios coming together with the support of their partners Goethe Institute, NetworkMediaArt, IfA, and the City Of Dresden. Forplay Society will open its doors on Dec 13th in Mattanchery, Kochi, Kerala; and we invite you to some months full of exhibitions, concerts, performances and workshops. The Forplay Society was partner of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in the time of the 2022 Biennale and organised together with the Biennale Foundation several artistic projects, including exhibitions, concerts and workshops at the Biennales ABC Art Room at Cabral Yard, Fort Kochi. Now Forplay Society is coming back for the actual edition of 6. Kochi Muziris Biennale.
You find us on Bazaar Road, OPP: Kaycee Corp. , Mattanchery, Fort Kochi, Kerala
Growing up in India, European landscape art, or landscapes modelled on the European vision of the scenic was a massive part of the popular visual culture around me. Screensavers, desktop backgrounds, and photo posters – all depicted natural landscapes that were unfamiliar in location, and yet at the same time, extremely familiar in concept. When I encountered the same landscape in real life, my immediate instinct was to turn the natural landscape into a background for an object that has become a universal tool in the photography trade; the seamless studio backdrop.
A response to the perceived and constructed relationships between the natural landscape and photographic image. If you’re… references several tropes and tools of photographic image making. The work looks at the ‘background’ and its ontology. The word ‘background’, here, applies to both the commercially available seamless photo backdrops (whose names are inspired by nature) as well as the scenic landscapes amidst which the studio backdrop is installed.
The history of image making, especially when it comes to creating landscape imagery, is linked to several concepts – the scenic; sublime; exploration and so on. The framed landscape painting for instance served as an optical illusion that mimicked a window to the outside world. This work dwells on how these landscapes, or ideas of the scenic, become genericised in editorial and studio photography and have evolved over time to merely signify the scenic by a flat, seamless background.
Ajit Bhadoriya is an artist who works primarily with the camera lens. He explores themes of home, displacement, the tension between the urban and the rural divided by the fragile representation of nature, the longing for home, and landscapes in the making. His work is also concerned with technologies of navigating and visualizing the urban landscape through layers of language, cartography, and sensory representations. He is interested in documenting the smallest markers that alter the meaning of space and time.
Ajit did his Masters in Photography at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and at the University of Creative Arts, UK. He was awarded a Media Fellowship by the National Foundation for India and a Tierney Fellowship in Photography by the Tierney Foundation, New York. He has exhibited his work at festivals such as Photoville (New York, 2012), Angkor Photography Festival and Workshop (Siem Reap, 2012), Chobi Mela VII (Dhaka, 2013), Focus Photography Festival (Mumbai, 2015), Landskrona Foto: View India (Sweden, 2019) and Pingyao International Photography Festival (China, 2019).
For their first collaborative performance Echo. and Lami will present an electro acoustic set with improvised pieces.
Echo. is present in the live music scene of Kerala for the past 8 years. Apart from his solo explorations with guitar and vocals he has worked along with major bands like Metaphors, Arounds, Joker Blues, and Gowwli. Echo likes to create music that moves people and finds his influence in rock, folk and more.
Lami is a violinist, music composer from Kochi who works across multiple disciplines. Worked with the folk fusion band Pahiya, later shifting her attention towards production & design of sound. Her works are experimental, mostly genreless mixing electronic and acoustic instruments, vocals, samples, noises, ambiences & sounds from surroundings in her tracks.
