Hello!

February 2016 was a big month for UnBox, with two significant events taking place: UnBox Caravan and EyeMyth Festival. Read all about both in this month’s newsletter!

UnBox Caravan 2016 took place February 1-13th in Ahmedabad at the National Institute of Design. The Caravan was a metaphor for the collective journey – a journey through which makers, artists, designers, developers, and technologists exchanged ideas and collaborated across disciplines and practices. Participants were asked to focus on the broad theme of “Digital Futures and Connected Communities”, through a malleable program structure of engagement, ideation, building, and sharing.

The Caravan began with an immersion phase in which participants explored Ahmedabad and engaged with both the local community and NID students to understand various traditions and approaches to making from an embedded perspective. The engagement as a group then shifted to sharing possibilities, the crafting of research plans, and constructing rough prototypes in collaboration with local Ahmedabad residents and students. Following this, an exhibition of work in progress was presented at the Conflictorium in the old city to engage with local communities and on the NID campus, prompting feedback and thoughts on further ideation going forward.

Following this, an exhibition and brief talk was presented on the NID campus, prompting feedback and thoughts on further ideation going forward.

Throughout the Caravan participants reflected and wrote on themes including the caravan past, present, and future, rethinking making (self, practice, city), and digital futures. You can find a few of these reflections on Medium, and the rest will be featured in our forthcoming Caravan publication!

The second edition of Eyemyth was held in Mumbai February 19-21st and was delivered in collaboration with the Japan Media Arts Festival – a prestigious annual media art festival which recognises creative achievements across the four categories of: art, entertainment, animation and manga.

This year, the festival was curated around the theme of representations of somatic impulses in media art. Events at the festival, which took place at cultural institutions throughout Mumbai, included: interactive audiovisual installations at Sitara Studio, live multimedia performances at the 150 year-old Edward ‘Talkie’ Cinema, award-winning film screenings from around the world and a workshop on analogue modular synthesisers at Dolby Labs.

Here are some first-person accounts of the experience from the Quicksand team:

“One of my highlights from the EyeMyth festival is galcid + Hisashi Saito’s performance. It was my first time seeing someone make analog music using a lot of electronics and an oscilloscope…I was totally in love with their music and amazed by what one can do with resistors, capacitors, and devices like such.” – Selvan

“The concept of experimental media becomes really interesting not when talking about creating something new and bizarre, but actually taking the familiar and turning it on its head.” – Palak

UnBox continues to evolve in new and exciting ways as we continue to bring the platform to different spaces. UnBox is, and always has been, a collaborative effort where participants help co-create the experience. We’d love to hear your ideas on where we can take UnBox next, so reach out to us and let’s start a conversation!