TEAM
Blessin Varkey
New Delhi, India
Blessin Varkey is a software engineer who works with emerging technologies for Rapid Application Development. He has a passion for using technology to make a difference in the world and believes that it can be a powerful tool for social change. Blessin has co-authored 15+ articles and journals with the Association of Computing Machinery and is a member of ACM’s Special Interest Group - SIGACCESS. As a social innovator, his work was also recognized by the NASSCOM Foundation in 2015 for developing HOPE, a Kinect-based application for individuals with developmental disabilities and by Digital Empowerment Foundation in 2016. Blessin did his post-graduation studies in Artificial Intelligence and his graduation in Computer Science Engineering.
Blessin is also the Founder and Artistic Director of The Impro Company— a Delhi-based improvisational theatre company. Since 2015, he has been performing/directing improvisation and exploring applied improvisational theatre in education, special education, mental health, design thinking, leadership and with corporates in the United Kingdom, Jakarta, Uzbekistan and India. His impro theatre techniques and pedagogy are influenced by Keith Johnstone's 'Impro system'. As an actor & director, he has worked with various theatre, digital and improv groups.
For this project, Blessin will be developing the generative AI (text-generation using gpt3, text-to-image using StyleGAN/Disco Diffusion/ VQGAN, Python TTI, Pixel models etc) and will be co-designing & hosting the improv show.
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Ranji David
Bengaluru, India
Ranji is a trained Actor, Director and Theatre Trainer. A theatre practitioner for the last 22 years in India and outside India, he currently heads Organizational Theatre. He completed his training in Devised Theatre, Moving Body, and Theatre for Change from the London International School of Performing Arts (LISPA). Additionally he studied Clowning and Mindfulness at N2N, Emerson College, Essex, UK and Theatre for Social Change from the Dartington Center, UK. He is also a Certified Master Coach and Psychodrama Director from Veda-Drama, Germany.
He has performed in festivals across India and the world, including Edinburgh Fringe Theatre Festival, Scotland (Production: Bhagwaan Dhoondo), European Theatre Festival, Devon, UK (Production: Untold Stories), Indian Theatre Festival, London ( Production: Bhagwaan Dhoondo), Indian Theatre Festival, Theatre PurPur, Switzerland ( Production: Untold Stories), Indian Theatre Festival, The Atlier, Den Hauge, Netherlands ( Production: Untold Stories ), Indian Theatre Festival, The Barbican Theatre, Devon, UK ( Production: Bhagwaan Dhoondo). He has conducted workshops in the UK, Switzerland, Netherland, France, Germany, Italy, Finland, and Singapore. He has most recently launched “The Nothingness Workshop” which combines the principles of Zen, Tao, and Theatre in Italy and Finland. Ranji won the Global Leader for Diversity and Inclusion from the World HRD Congress in 2017, for his work in 16 countries.
For the ClimateProv project, Ranji will be part of the improvisational theatre design and production management.
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Marie-Eve Hildbrand
Lausanne, Switzerland
Born in 1978 in Switzerland, near Leman Lake. She is a filmmaker, cofounder of the Terrain Vague Collective. After shorts and length features both documentaries and fictions, she like to explore new forms of storytelling through various audio-visual media. Since a few years, she focuses her research on the depths of the intimate, between the singular and the universal.
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For the ClimateProv project, she is interested in the ideas of pushing boundaries for a hybrid event and she will execute the onscreen rendition of the performance.
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Gaurav Singh
Berlin, Germany
Gaurav Singh Nijjer (he/him) is a theatre-maker, creative technologist, improv theatre practictioner and arts manager from New Delhi, India. He's the General Manager at Kaivalya Plays, an Indian performing arts company.
As a theatre-maker, his artistic practice investigates live performance and audience-performer interactivity using technology and distanced composition. He brings his professional experience in marketing, technology and data to explore new ways of engaging audiences, in the theatre, at home and otherwise.
In 2020, he received the prestigious Chevening Fellowship from the UK Government to pursue a masters degree at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. In 2021, he received two grants under the C3: Codes, Creativity and Community program by Goethe-Institut and BeFantastic to create open-source community platforms for arts funding and arts education. In 2022, he moved to Berlin, Germany to undertake the German Chancellor Fellowship where he is conducting a 12-month arts research project on audiences for digital theatre and hybrid performances.
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In this project, he will be helping with the improvisational design of the project as well as the digital / hybrid structure bringing together media, technology and other production elements. Gaurav has previously worked on in-person and digital improvised theatre productions with Kaivalya Plays (India) and the Nursery Theatre (UK).
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Monica Hirano
Nice, France
Monica Hirano [b. 1992, Brazil/Germany] is an artist, curator and art producer. For the last 7 years, she has split her time between Egypt, India, Malaysia, Italy, Spain and France. In her curatorial practises, she seeks to work with values of diversity and LGBTQAIP+ movement, inclusion and human rights and HIV lives.
As an artist, Hirano uses the language of performance and installations, seeking deep self-research. She uses ancestry, heritage, family relations, roots of self esteem and childhood memory as themes of research.
For the ClimateProv project, she will be an associate member, giving support on project management; curatorial guidelines (as well as consultancy on the cohesion on the artistic argument); and intakes on stage art direction and costumes.
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David McFarlane
Manchester, United Kingdom
David McFarlanee is a musician, participatory artist and digital artist from Bolton, Manchester. Much of his practice is linked to sound and words, as well as interactivity, communication, and translation of information. His work has been featured as part of the Manchester Science Festival, Manchester International Festival, Art Assembly and Manchester Poetry Festival, including soundtracks, concert pieces, visual art installations and digital installations.
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David joins the Climateprov team as a musician, improvising melodies and sounds alongside the rest of the ensemble and joining
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Tajinder Dhami
London, United Kingdom
Tajinder is a graduate of Animation departments at the Royal College of Art London (Mphil), and The National Centre for Computer Animation, Bournemouth (M.A distinction). He Practises as an Artist-Animator and commercially as a Motion Graphic Designer.
HIs practice revolves around the term ‘Extensionism’. He uses Animation as an analogous medium and space for exploring extended modes of being through both psychological and technological states.. His work has been screened Internationally.
He has worked extensively with diverse communities in the Uk, including gathering migrant stories of India’s Independence, for exhibition at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol. He co-curated the South-West leg of the seminal Soho Road to the Punjab exhibition, plotting the emergence of Bhangra music in the UK, and completed a six month residency with GARAS/Artshape in Gloucester, creatively engaging with Asylum seekers/ Refugees to generate a series of exhibitions.
As a Motion Graphics Designer, he specialises In Online education, creating ongoing branding and Motion Graphics Design for the University of London,. As an animator he has been awarded a number of commissions including the NHS trust, and for maverick musicians Matthew Herbert, and Natty and the Rebel ship.
For this project, Tajinder will develop Animation, Motion Graphics, and design, for the screens and projected surfaces accompanying the performers.
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Tiz Creel
London, United Kingdom
Tiz Creel (1991) is an artist from Mexico City currently based in London. Her practice is influenced by play, spontaneity and games, as forms contingent on relations between people. Treating art as a method and not a learning subject led her to explore multiple methodologies. Her work often becomes prominent when the individual’s imagination transforms the artwork. The audience's role is not to discover but to create the meaning -whatever form it might take. People might challenge the work; that encounter is essential for the work sense itself. Tiz's work mirrors reality, but the reflected place is a world you can play with, a world that you can break. For Tiz, play is the practice of becoming, an ongoing exploration of the human experience. When we play, we engage fully with life and its contents to reach for the deepest truths of ordinary things and hopefully pursue higher respect and interest in the things around us.
In 2019 she completed an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University (London) as well as a undergraduate degree in Communications from Universidad Iberoamericana 2015 (Mexico City). She has exhibited in the UK in Manchester Contemporary with SEAGER (2021), Now Play This! (Ecologies spectrum, 2021): Arebyte (Homepage Art Fair, 2021); Division of Labour (Soft Display, 2020); Pitt Studio (Heavy Duty Paper, 2020); Residency Gallery (The Correspondence, 2020), Hot Air by Bad Art (Flower, 2021) and Camden People’s Theatre (Robots, 2019), as well as internationally in Torino, Italy in a residency for Generation A=Algorithmus by Goethe-Institut (2021), Correspondences on the EU’s Digital Futures & Polis180 (Germany, 2021), Next Level Festival! (Essen, 2021), One-Off Moving Image Festival 2021 / Wrong Biennale (Online, 2022), Arebyte On Screen at the Wrong (Online, 2021), Galerija Mocvara (Zagreb, 2019), NFT The Block Lisboa (Portugal, 2022), <Ctrl + Shift> (Toronto, 2020), Parsec (Bolognia, 2020), Linea Festival & Ampudia Centre for Art and Technology (Ruvo de Puglia, 2020), Museo Tamayo (Mexico City, 2019).
Tiz will contribute for creative production, game design, illustration, 3D models, p5.js, Unity, JS for the project.
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BeFantastic
Bangalore, India
BeFantastic is a techart platform that originated in Bangalore, India in 2017. It envisions a positive, sustainable future leveraging creative tech. It provides an international Fellowship program – CoLab, open public Dialogs on the state of technology and arts as well as a public showcasing festival. Its founding team comprises experienced architects, designers, artists and technologists with a track record in connecting their practice with participatory processes, private and public sector agencies. BeFantastic convenes and engages a vibrant international community of techart creators and experts to push the boundaries of technology and the arts.
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The Climateprov project was conceptualized during the BeFantastic Within Fellowship conducted by BeFantastic in collaboration with Future Everything. As primary partners, the BeFantastic team provides production and mentorship support, logistical and technical guidance as well as being a sounding board during the artistic development of the project.
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