prithakay.art | ONLY A GAME

ONLY A GAME

Only a Game (?) is an immersive, locative, game/play-based experience at the intersection of movement arts, visual arts, pose detection, creative coding, pedagogy, and community engagement. AI X Performing art project funded by British Council during India/UK Together Program for showcase at India's first tech-art festival: FutureFantastic. Developed in collaboration with artists and creative technologists from UK, Germany, and Switzerland. A game where an AI responds to movement improvisations of the player to control the environment. Experiment aimed at game-based learning which conveys widely-applicable concepts of physics and dance through movement explorations.

This project aims to make artistic and scientific processes accessible and engaging across communities while expressing urgent social narratives. Through somatic and movement arts explorations, players can discover how powerful individual and collective embodied experiences can be for learning playfully while still being transformative; they co-create “emergent” tangible art-pieces that expresses these collective embodied experiences.

While it is a community engagement project that can be expanded to various topics, at present, Only A Game (?) aims to engage emotionally, culturally, and intellectually invested stakeholders in climate action - to foster conversations on the idea of how our actions change the environment around us.

Initially, the project was commissioned by the British Council for showcase at Future Fantastic Tech-Art Festival in India (March 2023) and developed through the BeFantastic Within Fellowship supported by Future Everything who sponsored the prototype showcase at HOME (Manchester) in February 2023 as a part of an artist development program.

A locative, live, interactive game experience where the participants use their body as the controller to affect changes in the game-world environment which degrades when no action is taken. In the current scenario, as carbon increases in the environment, the temperature rises and players can perform movements to reduce the emissions, thereby slowing the rise of temperature - before it reaches a tipping point. Victory condition: If players reach the net zero carbon, they will be presented with the next steps for recovery. Even though individual movements show an impact, only coordinated movement of multiple participants can bring a significant change. Accompanied by visuals, text, and sound inspired from real world data, the experience is designed to convey non-intuitive concepts underlying climate science, the urgency and reality of climate change, and the role of the individual and that of the collective in it.

The prototype was developed in collaboration with a team of visual artists, creative technologists, and movement artists across India and UK after rigorous research of process, narrative, user experience, and technology for a year during the fellowship and we are currently interested in completing the development through further funding.