Prayas Abhinav

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Prayas Abhinav teaches at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology and is a researcher at the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA). He has also participated in the exhibitions India Art Summit, by The Guild, Mumbai (2011); Myth Reality curated by Veerangana Solanki at The Guild, Mumbai (2010), Continuum Transfunctioner (2010) at exhibit320 in Delhi, Contested Space - Incursions (2010) at Gallery Seven Arts in Delhi and Astonishment of Being (2009) at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture in Kolkatta. He has presented his projects and proposals in the last few years at Periferry, Guwahati (2010), Exit Art, New York (2010), Futuresonic, Manchester (2009), Wintercamp, Amsterdam (2009), 48c: Public Art Ecology (2008), Khoj (2008), Urban Climate Camp, ISEA (2008), Sensory Urbanism, Glasgow (2008), First Monday, Chicago (2006), The Paris Accord (2006) and PSBT / Prasar Bharti (2006). In 2011, he curated and participated in a residency and exhibition project, 'On the Sidereal' at The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai.

Prayas navigates into art, technology and design worlds through projects and research. Across the last few years, he has been working on creating diverse public conversational spaces in urban settings and making objects that challenge our self-understanding and social conditioning. Even war has limits is a modified version of the Space Invaders game (a classic arcade game) in which the confrontational process part of our social situation plays out and becomes a semiotic conflict in which accusations and cross-accusations are made easily. The game can be played with a joystick. Additional cross-accusations can be typed with a keyboard. The tiger is not a tiger (but don't tell) looks at data-mining as a tactic used by marketers to mind-read consumer desires. The process of psychological and sociological processes being appropriated for desire-mapping, forecasting, and tightening the consumer noose is unraveled in the texts and in the functioning of the installation.