Embedded Files
Vivek (b. 1986, Abu Dhabi) is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher working at the intersection of immersive moving image, computational media, digital worldbuilding, devised performance, liquid cinema architectures, and speculative fiction. Trained initially in computational sciences, programming and cybernetics, Vivek later professionally studied film production and pursued a career as independent filmmaker and cinematographer. He remains an ardent student of the traditional lens based cinematographic medium, pondering deeply over its capacity for transfiguration while simultaneously exploring its confluences with algorithmic image synthesis, computationally configured virtual environments, and VR experiences of re-embodiment. His visual practice investigates the contrapuntal and transmodal encounters of optically acquired time-based media, computational 3D modeling, digitally rendered worlds of non-Euclidean geometries, nondiegetic soundtracks, and durational temporality.
Working in a predominantly experimental, non-indexical moving image idiom inspired by poststructuralist Deleuzian time-image poetics and minimalist avant-garde aesthetics of world cinema auteurs like Bresson, Kaul, and Aravindan, Vivek's expanded cinema work emphasizes dislodging notions of spatial continuity and linear temporality within the viewer's perceptual landscape to evoke a more visceral experience of subjectivity. Vivek's multimodal works address recurring themes such as the phenomenological experience of consciousness, the emergent poetics of transmodernist art, the predicament of subjectivity in the postdigital age, technological dystopia, and urban alienation and ennui as markers of diasporic postcoloniality.
Using a variety of computational, cinematic, and performative strategies including multi channel video, free verse cinematography, devised performance, creative coding, web and VR development, Vivek's praxis seeks to extend traditional compressed cinematic space into eversive, computationally reconfigured hybrid expanses for transmedia assemblages: immersive spaces for multi-modal moving image experiences that are embodied, mediated and coauthored by the viewer themself. Inspired by transmodernist media formulations of theorists like Gene Youngblood, Lev Manovich, and Marcos Novak, Vivek weaves moving image tapestries that serve as refractive kaleidoscopic spaces of Bergsonian durational temporality that simulate and evoke the embodied experience of consciousness itself. Drawing from critical transhumanist frameworks such as Indofuturism and South Asian modernities, Vivek's moving image work seeks to situate itself within highly speculative expanded postcinema futures that go beyond the dominant ocular-perspectival, linear temporality paradigms of Western epistemology, embracing rhizomatic, recursive, cyclical modes of narrativity from Eastern philosophical traditions.
Vivek has been an artist-in-residence at the Toji Cultural Foundation in Wonju, South Korea. His work has been showcased around the world at venues including Glassbox Gallery in Santa Barbara, Toji Showcase in Wonju, Scary Cow Film Festival in San Francisco, Mono X Festival in New York City, and Experimenta Festival in Mumbai. Born and raised in the Middle East of South Asian descent, Vivek's praxis is shaped by the uprootedness and ephemerality of his lived experiences. Having lived around the world in places including Abu Dhabi, Kochi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Houston, New York and San Francisco, he is forever home and in perpetual exile everywhere both at once. He currently resides in Santa Barbara, California.
Google Sites
Report abuse