Cultural Entrepreneur. AI TechArtist. Curator. Researcher.

Archana Prasad is a serial founder in the the cultural & tech sector. Based in Seattle, USA and Bangalore, India, she has more than two decades of industry experience and is an established thought leader in the tech and arts industries.

Cultural Entrepreneur

TechArtist

About Her AI Practice

Archana is an experienced curator of Art Festivals, Exhibitions, Cultural Engagements and Speaker Sessions. She is focused on the edge effects of frontier tech & arts.

Curator & Researcher

Get Her Take On This

"In our AI-driven future, art and research weave soul into innovation, the very fabric of possibility."

Archana uniquely blends art and activism to build a vibrant innovation culture, reshape public perceptions of creativity, and nurture a global network of creators committed to AI and techart for socio-environmental change.

She has a deep love of documentation and creating public awareness on neighbourhood socio-cultural heritage, and many of her projects over the last two decades do so using a combination of hi and low tech with social research, design and participatory art processes.

Archana formerly worked at Microsoft Research India in Design Research and Advanced Prototyping and holds 3 global technology patents. She holds a Bachelors in Painting and a Masters in Art History from CKP and a Masters in Animation from NID. She is a Clore & Chevening 2017 Fellow and an ATSA 2010 Fellow. She is a TechStars Founder and a Blume Founder. Archana is an Accredited Coach from Relational Dynamics First, UK. She has a Master Class Certificate in Curating Contemporary Arts, Royal College of Arts, UK.

Her work has received a Public Arts Grant from the India Foundation for the Arts, British Council's Digital Arts Grant, Facebook Developers Community Challenge Prize amongst others. She was an Artist-in-Residence at Kanoria Center for the Arts. She won the German Language Artists Scholarship at Goethe Institut, Bangalore.

About

In the era of AI, curation in the cultural sector remains essential for navigating information overload, tailoring experiences, providing context, facilitating discoverability, addressing ethical concerns, building community, and supporting artists and cultivating the cultural landscape.

Curate Culture

Techart is a wide open frontier for creative innovation, where artists craft interactivity, bridge disciplines, and collaborate across borders. It's the loom where artists weave a vivid tapestry, a reflection of our era's spirit, and a gateway to manifesting a better future.

Make TechArt

Gen AI transforms the arts and cultural sector by revolutionizing creation, access, collaboration, and preservation, making it an essential and transformative force in the global cultural landscape.

Explore Gen AI

Art festivals, conferences, and exhibitions are the vibrant canvases for techarts to blossom. They also provide both the showcase and the pulpit to reach and connect with diverse groups of people in our efforts to move the needle for positive change on critical issues of our times.

Gather & Show

Community building is critical to human connection, sparking engagement, inclusivity, and collaboration. Together, we educate, preserve, and amplify the arts, offering context, ethical guidance, and unwavering support to culture makers. As technology leapfrogs us into the vast unknown, these human networks hold and ground us.

Build Community

Focus Areas

Featured Work

Gooey.AI

Discover, customize and deploy low-code AI recipes using the best of private and open source Generative AI.

With more than 200,000 users exploring our AI workflows, Gooey is poised to become the Github for Gen AI.

Visit Gooey.AI

Dara.Network

Where Communities Create Social Capital.Dara is an app that connects incredible organizations and entrepreneurs, creators and change-makers. They use Dara to make their communities thrive.

Visit Dara.Network

BeFantastic.in

BeFantastic BeFantastic is a TechArt platform birthed from the experiences of Jaaga.in a social experiment that started in 2009. BeFantastic continues the ethos of innovation in techarts, with a deep focus on community. Its flagship festival FutureFantastic.in is a heady mix of AI-enabled artworks, dialogues, workshops and performances to amplify a global response to our shared climate emergency in the belief that we can manifest a radical, open and optimistic future as activated global citizens. Together.

Visit BeFantastic.in

Creative Practice

Work from Archana's archives spanning the last two decades at the cusp of public, tech arts and research.

Poetry Across Borders – live shared international poetry performance events
Samuha – A Site & Time Specific Artist Platform
CitySignals – A Sonic-Video Public Art Project
The Manjunauts – A Sci-Fi Experimental Electronica Art Band

Neighbourhood Diaries – Oral histories of Bangalore neighbourhoods
Hampi Crafts – Documenting Living Crafts. Supported by Crafts Council & Gov India, Science & Technology Dept.
India Digital Heritage Project – A Microsoft Research Pilot for a Heritage Narratives platform

We Are Here – Phone based urban excursions into the city
Urban Avantgarde – Art On the Streets of Malleswaram
Bangalore City Project – Connecting the City through Culture
Malleswaram Accessibility Project – Participatory Neighbourhood Accessibility

Featured AI & Community TechArt Projects

Radbots

RadBots are a collection of conversational videobots created by leading playwrights, artists and screenwriters from India, Sri Lanka, the UK and Germany. This project gives interactive voice to characters from traditionally under-represented communities, both economically and in the tech-sector.

The RadBots project combines 2022’s most advanced artificial intelligence, authored screenplays and the async video-chat platform of Dara.network to bring Turing-test passing and fascinating characters to life on anyone’s phone.

Our first collection of 20 RadBots will be made available as NFTs at the India Art Fair in 2022. Ownership of each RadBot will be made available to a limited number of Edition buyers who will be the sole owners of each RadBot, with rights to interact with these incredible characters and to vote and submit proposals to the RADAO.

Jaaga.in

Jaaga builds collaborative communities to help address today's big challenges. Jaaga started as a social sculpture & architecture experiment in 2009. We have been dedicated to the vision of providing a safe, neutral and community driven place for creators, technologists, learners and entrepreneurs. Being a woman-led organisation we are proud of our needs driven approach of supporting our diverse community.

Between.Today

This piece is a homage to our past and our future. It features some of the best creative minds of the past and leverages the most advanced Deep Learning AI and hardware available now to place the viewer next to our revered subjects, as if drawn by them. It is a reminder that creation has always happened in scenes and collectives and that our creative fore-bearers are the foundation upon which we stand. Plus, as we move ever towards the Enlightened Singularity, the hope that our grandchildren will be able to live with better and better facsimiles of us is teased here in crude selfies. Snap away!

In the first instance, we play homage to Vincent Van Gogh.

Malleshwaram.in

Malleshwaram Calling is public art project that brings together neighbourhood oral heritage, layered with technology and participatory practices.

Having grown up in the neighbourhood of Malleshwaram, Archana Prasad, the artist, has been grappling with the fast disappearing narratives and places that bind the neighbourhood together.

Stories of the past that connect people and places, carry a sense of allure and bring us a much needed notion of continuity, of being part of a larger whole. This feeling of belonging, results perhaps in a certain civic pride that Bangalore, with her buckling infrastructure and torn sense of self, needs most from her people. Archana's concern for the growth and preservation of the neighbourhood translates into the desire to capture, document and present these voices and secrets from the past, in unexpected ways to the public.