Latest news with #SonicPicnics
The Hindu
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
An auditory trip through Cubbon Park
On Sunday, Cubbon Park came alive with a unique new initiative: Sonic Picnics, an interactive textile artwork by Karthika Sakthivel, a Bengaluru-based artist. The piece, created over the last year with recorded interviews, memories, and community engagements in Cubbon Park, invited the public to embark on an auditory trip through the heart of the city, and explore its historical and contemporary narratives, to see what exactly makes the park so special to Bengaluru. The project, created under the India Foundation For The Arts' Project 560 programme, involved participants sitting on and engaging with a large picnic blanket that, using touch-based audio technology, played the stories, interviews, and personal memories of the people and communities in and around Cubbon Park. Genesis of idea The idea came from the artist's work with the British Library, where she realised that people 'don't want just to put on headphones and stare at a wall anymore'. In the spirit of this, when she heard a clip of a woman talking about her mother's warmth and fondness, she had an idea to create a quilt that you could be wrapped in, like the mother's embrace, while hearing the stories of her warmth. She then took her learnings from that and translated them into the piece she has today. Built as a communal experience, the piece allowed for up to five people to sit together and, with the help of headphones connected to conductive fabric, thread and a microcontroller tucked under the blanket, hear the stories that they chose together. 'I thought of it as a social experiment,' explained Sakthivel. 'I feel like we're always in our own bubble, and suddenly people realise that I'm making a decision and other people are listening to it too, and it was a revelation to them. Even if they were strangers, in a way, the stories bring them together.' She also talks about the venue chosen to conduct this experiment. 'The reason I chose Cubbon Park is because it's a place where people slow down and feel this connection to each other and nature. We have a large culture of storytelling, but we don't see as much listening, and I'm interested in cultivating that.' A range of stories The stories ranged from experiences of celebrating a child's first birthday and going on dates that lasted till the sun rose to the effects of the recent changes in rules banning food and photography in the park. The response from the listeners felt overwhelmingly positive, with one saying, 'This magic carpet takes you from one mythology of the park to another through time and shows us that while fashion and accents have changed, the way the city interacts with the park has stayed the same' Looking to the future, Sakthivel notes that she's interested in the idea of having additions and chapters to this piece, allowing for it to continue in different forms. 'The great part about fabric is it's very malleable, I've done a quilt, I could do a table cloth, but to me it's not just about the medium, it's about the people and the stories.'
New Indian Express
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
A Stitch in Time
Memories, bitter, sweet, or both, have a tendency to become entwined in the places they were formed. And if you were to think of one place that holds most Bengalureans' memories – where children run around on school trips, couples steal a moment alone, and the elderly come for peace and quiet – Cubbon Park comes to mind. It is this interconnectedness between Cubbon Park and the people whose memories are entwined within it, that Bengaluru-based artist Karthika Sakthivel seeks to explore with her project Sonic Picnics – a quilt that tells these stories to anyone with a moment to sit, touch a patch of fabric, and listen. Created with the aid of a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts, the installation is set to be open to viewers on Sunday at Cubbon Park. 'We've found some amazing stories. Someone shared a story of finding a dead dog, cremating it and coming back to plant a tree in its memory; another, a sweeper, got street-cast for a movie here; one guy had a first date here that lasted over 12 hours and the couple saw their first sunrise here, with light rushing through the leaves and dew. There was also a man who manages the public restroom who sang for us! It's lovely to see these meaningful connections people make with nature and each other,' she says. Sharing the origins of this project, which started with her work on a jacket that tells oral histories at The British Library, Sakthivel says, 'We were trying to figure out how to get visitors to engage with oral histories. People don't want to put on headphones and stare at a wall, so how do we create an embodied listening experience?' The answer, applied to Cubbon Park, was to collect stories from people and weave them together over a year. 'What we're trying to do here is capture present day experiences and future aspirations that people have for the park by communally weaving together a picnic blanket that is interactive. We got people to come to workshops, listen to the 24 stories we've curated, and start stitching onto the patch. Some, saw us and just joined in!' says Sakthivel. How exactly does the blanket work and make this interactive experience happen? Through the magic of smart fabric, explains Sakthivel. 'I'm using conductive fabric, thread, and an entire circuit is concealed under the fabric so you can't tell it's there. But when you touch a particular story, it plays the audio in the headphones. At any point, five people will be able to sit or lie down on it.' With Cubbon Park being a thriving spot for community events and clubs, bringing people of all classes together, Sakthivel hopes that the project will act as a conduit that encourages a culture of people listening to one another. 'We talk a lot about storytelling but there's not as much of a culture for story-listening. Through this, we want to create a culture where people slow down, sit down, and actually listen. Listening in a group is different from listening alone – you can see how many different stories exist and how many different people use a public space.'
