Aparna Rao: High-tech art (with a sense of humour)
Aparna Rao re-imagines the familiar in surprising, often humorous ways. With her collaborator Soren Pors, she creates high-tech art installations: a typewriter that sends emails, a camera that tracks you through the room only to make you invisible on screen. They put a playful spin on ordinary objects and interactions.
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ABOUT Aparna Rao
“With the clever use of technology, TED Fellow Aparna Rao creates art installations that let people experience familiar objects and interactions in refreshingly humourous ways.
From her sound-sensative ‘Pygmies’ to her 2-person ‘Uncle Phone’, Aparna’s work encourages participation rather than spectatorship. Together with Søren Pors, she describes their work as ‘a personal exploration of subtle unconscious patterns and limitations that influence our behaviours and relationships; and the applied fiction or imaginative logic that makes them seem logical. The resulting work can be idiosyncratic, but still logical on its own terms’.
Aparna studied at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, and at Interaction Design Institute in Italy. She crossed paths with Søren Pors in 2002, during a two year research scholarship study in Italy at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy.
In 2005 she partnered with him and they’ve worked in collaboration ever since. They have developed a multi-disciplinary art practice involving mechanical and electronic engineering, programming and manufacturing processes.
In 2009 they began showing their early works at The Expanded Box, ARCO, Madrid, Spain; Indian Highway curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Julia Peyton-Jones and Gunnar Kvaran at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; and at the 4th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, curated by Raiji Kuroda, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan.”
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