Neeti Sivakumar
2024 HEAR US Awardee
ITP Class of 2024
Neeti Sivakumar is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based in Brooklyn, New York. She works at the intersection the sociology of space and technology. Her practice focuses on the ‘production of space*’*, that is, space constructed through activities, interactions, and perceptions, and what it means for marginalized communities to occupy space visibly. She believes in a participatory approach to reflect and critique structures of inequality and access. Her work encompasses a variety of mediums including architecture drawings, crafted spaces, sculptures, video, internet art, augmented reality, and generative artificial intelligence. She is a trained architect from India, and has received grants from the Goethe-Institut Mumbai, ZKM, Karlsruhe, and BeFantastic Bangalore. She is expected to graduate with an MPS from NYU Tisch in 2024.
Project
Nurturing Memory: In anticipation of grief, I have begun to memorialize my grandmother. The deterioration of her health due to dementia forces me to question how I would like to remember her. While I ponder this question, all I can think of are how her hands, now wrinkled, raised a family using her lived experiences. Through recorded conversations, photogrammetry, and interaction, I intend to revisit the way she has spent her life nurturing plants and people.
This garden of memories mimics how she tends to her garden, with care and touch. As the plants sprout, blossom, and wither, her stories share snippets of her life. The first arc of the project is an interactive game focused on depicting aspects of dementia and memory deterioration through the game mechanics of finding ‘seeds of memory’, planting and nurturing them to give rise to a memory. The second arc follows the story of three caregivers and their personal experiences around anticipated grief of losing family members.
This will be collected through volumetric capture and experienced as a segue to the third arc. The third and final arc requires the participation of the audience in sharing similar stories through audio recordings and planting these as ‘seeds of memories’. The garden of recorded memories will grow on the internet in real time and will only be accessible once the plant has bloomed. These memories, however, will wither away to reflect reality.
