|
![]() About Solar Project |
The Solar Project
|
Origins
of Project Solar Eclipse '99: |
The
Solar Project The Collaborative Events The Outcome The Future Contact details Potential Partners |
The
collaborative 'events' to date: Across two and a half years since the Project's inception, member-communities had interacted, exchanged and worked together collaboratively (with one another) over several shared ideas and interests. This was followed by an intense period of analysis of the findings in the form of several international research papers - almost all of them invited for presentation. The project has received over a hundred international awards. The 'events' held under Project Solar Eclipse'99, all of them considered to have been the first of their kind, had been: 1. Collaborative Murals: (a large mural about Bombay in Cornwall, UK and about Cornwall in Bombay) 2. Interactive Festival: named 'Virtual Holi' played cross-culturally across at least forty-four countries in Western Hemisphere 3. Collaborative Sculptures: (giant-sized installations of the Indian Elephant at Cornwall and a giant Cornish Sailboat in India) 4. Collaborative Sundials: collaboratively developed by children and design students in UK and India 5. Solar Eclipse '99, the actual phenomenon for which the project had collaborated with UK's Arts Council, USA's NASA-Exploratorium, Mumbai's Nehru Centre and the Press Trust of India to 'virtually' present the movement of the eclipse along the trajectory from UK to India and then grab images of the actual eclipse in India for the viewing of the international audiences - all this via the networking technologies. 6. Castles in the Air: an artists' and sculptors' initiatives at building installations and artworks at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai 7. Collaborative Love Stories: an initiative between City Gallery, Leicester, De Montford University, Leicester, UK and India (IIT Bombay and the Godrej Udayachal School, Mumbai). |
The
Solar Project The Collaborative Events The Outcome The Future Contact details Potential Partners |
The
stages of Project Solar Eclipse: (a) The proposed project's precursor is its experimental phase carried out between the Fall of 1997 to Dec 1999 and spread across eight internationally participated cross-cultural 'events.' The project's outcome is the artefacts, installations, paintings, crafts works, product design material etc., that were created out of these cross-cultural 'events', in addition to the collaborative space on the Net (www.coloursofindia.net) that had netted in more than 100 awards for the project. The collaborative space continues to invite the attention of hundreds of thousands of visitors worldwide. (b) Additionally between 2000 and the present (2003), the project moved on to its analytical phase and the Project's findings were presented at various stages of its unfolding as keynote addresses, in the form of invited as well as selected international papers at: (a) Graphica International, UEFS, Feira De Santana, Brasil, Sept 1998 (held once in two years), (b) at the National Internet Guild's Conference, IITBombay, April 1999 (the only one held so far), (c) at the ICSID/ICOGRADA/IFI Millennium Design Congress (held once in six years), Sydney, Sept-Oct 1999 (d) at the ACUADS hosted by the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Oct 1999, (e) at CADE (Computer Aided Design Education), Falmouth College of Arts (FCA), Falmouth, UK, July 2000, (f) at The City Gallery in collaboration with De Montford University, Leicester, UK, July 2000, at (g) at the Workshop on Design of the New Media Technologies, IITB, Dec 2001, (h) at the International Conference on New Technologies and Methodologies in Arts, Media and Design held at the Rajabhat Institute of Suan Sunanda at Bangkok, Dec 2001 and (i) at the Design History Society's international conference' entitled 'Situated Knowledges: Consumption, Production and Identity in a Global Context', held at University of Wales, UK, 3rd - 5th Sept. 2002 among others in India. (j) Our most recent publication has come on invitation from the American refereed journal 'Design Issues' (guest edited by Prof. Martha Scotford) and published by MIT, Cambridge, Massachusettes Press, to present the findings of our experiment. This paper entitled "Across the Web: the Colors of India as a cross-cultural collaborative initiative for learning" is currently in the process of being published by MIT Publication, Cambridge, Mass, USA. |
The
Solar Project The Collaborative Events The Outcome The Future Contact details Potential Partners |
Looking
Ahead: It is known that this was a project that was being conducted in the way it was for the first time in the world in 1997. Given this precedence of a systematic experimentation of a technology entirely new and scarcely understood when it was first undertaken, we now need quite urgently, to move on into the post-experimentation phase. And build on the findings gathered through its experimentation phase. The problems and the prospects of the project- findings urge us to move on into investigating the following issues into the future: (i) An imminent need to construct dynamic, collaborative structures built into the Net in a manner that allows schools and institutions, artists and art galleries, craftspeople and crafts guilds and so on to download readily available collaborative tools and start the process of cross-cultural or creative collaborations; and (ii) the need to understand in some depth the collaborative potentials between apparently divergent target groups such as craftspeople, artists, industrial designers and children and converting the findings into applications for future use. |
The
Solar Project The Collaborative Events The Outcome The Future Contact details Potential Partners |
Contact
Details: Dr. Ajanta Sen International Co-ordinator Solar Project C/CSRE 139, Hillside, IIT Powai Mumbai 400076 India Telephone: 091-22-5721601 Fax: 091-22-5721601 email: ajanta(at)coloursofindia.net |
Potential
Collaborative Partners: If you would like to get involved in doing a cross-cultural collaborative event with people located in diferent parts of the world and belong to either an Institution, School, Art Centre, Art Gallery or a Museum, do get in touch with us. write to us at: solaris@coloursofindia.net |
![]() |
Collaborative
events: |
|