Dhruv Jagdish Jani

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Explorations will explore knowledge embodied in virtual avatars through interactive prototypes combining dance, performance, and video game spaces, questioning the material body's role in digital realms. Dhruv Jagdish Jani is the Coordinator for this project. 

Dhruv Jani is the founder of Oleomingus, an independent games and arts practice studio, whose work is situated at the intersection of postcolonial writing and interactive fiction. Dhruv is currently a Designer-in-Residence and faculty at Anant University in Ahmedabad, a partner at the Improvising Futures Grant at IICSI, University of Guelph. He serves on the advisory committee for the Game Artists International Network and the DiGRA India chapter. His creative output includes solo exhibitions like The Concentric Fictions of a Generous History (2023) and Notes in the Margins of History (2019), commissions for institutions like the V&A Museum and the India Art Fair, and game releases such as The Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place (2021) and The Strange Parable of Timruk (2018). He is also the recipient of the A MAZE Humble New Talent Award (2020) and an Arts Practice Grant from the IFA (2016). Priyākshi Agarwal is a Dance Anthropologist with an Erasmus Mundus Master's in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage, trained extensively in Bharatanatyam, Kalaripayattu, and various Indian folk and international contemporary dance forms, and her research, notably on Dancehall as a tool for resistance through a feminist lens in Kingston, Jamaica, informs her work, and she holds a strong foundation in both academia and performance. Given his experience, Dhruv Jagdish Jani is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA. Priyākshi Agarwal will join him as a collaborator on this project.

The project with the working title Corpoliteracy of Virtual Bodies is a collaborative exploration by Dhruv and Priyakshi, that will investigate the role of bodies in both performance and video games to question the knowledge embodied within virtual avatars and simulated counterparts. The central enquiry asks what forms of knowledge we embody with virtual avatars, how this knowledge is dissociated from its material sites, and how it manifests in networked interfaces. Drawing on the concept of "corpoliteracy", the body as a platform for acquiring, storing, and disseminating knowledge through performativity, the artists seek to extend this reading to simulated bodies in atemporal domains. 

The collaboration aims to entangle Priyakshi's practice, which foregrounds the material body and its movements in dance and activism, with Dhruv's work in interactive fiction, which often occludes or diminishes the body within vast digital landscapes. The project will delve into the making of small game-like prototypes combining text, videogame spaces, and live performance elements, structured around five thematic chapters: Roleplaying, Gestures & Signification, Skeletons & Joints, Bodies as Sites/Interfaces, and Spaces & Bodies. These interactive pieces will attempt to create a critical framework for negotiating the temporality and occupancy of simulated bodies.

The outcome of the project will be game-like prototypes, videogame spaces and live performances. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be the audio-visual documentation of the artistic process, along with the game prototypes.   

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it attempts to bring together two domains of artistic practices, to explore a common philosophical question of the phenomenology of the human body, through finding corresponding patterns between the virtual and the real.    

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm by convening an online gathering of artists coordinating Explorations projects. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees. 

This project is supported by Parijat Foundation.