In a process of constant reinvention, Debashis unleashes his skills as a percussionist—his primary training—to apply the principles of rhythm and its transformations to transmedia experiments that incorporate improvisation, field recordings, artificial intelligence, and machine learning in hypnotic performances. In this space of experimental creation in works ranging from sound installations, performances, record releases and media art, Debashis exposes us to spiritual and cultural reflections that take us into a state of trance: the reimagining of Hindu scriptures, the reconnection with Bengali ancestry and a possible encounter with the divine from the mundane, from the technological.
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Live Performance
Machine Learning research
New Project with Visual Artist Tazeen Qayyum
Live Performance
Using extended and traditional techniques, sinha creates live performances that highlight the nature of listening and time. Sinha situates his performances within the forms integral to musical and performance practices from the Indian subcontinent – spontaneity, concentration and improvisation – filling them with contemporary content and sounds.
Find out more about Sinha’s current projects here
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Machine Learning research and performance
Sinha’s researches in machine learning and sound has put him in the forefront of researchers and activists that interrogate the imperatives of AI, using research-creation to explore alternative expressions of algorithmic culture. His work has been featured at MUTEK.MX, Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Prefix Contemporary, and elsewhere.
Sinha’s track from the international compilation MUTUALISMX, released on Other People Records
Sinha is also part of the international artistic research group Wilding AI, which has been visiting MUTEKs and other festivals around the world to “propose – conceptually and methodologically – a wilding of generative AI to move through possibilities, junctures that are idiotic until they are not (Coleman, 2021).
Find out more about Sinha’s work with machine learning and AI
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New performance project with visual artist Tazeen Qayyum
Sinha and Qayyum are currently in development on a new performance duo which delves deep into the power of ritual. Performing and responding to each other in tandem, Sinha and Qayyum use cyclical gestures in their respective worlds – visual art and sound – to craft an integrated and responsive performance that relies on the moment.
For more information and current projects, visit the home page.