Ansh Patel
Ansh Patel is an interdisciplinary artist whose works range from experimental games to interactive digital media. His work usually marries practice with the conceptual, exploring the processes linking an idea to its implementation. His body of work in games generally comprises of short-form games that serve as critical deconstructions of a conventional aspect of the medium and culture. His digital media projects focuses on embodiment, digital performance, surveillance and how technology mediates our interaction.
He is also a critic whose work has appeared in Paste, Unwinnable and Arcade Review. He occasionally writes academic papers on post-modernist meaning-making processes and post-colonial critiques of first-person shooter games.
Presenting
The Pervasive Rhizome: Data Tracking Edition
Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari envisioned the "rhizome" as an ideological and semiotic structure which ended up serving in many ways as an underlying inspiration for the Internet.
"The Pervasive Rhizome: Data Tracking Edition" is an interactive application which visualizes the complex interconnectivity of the Internet as well as the myriad ways data gets requested, tracked and siphoned while navigating it. Beginning with a participant choosing a URL as a "starting node", the application automates through different pages recursively scraping links and moving to the first, unique link briefly displaying the page before moving onto the next.
In parallel, on a separate screen, all of these links are being visualized in a large connected network building the wide, interconnected mesh of nodes and links. Each node/web page will have a small visualized graph on its side, showing the number of content requests on it. Over time and through multiple "instantiations" by new participants, this visualized mesh will start building the rhizome of the Internet but also a dense display of how underlying mechanisms of data tracking are pervasive and enormous beneath the innocuous veil of the browser.
Playful Mesh: Site-Specific Game to Visualize Networks
Wireless network and its architecture, to most people, is a pervasive but densely opaque and abstract entity that would be impossible to comprehend on their own.
Play has always been human culture's aspect of simplifying and abstracting aspects about our real world into a temporary engaged experience out of which players emerge with a new-found look at the world around them.
Using similar ideas about play and its potential to bring an awareness about our immediate environment, "Playful Mesh" is a site-specific game that will be installed at MAGNET, the location of the event, that visualizes the free-forming connections of the mesh nodes being formed by the spatial movement of its players.
The game played by upto four players will be controlled directly by the number of active nodes in the mesh, their spatial location allowing them to form bonds with their nearest neighbor to allow them a greater power of expressiveness on the game's abstract painting that's projected onto the screen. As a result of which, players can start forming a direct connection on how their spatial relationship is being reflected in the mesh network, allowing them to understand basic aspects of connectivity albeit in a fun and playful way.
