Featured ENTERPRISES

Cultural Entrepreneur. AI TechArtist. Curator. Researcher.

Cultural Entrepreneur

Archana Prasad is a serial founder in the the cultural & tech sector. Based in Seattle, USA and Bangalore, India, she has more than two decades of industry experience and is an established thought leader in the tech and arts industries. Listen in on Nvidia's podcast tracking the journey of her digital arts project Dara.network supported by British Council to a TechStars VC funded AI platform - Gooey.AI.

TechArtist

Archana has a deep focus on AI & TechArt in Public Space. She has a unique participatory, community lead artistic practice. Here is a video of her talking about her creative journey presented by the British Council as one of their featured Cultural Champions.

About Her AI Practice

Curator & Researcher

Archana is an experienced curator of Art Festivals, Exhibitions, Cultural Engagements and Speaker Sessions. She is focused on the edge effects of frontier tech & arts.

Her Career Trajectory

Featured ENTERPRISES

"It is critical that cultural workers lead on the design & roll-out of frontier tech like AI."

Archana leads on the rally of #AIforGood and nurtures a global network of creators committed to AI and techart for socio-environmental change.

She has a deep love of documentation and creating public awareness on neighbourhood socio-cultural heritage, and many of her projects over the last two decades do so using a combination of hi and low tech with social research, design and participatory art processes.

Archana formerly worked at Microsoft Research India in Design Research and Advanced Prototyping and holds 3 global technology patents. She holds a Bachelors in Painting and a Masters in Art History from CKP and a Masters in Animation from NID. She is a Clore & Chevening 2017 Fellow and an ATSA 2010 Fellow. She is a TechStars Founder and a Blume Founder. Archana is an Accredited Coach from Relational Dynamics First, UK. She has a Master Class Certificate in Curating Contemporary Arts, Royal College of Arts, UK.

Her work has received a Public Arts Grant from the India Foundation for the Arts, British Council's Digital Arts Grant, Facebook Developers Community Challenge Prize amongst others. She was an Artist-in-Residence at Kanoria Center for the Arts. She won the German Language Artists Scholarship at Goethe Institut, Bangalore.

About

Gooey.AI

Archana Prasad drives Gooey.AI’s vision, making Generative AI accessible for impact-driven organizations. Gooey.AI is a secure, low-code platform with 870,000+ users, enabling AI discovery, customization, deployment, and impact measurement. She leads user research, design, and community engagement, while managing key partnerships and communications. She defines the company's strategic goals.

Visit Gooey.AI

BeFantastic.in

As Founder and Curator of BeFantastic, Archana Prasad advances techart through festivals, fellowships, and public arts initiatives. Evolving from Jaaga’s pioneering work, BeFantastic fosters AI-driven art and global collaboration geared to UN's SDGs. The 2023 FutureFantastic festival showcased AI art addressing the climate crisis, and exemplifies the organisations commitment to embodying radical optimism for an open, engaged future.

Visit BeFantastic.in

Dara.Network

As Founder and COO of dara.network, Archana Prasad built a platform fostering creative cross-border collaborations through technology. Dara.network connects global changemakers via networking events and a digital platform, enabling deeper collaboration in the arts, tech, and social impact sectors. Archana led its vision, operations, and partnerships, shaping it into a dynamic space for meaningful connections.

Visit Dara.Network

Jaaga.in

As Founder and Director of Jaaga, Archana Prasad built a platform uniting arts, technology, and social change in Bangalore India. Since 2009, Jaaga has convened global and local thinkers, led public arts initiatives, and connected governments with grassroots communities. Now a Public Charitable Trust and for-profit entity, it supports artisans, creatives, and tech entrepreneurs. Archana continues to drive its mission with her board of trustees.

Visit Jaaga.in

Creative Practice

Work from Archana's archives spanning the last two decades at the cusp of public, tech arts and research.

Poetry Across Borders – live shared international poetry performance events
Samuha – A Site & Time Specific Artist Platform
CitySignals – A Sonic-Video Public Art Project
Between.Today - Gen AI Interactive paintings

Neighbourhood Diaries – Oral histories of Bangalore neighbourhoods
Hampi Crafts – Documenting crafts. Supported by Crafts Council & Gov India
India Digital Heritage Project – A Microsoft Research pilot for
a narratives platform

Urban Avantgarde – Art On the Streets
Malleswaram Accessibility Project – Participatory Neighbourhood Accessibility
We Are Here – Phone guided urban excursions
Bangalore City Project – City stories

Archana's Focus Areas

In the era of AI, curation in the cultural sector remains essential for navigating information overload, tailoring experiences, providing context, facilitating discoverability, addressing ethical concerns, building community, and supporting artists and cultivating the cultural landscape. With Jaaga.in Archana has been at the center of culture-making and curating since 2009.

Curate Culture

Techart is a wide open frontier for creative innovation, where artists craft interactivity, bridge disciplines, and collaborate across borders. It's the loom where artists weave a vivid tapestry, a reflection of our era's spirit, and a gateway to manifesting a better future. Through BeFantastic.in Archana nurtures the techart communities of India and beyond.

Make TechArt

Gen AI transforms the arts and cultural sector by revolutionizing creation, access, collaboration, and preservation, making it an essential and transformative force in the global cultural landscape. Through Gooey.AI Archana spends much of her time on this topic.

Explore Gen AI

Art festivals, conferences, and exhibitions are the vibrant canvases for techarts to blossom. They also provide both the showcase and the pulpit to reach and connect with diverse groups of people in our efforts to move the needle for positive change on critical issues of our times. Through her AI festival platform - FutureFantastic.in, Archana curates, engages and supports the AI Art ecology.

Gather & Show

Community building is critical to human connection, sparking engagement, inclusivity, and collaboration. Together, we educate, preserve, and amplify the arts, offering context, ethical guidance, and unwavering support to culture makers. As technology leapfrogs us into the vast unknown, these human networks hold and ground us. Archana believes in helping people create social capital, she does this through her work with Dara.Network.

Build Community

Featured AI & Community TechArt Projects

RadBots

RadBots are a collection of conversational videobots created by leading playwrights, artists and screenwriters from India, Sri Lanka, the UK and Germany. This project gives interactive voice to characters from traditionally under-represented communities, both economically and in the tech-sector.

The RadBots project combines 2022’s most advanced artificial intelligence, authored screenplays and the async video-chat platform of Dara.network to bring Turing-test passing and fascinating videobot characters to life on anyone’s phone.

Malleshwaram Calling

Having grown up in the neighbourhood of Malleshwaram, Archana Prasad, the artist, has been grappling with the fast disappearing narratives and places that bind the neighbourhood together. Stories of the past that connect people and places, carry a sense of allure and bring us a much needed notion of continuity, of being part of a larger whole. This feeling of belonging, results perhaps in a certain civic pride that Bangalore, with her buckling infrastructure and torn sense of self needs most from her people. Archana’s concern for the growth and preservation of the neighbourhood translates into the desire to capture, document and present these voices and secrets from the past, in unexpected ways, to the public.

Between.Today

This piece is a homage to our past and our future. It features some of the best creative minds of the past and leverages the most advanced Deep Learning AI and hardware available now to place the viewer next to our revered subjects, as if drawn by them. It is a reminder that creation has always happened in scenes and collectives and that our creative fore-bearers are the foundation upon which we stand. Plus, as we move ever towards the Enlightened Singularity, the hope that our grandchildren will be able to live with better and better facsimiles of us is teased here in crude selfies. Snap away!

In the first instance, we play homage to Vincent Van Gogh.

Jaaga - Social Sculpture

Jaaga, a social sculpture created by Archana Prasad and Freeman Murray started in 2009 as a palette rack structure that invited techies, artists and activists to meet and share their work with the public. Today it is a Not-for-Profit that runs programs to support the creative and tech ecology in India,

FEATURED WORK

CULTURAL PRACTICE LEADING TECH INNOVATION

Archana drives Gooey.AI’s vision of making Generative AI accessible for impact-driven organizations. Gooey.AI is a secure, low-code platform with 870,000+ users, enabling AI discovery, customization, deployment, and impact measurement. She leads user research, design, and community engagement, while managing key partnerships and communications. She defines the company's strategic goals.

Gooey.AI

>

As Founder and Curator of BeFantastic, Archana advances techart through festivals, fellowships, and community arts initiatives. Evolving from Jaaga’s pioneering work, BeFantastic fosters AI-driven art and global collaboration geared to UN's SDGs. The 2023 FutureFantastic festival showcased AI art addressing the climate crisis, and exemplifies the organisations commitment to embodying radical optimism for an open, engaged future.

BeFantastic.in

>

As Founder and COO of Dara.Network, Archana built a platform fostering creative cross-border collaborations through technology. Dara.Network connects global change-makers via networking events and a digital platform, enabling deeper collaboration in the arts, tech, and social impact sectors. Archana led its vision, operations, and partnerships, shaping it into a dynamic space for meaningful connections.

Dara.Network

>

As Founder-Director of Jaaga, Archana spearheads a platform uniting arts, technology, and social change in Bangalore India. Since 2009, Jaaga has convened global and local thinkers, led public arts initiatives, and connected governments with grassroots communities. Now a Public Charitable Trust it supports artisans, creatives, and tech entrepreneurs in expanding their practices. Archana continues to drive its mission with her Board of Trustees.