Prayas Abhinav

Prayas Abhinav lives in Bangalore, India. He presently has an interest in re-vitalizing and re-imagining urban spaces. Through his work he explores how outdoor spaces can be utilized for cultural and civic uses. Employing social networks and low-fi technologies to connect communities and resources is often one of his approaches. He has been part of efforts to seed open content movements in India and in 2007 helped launching the Creative Commons India licenses. His focus of research in this areas has been identifying and understanding non-coercive business models which do not depend on restrictive intellectual property policies for their efficiency. He has been supported by fellowships by Openspace India, International Institute for Art, Culture and Democracy (IIACD) and Center for Media Studies (CMS). His fiction and poetry has been published in a few magazines and newspapers. "Even War has Limits," an essay he wrote won a prize from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and took him to Kosovo in 2000. He has taught workshops and electives at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and Center for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT). He published a literary magazine, Crimson Feet from 2003-05. For his experiments with ways to make small presses in India sustainable, the magazine was part of the venture incubators at the National Institute of Design (NID) and IndiaCo (2003-04). He has presented his projects and proposals at Futuresonic, Manchester (09), Make Them Love You, Chennai (09), Wintercamp, Amsterdam (09),48c: Public Art Ecology (08), Urban Climate Camp, ISEA (08), Urban Typhoon, Koliwada (08), Sensory Urbanism, Glasgow (08), First Monday, Chicago (06), The Paris Accord (06), Public Service Broadcasting Trust (06), Sarai (05), Alliance Française, Ahmedabad (02) and Chitra Kala Parishath (02).