10 Questions with Jayakar Priyadharshan

Jayakar Priyadharshan is a Contemporary Speculative Architect of Indian origin currently in the UK. He did his Master's Degree in Art in Architecture at Stadelschule Architecture Class, Germany. Jayakar is now living a double life as an architect and an academician enriching the young upcoming minds with contemporary ideologies. He is well known for his works in the field of architectural aesthetic practice. one of his famous works is what he calls the invisible building (A building facade that can hide from the eyes of Artificial Intelligence), where he talks about the flipsides of artificial intelligence and countering the rise of AI.

www.jayakar-priyadharshan.com | @jayakar_priyadharshan

ARTIST STATEMENT

Jayakar currently works on the question of authenticity and austerity of the modernist defunct doctrine of drawings and explores on the new contemporary ways of transmuting ideas into drawings through modern day tools that can be used "for representing architecture" or can be understood "as architecture by themselves" by capitalizing on the various technocratic digital tools that are analogous and available for establishing a peerless stronghold of the ubiquitous zeitgeist.

Extreme Grids – Architectural Drawings | PROJECT DESCRIPTION

An Idea is a one-dimensional Entity. But its ability to suck in more dimensions to trans mutate itself into something different is beyond intelligence. The first incorporation of two dimensions is where the ambiguous characteristic completely breaks away from idealism towards surreal realism. The ability of a sketch to produce an infinite number of outputs has been quintessential for the humankind to pass on information from one generation to the other about reality and observation. But What these sketches achieved in particular is the enormous flux of ambiguity with which it can represent aesthetics, data, information, and misinterpretation—a point of standing parallel to the creator himself. With contemporary tools like a PC and software, people try to incorporate or give new facets to their thoughts or Idea. This is where the contemporary Idea of using a digital medium starts to establish a peerless stronghold of its existence in mind to a two-dimensional digital canvas. The ability to explore new dimensions to an idea and edit and understand the many ways can open the new door of misinterpretation. These sets of drawings represent how an idea can be represented in a two-dimensional canvas before its access to other dimensions. A collage of ideas from which architecture starts to happen, or it can be architecture by itself. Denoting a specific point of start which can be deliberately misinterpreted to a place where the same drawing starts to present itself with a different façade to another reader, increasing the ambiguous characteristic of interpreting the same Idea. So, this series of drawings is a very carefully choreographed, highly rational first step towards discovering a contemporary way of approaching architectural design.

INTERVIEW

Please, introduce yourself to our readers and tell us a little more about your background. You are trained as an architect; how did you start getting involved with art? 

I am an Architectural Futurist who works on contemporary tools to create a discourse on how art and architecture can benefit from them through the lens of speculation.

The real breakthrough of me exploring the genre of being an artist happened through reading Art theory, psychology, and philosophy. Psychology provides you with the information of self; Philosophy gives you a sense of realization, and Art theory gives you the superpower of understanding ontology. And when you club these three dimensions of learning together, you move into a void where you question every convention and try to juxtaposition or overlay new information of your understanding to create a reality with your own constructs. In other words, you start to build your own version of reality, and this intention of questioning the real and trying to bridge an idea to reality was the flare that made me get more involved with art and incorporating art into architecture.

As an architect and visual artist, how would you define yourself artistically?

I would consider myself as the exact line of duality or the intersecting point of Art and Architecture. I like to introduce dimensionality to an idea; more the dimensions, more the mutations, More the mutations, greater are the chances of misinterpretations. And misinterpretation is where an idea transfigures into an aesthetic. I try to use all the contemporary tools available to find new ways of understanding the conventions and create a discourse of its possible potential in art and architecture.

What is your creative process like? What is your working routine?

Preferring Objectivity over Subjectivity and relativism over idealism are the two fundamental mantras to my creative process. The moment you start to "think" about what you have sketched on a digital canvas trying to convert an idea into a drawing is when you lose control of your mind and give the driver's seat to subjectivity and consciousness, and that is where the authenticity of an idea is lost. And I think that point is quintessential for my creative process, and that Is how I work. And about the working routine, I meditate a lot before working to free my mind from its chained pragmatism so that I don't become a laughing stock to my own subjective prejudices. And If I don't strike a balance during my pre-work rituals, then I make sure that I don't work on idea production at all.

Where do you find inspiration? What artists influence or inspire your work the most?

Questioning the basic conventions and interweaving it with a sense of "self" and transmuting the information into a 2D, 3D, or 4D canvas is the best way to find authentic inspiration for oneself. I work with all the contemporary Technocratic advancements like the AI, LIDAR, Digital, analogous sculpting, Cyberspace, AR, VR, MR, XR tools to find the contemporary zeitgeist of ways with which an idea/art/architecture can be explored or discourse can be struck. The set of drawings such as "Superpositions" by Peter Eisenman, "Micromegas," "Sonnets in Babylon," "CChamber works by Daniel Libeskind, and abstraction by Scott McCloud so some of the greatest works of all time that inspire me a lot.

In your statement, you declare you are working on the "authenticity and austerity of the defunct modernist doctrine of drawings." What do you like about drawing, and how do you see this practice evolving in the digital era?

A drawing is a representation, Like the first set of sounds that a baby makes to convey its feelings before learning a language to express or how AI learns to understand objects through neural networks. The question of how an Idea changes directly into architecture becomes amazingly arbitrary. It even takes us to a critical place where one starts to wonder if it is the visual aesthetics that solely drives it. When I started to question how to establish a sense of style that is considered the signature of an artist, I wanted to investigate this bridge (Drawing) that was kept invisible by many artists and architects deliberately or unknowingly. That is when I started to search for books that express this school of thought. Still, unfortunately, the number of resources available for the understanding and authorship of this dominion has been very little or really hard to find. Drawings have never been the zeitgeist of any generation as of yet, so speculating that this is the missing piece to the jinx of understanding yourself as a human species, I tried to explore the concept of representing thoughts/Ideas in a way my consciousness allows me to view the world. With the digital era and copious tools available, this practice will explode in every way possible, and the zeitgeist is just days away.

How do you keep yourself up to date with the latest digital trends and technologies that have today a significant impact on the art world?

The future is already here, but it is distributed and remains undiscovered in different parts of the world, and It is our responsibility to determine what needs to happen. I think this is where a strong acceptance of technology solves this issue. It has brought everything to our very fingertip. I constantly read technocratic blogs, Podcasts, and visual doses of aesthetics through social media platforms and visit every single biennale and Triennale in person when possible. Movies play an integral part in helping me understand how the limits of imagination can be broken and reconfigured when the data is passed on from one generation to another.

What are your thoughts on digital presentations, like fairs and exhibitions, for artists? Do you think these are good opportunities?

One of the most beautiful things about the COVID pandemic is that it brought the entire world together and eradicated the sense of distance by a bridge through a digital medium or cyberspace. This has helped people of different cultures to mix together to form a beautiful idea of "the one world" with different thoughts and enhanced a sense of cultural diversity which I would like to coin as "regional futurism." So, these digital fairs and exhibitions have broken all the cliché and barriers that creators had. It has pushed the world lightyears ahead when it comes to reaching various audiences of different cultural backgrounds from different regions. I think that if not for covid, this cross-cultural fabric could not have been achieved.

We all miss a lot of things from our lives pre-Covid. But is there one thing that you have discovered over the last year that you will keep with you in the future? 

Covid was a "perfect storm" for me. It gave me a sense of independence, self-realization of what I think "I am" to what I "really am." This was when I really started to read philosophical and psychological books because physical interactions were no more possible. And that is when books started to rule my world. How digital platforms can be used constructively for sharing and learning knowledge for which they were found in the first place. That made me realize how the banal Idea of "being cool" drags a person millions of years on the backside in the technocratic dimension of Space-time.

What are you working on now? Any shows, galleries, or publications where our readers can find your work?

I am currently working on Four different projects, apparently—one about the usage of Augmented Reality to create Snapchat-like Building filters. The second one is exploring Post-Apocalyptic Living Spaces (Mad-Max like Transport Houses), and the Third one is Artificial Intelligence and Architectural Hacking. A façade design solution that could make a building façade invisible to the eyes of AI and the final one would be the Idea of "Regional Futurism" or the "Indian Cyberpunk" where I am trying to incorporate "Mortal engine" type of a building aesthetic. My works have been exhibited at Stadelschule Rundgang 2016, 2017 (Frankfurt), Node Biennale 2017(Frankfurt). Death of Architects Exhibition at CAAD (Chennai), The Gaming Terrains, the Unknown (Chennai), War of Architects, Chennai Architectural Festival (2019).

Do you have an essential philosophy that guides you in your creative expression?

I believe in "Jungian Psychoanalysis," a method of access to understanding and interweave unconscious one-dimensional ideas to a sense of cognitive understanding. The more you think, the more you want to express it through scribbling. The more you scribble, the more you diversify. The more you read the "scribblings," the more you see the unforeseen, The more you see, the more you produce, The more you produce, the more you become understand the sense of self, and that charts a course to mastering the craft of austerely distinct styles. I said the word" scribble" to connect it to the first ways humans tried to pass data from one generation to the other.