Nusrat Mahmud, Co-Founder of BUREAU 555
We are just reflecting on a packed few days after our Digital Musings event at the V&A. Bureau 555 in collaboration with Brihatta Art Foundation participated in the Digital Design Weekend program as part of London Design Festival in a space-based interactive exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The aim of this exhibition was to establish a meaningful connection between traditional artisanal processes (woodblocks of jamdani motifs & clay modelling), people, and technology (3D objects & AR) in the current environment that requires reflection on the past, present, and future.We had three demonstrations designed to take you from a physical tactile activity and guide your through into a digital experience.
>Interactive block printing activity using traditional jamdani motifs.
>Live digitisation of block prints and motifs onto our specially created AR objects: Tepa putul (traditional Bangladeshi doll), a rainbow and a tree.
>Live modeling of a clay Tepa Putul which participants could then take home.
Some key highlights from the 3 days:
– Seeing the public from age range <2 years old to 82 years old take part and interacting with the printing, AR fun & modeling.
– Meeting a number of attendees from Sylhet who said they remembered making the Tepa Putul (dolls) from clay during their childhood.
– Getting the chance to explain the importance of the jamdani motifs and why these 200 motifs need to be documented, preserved and also given life within a digital space (thank you siafur)
– This was a lot of people’s first experience of using AR so watching everyone’s faces light up when they realised they could play with and manipulate the objects in their own environment through their phone was fantastic.
We would like to express our gratitude to the Victoria & Albert Museum and London Design Festival for giving us the opportunity to take in the exhibition.
We would also like to thank the whole team in London; Bishwajit Goswami (for his calm guiding force) Regina Jiang & Raffat Walid Saddat and Dhaka Ashim FaiazRokeya jinnat HafsaNafis AhmedMathious D rozarioNusrat J. and Ashrafia Adib for the fantastic collaboration. Our intern Hanaa Azhar-Yusuf was a total superstar, big thanks to the staff from the V&A especially Marc Barto who worked so hard to make the 3 days a success. We are waiting for numbers but we ran out of 300 flyers half way through Day 2!
