Inside A Bengaluru Playground For Experimental Sound, New Media, & Creative Collaboration

Home to artists, coders, fabricators, sound designers, and researchers, Walkin Studios has become a hub for experimentation in art and technology.
Promotional images for Walkin Studios
The non-profit, artist-run studio focuses on new media, art and technology, and collaborative forms of artistic practice.Walkin Studios
Published on
4 min read
Summary

Walkin Studios is a Bangalore-based artist-run non-profit that brings together artists, technologists, researchers, designers, and makers working across new media, sound, technology, performance, and installation art. Through residencies, exhibitions, workshops, and collaborative projects, the space supports experimental practices exploring themes such as ecology, labour, memory, artificial intelligence, media systems, material culture, and sonic environments, while providing artists with shared tools, technical resources, and a community-oriented framework for interdisciplinary experimentation.

Bangalore’s, Walkin Studios has spent the last several years building a space where artists, technologists, makers, researchers, and experimenters can work together across disciplines. The non-profit, artist-run studio focuses on new media, art and technology, and collaborative forms of artistic practice. Walkin describes itself as a place interested in the complexities of the present and the relationship between people and their environment, which runs through everything they do, from artist residencies and exhibitions to workshops, sound experiments, and large-scale installations.

Walkin is run by media artists, spatial sound designers, coders, metal fabricators, DIY hardware hackers, and art managers who share tools, knowledge, and resources. Artists working at the space have access to metal and wood workshops, projectors, sound equipment, books, production networks, and technical support. The residency programme welcomes both independent artists and those supported by cultural institutions, creating opportunities for experimentation that move across art, technology, sound, sculpture, performance, and research. Collaboration is central to the studio's philosophy, and many of the projects developed there emerge through collective processes of testing, building, and learning.

Wetspace Noise Drips 4.0, a gathering dedicated to experimental sound and multichannel sonic practices, developed by Cynk Collective, has evolved over several editions through rehearsals, shared learning, and collective exploration. The latest iteration brought together artists working with DIY electronics, custom-built synthesizers, computer-based systems, photography, site-responsive sound, and performance. Built around a multichannel sound setup, the project treated listening, composing, and performing as communal activities, allowing artists to explore how sound moves through space and how audiences experience it physically.

The exhibitions and installations associated with Walkin reveal the breadth of artistic concerns the space supports. Vineesh Amin's NOW explored time through the rhythms of the human body. Using the heartbeat as a living measure, the work proposed time as an embodied entity that is constantly changing, shaped by physical activity, emotions, surroundings, and individual experience. Every body here becomes its own clock, producing a temporal experience. Around the same time, artist Sagarika Sundaram presented sculptural textile works made from raw wool and natural dyes. Through a painstaking process of dyeing, tearing, layering, compressing, and cutting fibre, she created forms that appear to split open from within, exposing hidden pockets and embedded structures. Her works move between containment and emergence, giving physical shape to internal pressures and transformations.

Questions around media, technology, and contemporary belief systems appear in Lucie Freynhagen's video installation CONTENT CONTENT – The Puja. Designed for public space, the project borrowed visual languages associated with propaganda, advertising, consumer culture, and technological promises. The work reflected on how images, media systems, and digital culture shape desires, expectations, and collective fantasies. By layering these references together, Freynhagen created an installation that asked viewers to think about the promises attached to technology and the ways those promises influence public life.

Several projects also engaged directly with social and political realities. Indonesian artist Zalman Farizy's Manacles They Gifted focused on migrant labour camps in the Middle East. Drawing from his own experience as a third-generation migrant worker, Farizy transformed the gallery into a sensory environment that confronted audiences with lives often hidden from public view. The installation connected personal history with broader systems of labour, migration, and economic dependence. Another ambitious project, Convivial Commons Congress, imagined how non-human actors could participate in collective decision-making through artificial intelligence. Developed by teams in Bangalore and Berlin, the installation created a speculative congress where AI systems represented different environmental actors using sensor data, scientific models, and public datasets. Decision-making became something visible and material, expressed through spatial relationships, negotiations, and forms of alignment.

Memory, disappearance, and intimacy surfaced in Arivu Ilango's Before It Fades. The exhibition consisted of tiny portraits printed on heat-sensitive thermal paper, a material that gradually fades over time. Taken over several months at Forplay Society, the images documented people and events that passed through the space. Because the prints are already disappearing, viewers must move physically closer to see them. The work turns attention toward the fragile nature of memory and the traces left behind by encounters and relationships. A similar attention to overlooked materials appears in Amyth Venkataramaiah's Junk.wav, a sound sculpture built from scrap plastic, scrap metal, and discarded objects. Transforming waste into musical instruments, the project explored the hidden sonic possibilities of materials that have been thrown away while encouraging audiences to rethink ideas of value, consumption, and reuse.

Across its projects, Walkin Studios operates as a laboratory for artistic experimentation where sound, technology, ecology, labour, memory, and material culture intersect. Whether through fading photographs, AI governance experiments, multichannel sound environments, sculptural textiles, or instruments made from scrap, the studio continues to support artists who are finding new ways to understand the world and our place within it.

Follow Walkin Studios here.

logo
Homegrown
homegrown.co.in