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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 through a transdisciplinary approach. 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 began in 2015 as a response to the lack of art galleries and experimental platforms in Bengaluru. Founded in artist and curator Vivek Chockalingam's studio with Renuka Rajiv, Avril Stormy Unger, and Amyth Venkataramaiah helping to initiate the space, it grew steadily over the next few years before registering as a non-profit organisation. As an artist-run space, Walkin has continued to evolve with changing people, contexts, and ideas. Today, it 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, while the residency programme welcomes both independent artists and those supported by cultural institutions, creating opportunities for experimentation across art, technology, sound, sculpture, performances, and research.
The current core team includes Amyth Venkataramaiah, Kaldi Moss, and Vineesh Amin. Since sound was a shared thread across their individual practices, they started developing audio-visual experiences that brought their different skills into a single creative process. which eventually led to the formation of the CYNK Collective. "When a group decides to create together, the ideas can grow, the technical possibilities increase, and we create with a collective imagination," notes Vivek. The same spirit of collaboration continues to shape Walkin, where many projects 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. Kerala-based 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. The studio regularly takes its projects to different cities and was most recently part of the Kochi Biennale. The team has also designed two new programmes for the near future: Wetspace Noise Drips and Walkin Lab. Wetspace Noise Drips explores sound in all its capacities through two-day gatherings featuring spatial audio installations, deep listening sessions, and shared sound experiences. Walkin Lab is a mini residency that brings together 10 to 15 artists to collaborate, create new work, learn from one another, and present works in progress. "We plan to take these around India and expand our community of artists interested in these areas across the country," shares Vivek. "Sort of finding more tribe members and exchange processes; ideas and dreams."
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