Prayas Abhinav

Prayas is a writer and artist working and living in Bangalore, India. He has an interest in re-vitalizing and re-imagining urban spaces. Through his work he explores how public and semi-public spaces can be utilized for cultural and civic uses. He explores the potential of low-fi technologies to connect communities and resources.

He has been part of efforts to seed open content movements in India and in 2007 helped launching the Creative Commons India licenses in India. In 2007, he also initiated a long-term engagement with urban food systems by using public-spaces to grow vegetables and make them openly accessible through recipe-based maps. In 2008, he spent a month at Khoj Workshops to work on modular toolkits for anarchic protests in cities. In 2006 he made a short film with the Public Service Broadcasting Trust in which he narratively mapped the spaces which the homeless in Mumbai use to sleep at night. In 2005, as a fellow at Sarai-CSDS, he responded to the way urban spaces were used for advertising through poetry and photographs.

Projects are documented at:

http://prayas.in + http://cityspinning.org