ZKM goes India
An overview of ZKM activities in the country of technologies

- Duration
- 2017
ZKM has been active in India since January 2017. With its expertise in digital change, it is acting as a driving force, an idea platform and important communicator between culture and new technologies.
The »Kala Ghoda Arts Festival« is Indians largest multicultural festival which takes place every year in February. During the »Kala Ghoda Arts Festival« works will be shown in the Open Codes laboratory in the Max Mueller Bhavan Gallery. The ZKM | Karlsruhe will transform the exhibition space together with Karlsruhe Entropia e.V. and local artists and hackers into a multifunctional code and media art laboratory.
The ZKM operates as a kind of ambassador for the city of Karlsruhe. It strengthens the city's international relations and Karlsruhe's profile as a location for innovation.
Over five days, Shri Arnab Chatterjee and Shri Apurba Biswasis met experts from the ZKM curator team, from the ZKM museum technology as well as from the museum communication. They not only dealt intensively with the exhibition experiment »Open Codes«, but also visited the laboratory for antiquated video systems.
The Nehru Science Centre Mumbai attracts around 750,000 visitors annually. A total of around 500 interactive objects from the fields of science and technology are exhibited there.


The winning team of the »Coding Culture Hackathon« was not the only guest at ZKM coming from Mumbai in May 2018. The exhibition experiment »Open Codes« also prompted a prospective museum founder and a student of »Machine Learning« to make the long jouney from Mumbai to experience the exhibition and the ZKM. How they experience the exhibition can be read in our magazine:
A travel version for India
A total of fifteen installations were selected for the exhibition in the Goethe-Institut Mumbai.
The works relate to India and have been partially adapted, for example the ZKM production »Genealogy of Digital Code« additionally contains important Indian developments and events. Language-based works, such as »Lost in Computation« by Jonas Eltas, are now available not only in digital codes and in English, but also in Hindi.

In Mumbai, too, admission to the exhibition is free as well as the diverse program of events and workshops in cooperation with numerous local players.
Read more in our magazine

Coding Culture
A cultural data hackathon
The hackathon built a pre-running event for the exhibition »Open Codes. Digital Culture Techniques«, already addressing this topic of the exhibition of digital code as a new cultural technique.


The conference focused on the exchange between advanced research, for example in the areas of technology, sustainability, globalization, bio-medicine and start-ups, as well as on representatives of venture capital, who are developing new economic models in this field.
The conference also brought the start-up regions of Maharashtra, Baden-Württemberg and Israel into a lively dialogue and offered a platform for young Indian startups and artists to network with international companies.
With its contributions, the ZKM provided impulses for innovative questions from the perspective of art and creativity in connection with technology. As part of the conference, it organized the exhibition »Art & Science« in the Nehru Center Mumbai with thematically corresponding installations from the ZKM collection.
