India’s first arts hackathon, Confluence Ideathon 2021 x Serendipity Arts Foundation, has announced the winners from thousands of applications received worldwide. The project had also partnered with a host of premier educational institutions from across the world including The Royal College of Arts London, Birmingham City University, IIM Ahmedabad, IIT Roorkee, IIM Visakhapatnam, IIM Bodh Gaya, IIM Amritsar, IIT Roorkee, BML Munjal University, NIFT Kannur and industry bodies like AIMA and more.
The ideathon was created to identify and crowdsource new and innovative solutions for the upcoming Live Museum in Delhi NCR (covering performing, visual, culinary, film, and literary arts), and the winners across five categories included:
ART x Technology: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay has won for his project Dhvāni, an AI-Driven interactive media sculpture that highlights ideas around networks and our inter-connectivity. ART x Environment: UnEarth who presented a project which rethinks the way we see architecture. ART x Social Behaviour: Team Neev who presented a project titled Art Scrabble to offer collaborative and confidence-boosting experiences/ activities that will foster human connections and make the museum a centre of human interaction. ART x Design for the Future: Whoastudio, from Malaysia for their project titled Sigh of Hope. ART x Business Models: Atypical Advantage, who developed a model for a new arts ecosystem that helps generate an economic reward for artists and creative professionals.
All shortlisted participants received a Certificate of Participation and the winners in each category received a Certificate of Merit. The top three winners in each of the five domains were rewarded with a cash prize of Rs. 1 lakh for the 1st position, Rs. 50,000 for 2nd position and Rs. 20,000 for the 3rd position. The top 3 ideas will also get access to a ₹10 crore ($1.3m) cumulative incubation fund.