Profile:
Prathima Muniyappa is a Designer, Conservator and a research assistant for the Space Enabled research group. She is a PHD candidate in the Media Arts and Sciences at the Media Lab. She is interested in addressing issues of social justice, democratic access for historically marginalized communities and enabling indigenous agency. Her research investigates alternative cosmologies and cultural ontologies for their potential to contribute to emerging discourse on techno-imaginaries in the realm of space exploration, synthetic biology and extended intelligence.
Prior to coming to MIT, she completed a Masters in Design Studies in Critical Conservation at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard under a Fulbright Scholarship. In investigating traditional indigenous knowledge, practices and folkways for conservation, her design research on Sacred groves and alternative forest practices’ assumes complete synergy between the constructed categories of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and leverages the philosophy of non-duality as an operational paradigm. It achieves this synergy by investigating cultural identity as an ecological manifestation.
Research:
In Crew 292 Mangalyaatra Clare will undertake the role of the artist in residence, utilising their time to explore the venn diagrams of art, ritual indigenous cosmology and space exploration. These strains of ideas will manifest as a performance piece, drawn from the maasai cosmology, a creation tale begins when the god, Enkai gave his third son a long herder’s stick and a rope by which cattle slid down to earth from space, a cosmologic that de-seats human centrality and dominance and introduces narratives of non human mastery in space based journeying. This piece will explore how these cosmologies incite one to terraform the self before terraforming the cosmos, for consecrating space rather than desecrating space.