Mohar Kalra (USA)

Mohar Kalra is an American artist and researcher who creates interactive artworks that offer unexpected interfaces to the commonplace. In the process, he explores how we reflect and are reflected in the technological, biological, ecological and digital systems that scaffold our lives. Currently, he is interested in reframing future technological networks as if they were an extension of and conversant with local ecology, reconnecting us to natural networks around us rather than separating us from them.

At NART, he is developing a workshop series around adapting Estonian folklore to design DIY machines as more humanistic and intimate technologies to accompany us in our daily lives. He is also designing an outdoor installation around a public WiFi hotspot that will offer a form of shelter for human users as well as for local birds and wildlife, expanding the number of perspectives interacting with a conventionally human technology.

His residency at Narva is supported by a Mortimer Hays-Brandeis Travelling Fellowship.