Symposium Spotlight: Nishra Ranpura

Interviewed on February 21, 2026.

Who are you and where are you located?
My name is Nishra Ranpura. I am an interdisciplinary artist, creative technologist, researcher, and educator based in Austin.

When did you first start working with time based/ Interactive Media?
I first started working with interactive media in 2021, learning through creative coding, 3D animation, digital fabrication, and electronic textiles (e-textiles).

What inspires your work?
My creative practice being rooted in traditional crafts and informed by emerging technologies and futures studies inspires me to explore interdisciplinary interactions and languages, crafted machines, and embodied interfaces, through experimental and speculative narratives.

Tell us a little more about your work for the symposium?
My work for the symposium is ongoing research on regenerating the embodied knowledge of Bharatanatyam through multisensory technologies and Machine Learning. It centers the artist and the artform’s embodied perspective over external or audience viewpoint by embedding sensors into culturally significant accessories adorned while dancing. Inertial motion capture, integrated through these ornaments, honors their ritual and material significance while transforming them into living interfaces. In this process, machine learning functions less as an analytic tool and more as a form of digital muscle memory, absorbing, reflecting, and reanimating the embodied rhythms of the dance.

Do you have any current projects that you're working on that you would like to share?
I am working on designing interfaces as material storytelling systems between people and machines, often through weaving, sound, and computation. ‘The Weaver’ is a multisensory installation that examines the embodied relationship between the weaver and the loom using computer vision, motion tracking, and generative sound. 'Tapestreet: The Fabric of NYC’ translates the city’s open data sets about street names into digitally woven tapestries that narrate neighborhood histories through textile and music structures. Alongside these, ‘Metroloom’ was a workshop that invited participants to materialize personal subway stories into woven tokens using binary code, reflecting on weaving’s historical connection to computation and early analog technologies. Across these works, I investigate how interfaces can give physical form to stories by weaving words, data, and movement into tactile and participatory experiences.

What brought you to the New Media Caucus?
I have long followed the work and practices of many inspiring creatives, and I found myself repeatedly encountering the New Media Caucus through their projects and collaborations. Seeing how the NMC fosters thoughtful dialogue around art, technology, and culture made me want to be part of that conversation.

Where can we follow your work?
http://nishraranpura.com