It is often noted that life imitates art and Bengaluru is not a stranger to art in its most unique and innovative forms. This weekend, life itself is presented as a natural form of existence, offering yet another perspective to the city’s audiences through art. The debut edition of The Sixth Sense festival, a unique multidisciplinary festival, features different dimensions of art, music, technology and nature — finding their way into the spotlight. As founder Roshan Netalkar, who also founded the popular music fest Echoes of Earth, highlights, “nature’s intelligence is the guiding principle behind the curation of The Sixth Sense.”
Roshan also expresses the significance of, “engaging with technology, positioning it not as a passive medium but as a tool for awareness, learning and meaningful connection” through this fest. New media artist Rahul Sharma, who displays the shared grammar between forms of life and nature across varied scales, Bharat Raj Thukral founder of multidisciplinary art studio Dasien Lab and alternative electronic music artiste Panelia, who has a unique set planned, discuss what’s in store!
Tell us about your performance slated for next week. What can we expect from it in terms of the themes that guide the curation of your playlist?
There’s a lot of new music from the upcoming album that I’ll be performing for the first time, especially the quieter, more soundscape-driven pieces. The theme, as always, remains deeply individualistic; the core of this project is sharing my thoughts unapologetically and unfiltered. Storytelling is important to me and I try to bring that into every performance itself.
How is your set going to mirror the festival’s immersive experience structure? Anything unique?
I wouldn’t say unique, but yes, experiences like these can often feel cerebral, unconventional and, at times, otherworldly. My idea is to bridge this gap and build a human connection with the structure, as if it expresses the music through lights and their intensities.
What is your showcase going about?
Mycelial Sky is an immersive canopy that makes the hidden intelligence of fungal mycelial networks visible by inverting an underground system into an atmosphere above the visitor. Threaded with a network of responsive light, it behaves like a single living organism, distributed, non-hierarchical and constantly sensing.
As audiences move beneath it, proximity to embedded nodes triggers a heightened ‘stress response’ — pulses intensify and spread across the canopy, as if the ecology is registering disturbance. In this interpretation, the human body is not neutral; it is treated as a potential threat, activating defensive rhythms and signalling through the network. When visitors step back, the canopy gradually returns to a calmer equilibrium. The work invites playful wonder while sharpening ecological awareness: presence has consequence and recovery takes time.
How is the artwork encouraging the visitors to move beyond just veiwing — to interact with it and learn behind the science of it all?
Mycelial Sky is designed so that science is learned through metaphor, not instruction. These systems are distributed, sensing and responding through countless connections and the installation performs that logic in real time as the canopy shifts when bodies move near its nodes. The work is called Mycelial Sky to point toward a lesser-known idea — fungal life also participates in the making of weather, as spores and biological particles can seed atmospheric processes that contribute to cloud formation. Visitors leave with a felt understanding that ecology is not background, it is an active, networked intelligence that extends from soil to sky.
What is your showcase going to be about? How are you planning to engage with the audience?
Isomorphic Fields investigates how the same organisational patterns emerge across vastly different scales — from microscopic neural networks and fungal mycelium to river systems, urban formations and galactic structures. The installation transforms viewers from observers into co-creators. Through movement and presence within the space, participants actively generate and influence these pattern formations in real-time. Their gestures, proximity and collective behaviour become part of the underlying system, allowing them to experience firsthand how individual actions contribute to larger emergent structures.
Given the spectacle nature of the art, how do you ensure audiences do not just experience but also educate themselves on the science behind this presentation?
This piece offers a different kind of education — one rooted in embodied experience rather than direct instruction. By becoming active participants in these emergent systems, audiences don’t just observe scientific principles — they live them. When someone’s gesture ripples across scales to influence cosmic formations, or when collective movement generates mycelial networks, they develop a deeper, more intimate relationship with nature’s underlying organisational logic.
INR 1,499 onwards. On till February 22. Alembic City, Whitefield.