Mrityunjay Chatterjee has extensive professional experience as a digital artist and web/print designer. With a background of working in media and information technology initiatives, for almost a decade he was part of the Sarai Media Lab, a programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi (www.sarai.net). He produced a range of experimental digital designs for internationally showcased cyber artwork and installations, and collaborated with a group of artists and researchers to create a series of hyperlinked CD artworks on the theme of media markets and the politics of information societies. These HTML projects included Global Village Health Manual (2000), Network of NoDes (2003) and Ectropy Index (2005). He also designed Sarai’s annual Hindi and English print and digital publications, as well as conference documentation on intellectual property and surveillance/censorship.
He was one of the initiator and worked extensively in Cybermohalla programme, a collaboration between Sarai-CSDS and Ankur Society for Alternatives in Education, with young people from urban neighborhoods, assisting with all aspects of their creative endeavours in old and new media formats, evaluating works, sharing ideas and dialogue and providing concrete design inputs. One of his major efforts is to ensure that the creative works emerging through collaborative practice circulate within the community. He has designed various media forms for locality-based interventions, including bioscope, murals/graffiti, machaan (raised platform for recitation of text/stories) and sound booth (a structure for recitation of texts/stories, but in which the speaker is not seen). He also focuses on interventions that help to create shared spaces in the community. With the young practitioners he conceptualizes, designs and executes artwork at public sites, including bus shelters, tea stalls, street corners, shops and chabutras (platforms for casual encounters).
He currently works for Ankur Society of Alternatives in Education (www.ankureducation.net), a Delhi-based NGO, as designer/design pedagogue on similar grounds as he was working in Cybermohalla.
Mrityunjay is deeply interested in the way urban landscapes are transformed under various historical and economic pressures, and in visualizing/rendering the corresponding cultural shift that occurs in public spaces in the face of such change. He has been exploring this subject with Sreejata Roy through installation-based work for the last four years (see Projects section of this page).
He is also presently involved in a Kolkata-based research project, “Study of Popular Media Art and Its Production and Distribution”, supported by the Indian Foundation for the Arts (IFA), Bangalore. This project emerged from his long-term fascination with and incorporation of popular print media forms in his design practices.