art
Micah Alex
I am a Designer, Researcher, and Artist exploring community, technology, archives, and alternative digital infrastructures.
researcher
artist
designer
khattamicah- a play on ‘khatta-meetha’ (sour-sweet) and Micah (meekah).
Recent
Threads
Speculation & Futures
Speculative work from places where the present is already hard: Antarsam, counter-design, and storytelling in Wayanad.
6 piecesArchives & Memory
Projects on who holds memory and on whose terms, from Milli and IIIF to a Dalit History Month editathon and community …
7 piecesSituated Practice
Place-based research from Bidar, Wayanad, rural Bihar, and Bangalore, accountable to the people it concerns.
8 piecesCommunity Infrastructure
Mesh networks in Karnataka, community audio, and tools for collectives: infrastructure that communities own and …
9 piecesTeaching & Making Together
A design studio, prompt cards, and film and Raspberry Pi work with young people, on teaching as a situated practice.
9 piecesWriting
art
Poems
A small collection of poems and reflections
Kim Tae-ri is my Shah Rukh Khan
What does it mean for me to become a fan
essay
33 going on 30 going on 13
How to feel like you are at the correct age
case study
Translategate: The ghost in the Machine
There is a ghost in Google Translate and it survived the AI era
How to do counter-UI/UX design
Interfaces help manipulate your sense of reality. As a designer/developer who is part of the plural "user" being …
How to simply set up IIIF images for your small archive
Setting up IIIF image hosting for a small archive with self-hostable tools: static tiles, BIIIF, Wax, Tropy with the …
UI/UX Design
project
Website Development - IIHS
A WordPress site for the Tamil Nadu Government's Sustainable Habitats programme, commissioned through IIHS, with …
Papad - Community Audio Knowledge Archives
Janastu's audio-archiving tool for community practitioners, deployed on village mesh networks in Tumkur and Channapatna; …
The Lived Experience Project
Work with Enable India and Design Beku on a co-created archive of the lived and organisational knowledge of officers …
Pune Covid Relief
A website and Glide app built with Design Beku and ICAN in 2021 to list hospitals, pharmacies, and volunteers for Pune …
Milli - Connect and Annotate your Archives
An open-source platform to connect and annotate archives with the W3C Web Annotation Standard, piloted on the NCBS …
Carpooling Unalone - Karwaan
A six-month classroom project researching carpooling in India, leading to Karwaan, a community-based ride-sharing app …
Research
Can you subvert YouTube's battle for your eyeballs?
I am going to analyse YouTube's homepage interface and investigate the potential impact of a extension called Dearrow in …
Illustrations and maps for of "Film City Urbanism in India"
Print-ready maps of Hyderabad's cinema halls from 1936 to 2018, made in Mapbox, QGIS and Inkscape for Yamini C. …
resource
South Asian Digital History
An open-source 'awesome list' on GitHub collecting web resources on the history of the digital in South Asia and the …
Speculative Storytelling in Wayanad
A 5-week course in Wayanad, Kerala after the 2018 floods: a stitched-tapestry storytelling tool made with Paniya …
talk
Milli Platform at International Archives Week
At International Archives Week 2021 I presented Milli's designs in a workshop on using W3C Web Annotation to layer …
docs
Mapping Migratory Routes of Pastoralists across India
Janastu project mapping seasonal migratory routes of pastoralist communities across India, combining GIS with …
Pedagogy
Portfolio - Workshops, Classes, Panels and Publications
A portfolio of workshops, classes, panels, and publications that I have organized, spoken at, and written for.
Seeing, Being, Doing: design
I co-taught a four-month course on responding as a creative practitioner to places where humans and non-humans gather, …
project
Jingle Tales
A Critical Code Recipes contribution documenting how Janastu let young women in Mirzapur customise their Raspberry Pi …
Kishori Film Festival
An 8-week media-literacy programme with Janastu for 11th-grade young women in Mirzapur, using Inshot and the Aamne Samne …
Art
Art that I make
Posters made for events and advocacy plus more personal paintings, collected across Flickr albums
Feeling through the Cities - Koramangala
A poem about my street in Koramangala, Bangalore: the night quiet, buffaloes passing at dawn, pourakarmikas, and …
art
Glitch Art
Glitch art made through color bending and data bending, a form of visual protest and stimming, part of a broader poster …
art
Graphics work
Posters, logos, explainers, and graphics made for community network initiatives, open-source collectives, magazine …