A Ritual of Generosity

A Ritual of Generosity is an augmented reality interactive that lets you draw a kolam in 3D space, through a device that’s already in your hands. Kolam is an everyday art form drawn early in the morning, outside the house or the temple in south India. The drawings get walked on, washed out by rain, blown away by wind, and made again the next day.

Showcased at

AWS Summit, Bangalore
April 2026

In association with

Unbox Cultural Futures, Antariksha Studio

A kolam is traditionally made from rice flour, to feed ants and insects and small birds. It’s one of the oldest forms of interspecies generosity still practised every day. The pattern is a welcome, an invitation for the gods and for whoever passes by.

The dot, string and knot system is built on a few extremely simple rules, and yet countless complicated kolam patterns can be drawn from them. Researchers have spent decades writing about their grammar, their sequences, the algorithms hidden inside them. But the women drawing them already know, in their hands, without equations or formulas, how to close that winding loop without leaving a single dot out.

This AR piece is a dedication to this ephemeral, meditative ritual that has been passed down through generations of families for centuries.