Code World: Inside Cursorama and Non-Linear’s surreal, living landscapes
Artists Cursorama and Non-Linear are coding new worlds with pixelated oceans, bionic flowers and otherworldly beings
This is an underwater adventure like no other. And you don’t need a wetsuit or a snorkel to dive in. No need to hold your breath either. Because the ocean here isn’t made of water. It is a 180-degree set with screens and a stage alive with swirling blobs and luminous particles that imitate waves, micro-organisms, and ocean currents. As they dance to electronic beats, the scene changes, taking you deeper into the ocean’s depths. On the way, you get a glimpse of the deep-sea life. Jellyfish, squid, and coral. Biolume, the art installation by Goa-based Yash Chandak (Cursorama) and Dennis Peter (Non-Linear), just won the 2025 The Future is Born of Art commission by BMW India and India Art Fair.
For many visitors, immersive, tech-heavy, interactive art is uncharted territory. We saw what the Van Gogh 360 show did: Visitors were swallowed up by sunflowers and wrapped in starry nights. Cursorama and Non-Linear take it a notch ahead. Their digital ocean reacts to you, like a real one would. Each step creates ripples, and the screens light up with new patterns when you touch them. You’re not just looking at the ocean, but virtually swimming in it.
New media art isn’t new. But because technology is not static, with each update, there’s room for more creativity in art too. For Cursorama, it reflects and offsets the isolating nature of our digital world. “Instead of screens pulling people apart,” he says, “digital experiences can be tangible, communal, playful, and human.” Biolume’s message is simple: our actions shape the environment. But its tone is joyful. At the exhibit, adults wave at tentacles on screens. Children dash across lit-up floors, giggling. Together, they inhabit a mini-world built from light, sound, and code.
World-Building
Chandak’s artist name, Cursorama, is a mashup of cursor and panorama. “The mouse pointer is the human in the computer world. Rama represents a spectacle. Together, it’s a human who builds worlds through computers,” he says. As a child, he was obsessed with video games. “At some point, I realised it was unhealthy and quit, but the fascination with interactive digital worlds never left me.”
He stumbled upon the world of live visuals while working for a design studio in Goa. His boss and mentor Avinash Kumar, founder of the media-arts festival Eyemyth, introduced him to the experimental tech-art scene. At Magnetic Fields in Rajasthan in 2024, along with his studio Ocupus, he transformed the 17th-century Alsisar Mahal into a kaleidoscope of pinks, purples, and geometric patterns, that moved to electronic beats. At the terrarium-themed Bellandur Social outlet that same year, he and his studio created permanent projections for the dome. The alien-esque creatures and glittering space crabs brought a touch of outer space to the place.
His most consuming project, Deranged Life, began as a live audiovisual performance at antiSocial RAVE (Radical AudioVisual Experience) 2024. Artists in lab coats poured liquids onto petri dishes to create flowing visuals, while AI morphed live sketches into mutated crabs, jellyfish and fungi. Large LEDs displayed hundreds of these half-tech, half-organic lifeforms, breathing and moving to the music. The project later evolved into a permanent installation at Budapest’s Cinema Mystica Museum. “That’s something I never imagined when starting out with the idea,” he says.
Coding Nature
If Cursorama is the visuals wizard, Peter aka Non-Linear handles sound and engineering. His nickname echoes his penchant for not thinking in the conventional way. But he’s obsessed with the patterns and geometry of nature and turns that fascination into code.
Take his 2023 project Flow. In a darkened room at Mumbai’s Sassoon Docks, he hung 159 custom-fabricated light fixtures, woven around columns and scaffolds. They lit up in a sequence designed to imitate the different flows of water, with an accompanying sound track. “Like the pitter patter of rain is softer, so there was white noise in the background. Then there’s the gushing of a river flow and the slow gentle oscillations of waves on the shore.” It’s pure ASMR – rain, ocean and river cascading overhead.
He’s had no formal training in engineering, and picked up his skills from YouTube and Reddit forums. For his 2022 piece Bionic Bloom, which was made in collaboration with Digital Intuition at the Crescent School of Architecture, he 3D printed 90 flowers that would “bloom” at the wave of a hand (thanks to a kinetic camera). In December, visitors at the Serendipity Arts Festival caught his work Transmissions Into The Void. It turned hand movements into sound and light. “It evokes the sensation of reaching across dimensions, physically touching sound itself,” he says.
Uncharted Territories
The two met seven years ago in Goa. The terrain they explore is uncharted. Non-Linear admits he often runs up against his own limits. Each project demands learning new skills and a fair bit of improvisation. At Lollapalooza India 2025, they created a hypnotic chamber for Johnnie Walker, along with The Bigfat Minimalist, Ocupus and 4x4 Experiences, shifting from precise grids to a galaxy of glowing dots that responded to viewers.
Biolume, however, “was one of the rare times we could write our own brief, build an imagined world, and have support to bring it to life,” says Cursorama. “It pushed me to think deeper about the narratives I care about and the ideas I want to express, rather than just responding to client needs.” Now, they are embracing slower, more independent practices, and taking extra time to experiment and explore. Let them cook.
From HT Brunch, September 27, 2025
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