Pravin Pillay — Immersive Media Artist

Salish Sea Dreaming

The Salish Sea does not need to be explained. It needs to be felt.

Salish Sea Dreaming brings illustration, marine photography, underwater film, sound, and real-time systems into a living environment where herring, salmon, birds, and whales appear not as separate subjects, but as movements within an interdependent continuum.

First presented within Digital Ecologies as a Proof of Experience and developed as a prototype for Indigenomics IMPACT, the work is evolving toward an immersive dome experience. Coast Salish artist Austin Aan’yas Harry’s visual language is woven into the generative environment, shaped and reshaped by the living presence of the Salish Sea.

• Spatial narrative
• Generative visuals
• Ecological data
• Biosonification
• Collaboration

The Dreaming: Hyperobject108

The Dreaming: Hyperobject108 is a distributed experiential system composed of installation nodes interwoven across a site. Each experience node hosts a work contributed by an XR artist; together, these distinct works form a networked, site-specific experience. Interactive sound, projection-mapped visuals, and real-time environmental or biometric data create an ambient sensory field through which participants move.

Presence subtly changes the work. At the final node—the “inner sanctum”—participants discover that they have not only witnessed the installation, but actively shaped the live generative sonic layer underpinning the whole experience. The work is both system and ceremony: modular, scalable, and distinct at every site.

• Distributed experience
• Projection mapping
• Spatial sound
• Audience agency
• Real-time systems

the rain is the river is the ocean

the rain is the river is the ocean is a love poem to Premilladevi Pillay—dancer, poet, educator, feminist, and Pravin Pillay’s mother. As a teenager in apartheid South Africa, she performed Bharatanatyam at an illegal Black Sash gathering, transforming the otherness imposed on her into an invitation to encounter.

Her poetry, art, and image archive flow through a nonlinear mixed-reality performance in which movement becomes rain, river, mist, and ocean. Dance, real-time projection, live voice, and sonic improvisation transform the water cycle into a meditation on impermanence: the body moving through memory, mortality, resilience, and the thresholds between life, death, and rebirth.

Presented at the Tidemark Theatre in Campbell River in 2023, the sixty-minute work was created by Pravin Pillay (creative direction and emerging media), Prem Pillay (poetry and dance), Ruby Singh (co-direction, music, and poetry), Naomi Jason (dancer and choreographer), John Desnoyers-Stewart (interactive media), and Chris Jordan (photography).

• Bharatanatyam
• Dynamic Auto-Responsive Animation
• Intergenerational collaboration
• Poetry and live sound
• Memory and resilience

Différance Engine

Différance Engine (the Narcissus Pool) was developed with graduate students at the Human Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Saskatchewan. Sensors activated a servo-mounted infrared surveillance camera; once a viewer entered the frame, an early artificial-intelligence system tracked their eyes and marked them with a red rectangle.

That live image was mixed with altered footage from the Vietnam War and an audio loop combining white noise, the fetal heartbeat of Pillay’s unborn son, and the words “the war can never end.” The work emerged from his experience monitoring conflict zones with Médecins Sans Frontières and from the dissonance between the horror of war and the peace his son was likely to inherit in Canada.

• Human-computer interaction
• Artificial intelligence
• Robotic vision
• Surveillance
• Memory and conflict

afraid of what i could become

afraid of what i could become / eegostaman dha wheyteegoeean is an immersive installation in which four-channel video, twenty-eight photographs, text, voice, and music hold several histories in relation. Pravin Pillay’s memories of Rwanda before the 1994 genocide and the death of his grandmother Amma meet Cree poet and video artist James Nicholas’s experience as a residential school survivor and Cree oral histories carried through Joys Dancer’s song. The work asks how the effects of genocide travel through bodies, families, lands, and generations—and whether bearing witness can become a movement out of denial and toward recognition.

Created collaboratively by Pravin Pillay, James Nicholas, Sandra Semchuk, and Joys Dancer, the installation grew through dialogue and shared authorship. Pillay originated the concept and edited the video; Nicholas co-narrates; Semchuk created the photographs and video images; and Dancer composed the music.

First presented at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon and later at Urban Shaman in Winnipeg, the work toured nationally across Canada for over two decades and is now held in the permanent collection of Remai Modern. Semchuk received a 2018 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

• Immersive installation
• Collaborative practice
• Photography and four-channel video
• Memory and witnessing
• Genocide and intergenerational trauma
• Cree oral history