Spryk aka Tejas Nair. Photo: British Council
The way Mumbai artist Spryk, aka Tejas Nair, sees it, most AI-generated visuals feel like an illusion and perhaps, even like magic.
He explains, “It looks mind-blowing at first, but if you pay closer attention, you can start seeing the gaps clearly.” It made him deep dive into street magic and its history in India, with his research leading him to create a new audio-visual show called Neural Natak, which debuts at the British Council’s Creative Convergence gathering in Bengaluru on Nov. 6, 2025.
In development for about a year now, the conceptual show only picked up steam in the last four to six months. It will now play out at the Bangalore International Centre as an audio-visual performance that reimagines generative AI as a present-day street magician. He says about the inspiration, “Outputs from AI today, to me, feel a bit like it’s replicating these magicians. Executing movements faster than the eye can see at its first glance, or grand gestures carefully planned to shock and awe, and visual trickery that blows your mind, making you believe that anything is possible.”
Spryk — whose 2024 EP Afterglow explored the intersection of human emotion and artificial intelligence— says he’s been experimenting with Gen AI systems for a couple of years now, finding the way that neural networks work “quite fascinating.” He adds, “I think so much of modern AI is being designed and trained to closely emulate human behavior. However, what makes human creativity unique is not just knowledge but lived experiences. The emotional depth that we feel and can create through the things we make just can’t be felt by a machine. That is the essence that inspired this project.”
The 50-minute Neural Natak show, which unfolds as a short film with a complementary soundtrack, is created from a mix of “traditional and cutting-edge processes,” according to the artist. In addition to working with go-to visual collaborator EyeAmSid, the visual identity and branding comes from artist Madhav Nair aka Deadtheduck, who has made a series of illustrations and typography to tie the entire project together. From Adobe Premiere Pro for sequencing and visual modules to Touch Designer, Spryk says they’ve used tools like Nano Banana and Higgsfield Soul, along with open-source models like Wan, and newer, more commercial models like Veo 3.1 by Google & Sora 2 by OpenAI for image and video generation. “We’ve sourced and curated openly available archival footage and broken the show into five parts that tell the whole story,” he adds.
There’s been a deliberate inclination towards older models of Gen AI, the artist says. “They just seem to have more machine memory-like characteristics,” he explains.
For the music, Spryk will be on stage to trigger, effect, loop, chop, and remix elements throughout the show. Always a roving mind when it comes to genres, Neural Natak will bring in varied sounds that don’t conform to any particular genre. “Individual compositions could fall under several genres of electronic music featuring strong motifs of Indian classical and folk music,” he says.
It’s given him a chance to add elements that never made it to a Spryk show before. “The show has a unique soundtrack in that, unlike my previous shows, this one also features character voiceovers, narration, and lots of foley sounds,” he says. He’s played the high-energy sets at festivals like Lollapalooza India earlier this year, but he’s aware that this is a different room altogether. “The fact that this show was made for an auditorium with a captive and seated audience allows for it to be structured very differently and also lets me play a lot with silence,” he adds.
Though it’s meant to be more of a live show experience, the music from the project might be released as tracks or an EP. The guiding idea has been the concept of “techno-magic” in Neural Natak. “That refers to when technology behaves like magic. With that in mind, the sound for this project also has a mix of industrial sounds along with lighter, more ephemeral ‘magic’-like elements,” Spryk says.
At the core of it, Spryk treats Neural Natak as another step in his “restless hunger to learn and experiment” and not get too comfortable. It’s been important for him as an artist to explore new technology at a time when “technological progress has always rushed in faster than we can envision or prepare.” He adds, “A lot of it is messy and controversial, so I think it’s important that we actually engage more directly – and hopefully that helps structure new creative tools in a more responsible way.”
With this first show now developed and ready to go, Spryk says he’s in conversations with venues across India and the world to further evolve Neural Natak. That might also involve collaborations with the street performance community. He says, “[We’re looking to] traditional puppet artists, magicians, and folk performers to evolve this into something larger — potentially a touring production or even a festival commission.”
Register to watch Spryk’s ‘Neural Natak’ show at the British Council presents Creative Convergence 2025 here.
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