Rohit Gupta (born April 9, 1976) is a polymath and inventor based in India. A practitioner of post-Gandhian psychogeography, Gupta sat as one of the judges for the 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize. Of late, he goes by his internet pseudonym - DJ Fadereu and mixes computational art and live performance. His fiction and non-fiction was published widely in journals since 2000, followed by the E-author 1.0 Award. Gupta wrote India's first SMS novel, and invented trancewriting - writing for days without pause or sleep. A popular newspaper columnist, he dropped out from mainstream journalism and started writing comics and blogs. During the December 2004 tsunami, Gupta was in the news after publishing on a blog the SMS text messages sent by some friends in Sri Lanka, which proved to be critical information. At the same time, he designed a system known as "Alert Retrieval Cache" (ARC) for automated reception and delivery of SMS messages in disaster situations. The ambitious project met an early failure and was abandoned. In 2005 Gupta founded AlgoMantra, a research lab to investigate artistic and ludic uses of self-aware technology in Mumbai. The research philosophy deals with networked kreeda, ludic raga & tantric kulture using algorithmic techniques fused with Indic and tantric practices. The first technical work on exhibit from this lab was Cellphabet-'I can walk in English', a mobile software that converts the user's patterns of walking into plain English using cell tower ID tracking. The demo involved walking non-stop for 7 hours, to write the first three words. On 3rd November 2007, AlgoMantra demonstrated capabilities of their interactive table named Parab0xx. Using a laptop, a webcam and an overhead projector, the laboratory showed a cheap optical interaction system comparable to far more expensive (using touch-sensitive technology) counterparts like Microsoft Surface and ReacTable.
Education
Gupta graduated with a B.Tech(Chemical Engineering) in 1999 from the presitigious Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
Bibliography
- Play On Edward & Other Stories (Embassy Books)
- The Doppler Effect, a free online comic-book.
- OrganicPoetry
External links
- Personal Website
- BBC Radio 5 Live: Audio mp3 of interview about Cellphabet with Chris Vallance(5.5MB, 6min)
- Voice of America: On legal bullying by Indian media
- NPR with Clark Boyd: On 2004 Tsunami Coverage by SMS
- Article by Gupta on Wikipedia, in USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review
