Apple is moving beyond being just a tech company

The tech giant's new media initiatives are giving artists in India the tools to further hone their craft

Tech giant Apple has been successful over the years for several obvious reasons. One among these is that they’ve always offered products and services that align with their clear development strategy. Their design thinking is what connected Apple’s designers and customers, because of the emotion that was transferred. This was seen with the original Macintosh. American computer engineer Bill Atkinson, who was a member of the original Apple Lisa and Macintosh design teams at Apple Computer, once famously said “. . . There was an emotional connection . . . that I think came from the heart and soul of the design time.”

Apple has also been successful as it went beyond the focus of fashion, which many of its competitors thought was the most important. Their iPods, iPhones and Mac models not only looked sleek but were also made of great material. They wanted these sleek appearances to lead into a zeitgeist. They took this concept and went beyond it; they wanted to influence and make a stand. Their products definitely looked good, but they ran even better.

Design at the forefront

Over the decades, Apple has constantly reinvented itself, moving beyond being a tech company into one that uses tech to influence art, culture and society. But before we segue into a discussion on how Apple has been supporting visual artists in honing their craft, it’s important to spotlight the contributions made by Apple's former head of design—Jony Ive, who some consider one of the greatest living visual artists of all time, depending on who you talk to. Ive is responsible for remaking the visual culture for Apple’s image. 

It’s tempting to credit Steve Jobs alone when discussing Apple’s product line from the late 1990s to the early 2010s. However, the iPod, iPhone, MacBook, and other products resulted from a close collaboration between Jobs and Ive, with Ive coming up with many of the ideas and fine-tuning many others. According to Walter Isaacson, the author of Jobs’ 2011 biography, the two men had a “mind-meld” (an apt term for two die-hard sci-fi fans). Jobs took it more seriously, saying, “If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it’s Jony.”

Much has been written about the Bauhaus’ influence on Apple products, partly because Jobs never missed an opportunity to link the two. Ive was a big supporter of Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe’s mantra, “Less is more,” but drew inspiration from a broader range of styles. His original, translucent iMac case did for the PC what Richard Rogers’ Centre Pompidou did for the museum: he took an obscure, intimidating object, cut it open, and turned it into something playful and friendly. While the iMac was almost childlike, the iPhone exuded otherworldly mystery, evoking the monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A new initiative

So it is only natural that during a preview of the Apple store in Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC) in Mumbai (the first of its kind in India, along with the store in New Delhi’s Saket), the team announced a special initiative in support of the arts, a programme they call ‘Mumbai Rising’—running from opening day through the summer and bringing visitors, local artists, and creatives together. We’re told these sessions will offer hands-on activities with Apple’s products and services that celebrate the city’s local communities and cultures. It’s also a massive flex for a company supporting the visual arts in India recently with a slew of initiatives. Earlier this year, three multidisciplinary artists—Varun Desai, Mira Felicia Malhotra, and Gaurav Ogale showcased their artworks created on the iPad Pro at the India Art Fair as part of the Digital Artists in Residence programme. 

Guided by the theme “Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary”, Desai presented “Dimorphism,” a digital installation of code-generated video art, 3D LiDAR scanning, hand-drawn animation, and sound synthesis using synthesisers to iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil, as well as Mac Studio and Studio Display. Mumbai-based Illustrator Mira Felicia Malhotra brought idiosyncrasies of Indian families through her showcase titled “Log Kya Kahenge,” which translates to “What Will People Say?” The body of work is a set of family portraits that offer a look into the desire to conform to societal expectations and project a certain image for society to see using the Artivive Augmented Reality app on the iPad or iPhone. Digital artist and storyteller Gaurav Ogale turns nostalgia into art and makes his narratives leap off the page in motion by drawing frame by frame in Procreate, and then editing the video file on Adobe Premiere on a MacBook Pro, and layering in audio recordings taken on the iPhone 14.

Hands-on learning

With the ‘Mumbai Rising’ initiative, one can explore the illusionary world of anamorphic type with designer Aniruddh Mehta, known as @thebigfatminimalist on Instagram. In a hands-on session at the Apple BKC store, you can learn how to create and manipulate 3D lettering using the iPad and bring your Mumbai-inspired design to life in Augmented Reality. 

“In my session, I’ll be taking people through my creative journey and how I’ve learnt that playful experimentation does not be limited to one specific skill set or medium. My body of work has unintentionally covered multiple disciplines, and I’m excited to walk through it all and share my insights with the guests. Towards the end of my session, the audience will interact with some fun typography experiments in Augmented Reality that I’ve been working on,” says Mehta.

Artist duo Thukral and Tagra, part of Apple’s New World series in 2021, are also participating. Through their module, the idea is to create a story about the city and bring a unique perspective with selected words. It’s like writing a haiku, a short poem, which is then taken by an algorithm to knit specific images from the archive of their works. 

"We have always been using technology to bring something unique and allow our audiences to think beyond what is expected; our ideas of making a safe space and sharing are key here. We wanted to build something for thousands of people to explore and share something from the archive with a unique set of expressions. The narrative about the city is poetically devised under eight prompts: emotions, paradise, dreams, song, rain, speed, kaali peeli, and Bombay. The idea is to find collectively what city we live in and how we see it together," say the duo. 

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