Devai is a short animated film directed by Enrique Agudo in the SCI-Arc Fiction and Entertainment studio. In India today, the aesthetics of the smart city, and the ambitions of global commerce and an internationally focused middle class, are stripping away the locally specific detail and character of the urban fabric. The film explores how some of these emerging technologies of the smart city can be repurposed to bring the spaces of the spiritual, ornamentation, detail and eccentricity back into the urban landscape. The rhetoric of the smart city as a system of optimization and efficiency is reimagined and those technologies that shape it are developed for their mythic potential.

DevAI is an augmented reality street festival through which we explore this universe. Here technology is a catalyst for metaphysical experiences, heavenly visions, otherworldly acid trips, and most importantly, a capsule of cultural preservation.