Microbial Memories is a reflection on the possibilities of microbiomes to be used as a form of cultural archive. Based on the emerging science linking microbiomes to terroir in wine and other foods, we imagine a future where we can capture place and time with the microorganisms living in that moment.
We initially presented this project as a submission in the 2020 Biodesign Competition, where we won the Science Sandbox Prize for Public Engagement.
We then developed a workshop with Genspace to further develop our research into speculative design and archival practices of man and nature.
“Nikhil Kumar presents life in New York City at the height of lockdown, from March through May 2020, from his bedroom in the Lower East Side. As ambulance sirens were going off seemingly every minute and the city descended into a kind of physical and spiritual sickness, Kumar found himself beginning to have strange dreams. These dreams are channeled into the music video, with violin, guitar, and sampling by the artist. “ - As described in Agora Magazine, Vol 1
I used a variety of techniques to make both the music and video. I collected thousands of images of skylines and fed them through a machine learning model to generate the morphing city skyline sequence, using RunwayML and the p5js coding language. I used a similar technique for the more abstract morphing sequences later in the video, this time feeding hundreds of images of myself from my iPhone library to train the ML model.
I coded custom visual effects in MAX/MSP/Jitter and applied those to stop motion sequences shot on iPhone/iPad from my apartment and around New York. I drew animations with rotoscoping in StopMotionStudio on my iPad. All of it was arranged in Adobe Premiere. On the music side, I played violin, guitar, recorded found sounds, and used samples, which I composed and produced in Ableton Live.
I use cooking as an opportunity to learn: about science; about cities and cultures, about my family history; about local ingredients and minimizing waste. Cooking is my medium of synthesis where ideas from different walks of life combine like the items in a recipe themselves.
In 2015 I became a professional chef and helped open Pondicheri Cafe in the Flatiron District in NYC. During my time in the kitchen, I not only continued to deepen my understanding of technique, I also saw the very real impact of labor policy and immigration law on our staff, urban design and city bureaucracy on the opening of the restaurant, sound pedagogy in training our team.
Since leaving the professional kitchen, I continue to run experiments at home, where I’m enjoying learning more about fermentation and the use of my (fairly impractical) centrifuge. And, as anyone who has traveled with me can tell you, I use food as my entry point into any city I visit as a way to see a representative cross section of its people.
Pictured here:
(1) Filleted and seared Bay Area Sardines, which were in a period of oversupply when I lived in Mountain View, CA in 2014, atop leftover Jasmine rice crisped and browned to form a crunchy exterior, dressed in a chili-garlic fish sauce inspired by Nuoc Cham, a common dipping sauce I absolutely loved on a trip to Hanoi.
(2) Cultured butter made from 2 of Pondicheri Houston’s local cream suppliers in Houston, TX. The darker yellow butter was made from milk produced by cows on a diet that included more grass than the lighter-colored butter. We used the buttermilk, a byproduct of making butter, to make chaas, a Gujurati spiced buttermilk drink.
(3) Orange peel urugai: an Indian relish/pickle made from the peel of the orange. My grandmother, pictured here, grows oranges in her backyard; she taught me this traditional Tamil preservation technique to ensure that every part of the orange could be used without waste.
(4) At Pondicheri, I got to explore the future of Indian food in America. In Houston, we used local ingredients but authentic regional Indian recipes, pointing the way towards an Indian American cuisine. In New York, we found different regional suppliers and included different recipes inspired by parts of India with climates more akin to NYC. Our menus were meant to align with the practices of Ayurveda, a sister science to yoga. And while the intellectual component to our food was interesting, the day to day involved rigorous manual work in the kitchen, utilizing a part of my brain and body that I did not often call upon while working in tech.
(5) My colleagues in the kitchen were often Central American immigrants, a stark reality of the food industry. Most kitchen staff are often without health insurance or stability in their shifts; working in the kitchen paints a much more accurate picture of the reality that many Americans face than the cushy halls of Silicon Valley. Taken together, however, I got to see firsthand what kind of divides permeate our labor market and hopefully developed a better empathy and intuition for the kinds of changes that could help improve these systems.
I began my professional career in 2010 as a teacher, where I taught Statistics, Pre-Calculus, AP Government and Economics at KIPP Houston High School as a Teach for America corps member. This followed years of volunteering in schools during high school and university, where I concentrated in Decision Processes- studying how people learn and make decisions- and began to develop a love for working with students and their families. After I left the classroom, I continued to work with students as a SEO Leadership Council member and mentor, and as a teacher with Citizen Schools.
I believe that students deserve safe, trusting environments where they can make mistakes, and that they learn best through application. While it requires careful planning and thoughtful feedback mechanisms, project-based learning is an important part of my teaching philosophy.
I’ll highlight 2 of the more substantial projects that my students undertook:
1) I taught the entire senior class Economics. As part of my curriculum, students had a semester-long project to work in teams of 4-5 to create a business plan for their own startup idea. At the end of the semester, students presented their work to a panel of professors and MBA students and the winning team won $1000 scholarships. Throughout the semester, students learned core concepts surrounding startups: everything from market analysis and customer segmentation to defining a core mission and values. The project pushed students to collaborate, improve their presentation skills and apply their understanding of economics in a tangible way. It pushed me as a second year teacher harder than anything else I did in order to plan the logistics with Rice University, fundraise for scholarships, organize MBA volunteers to be mentors, devise a grading rubric that gave found the balance between structure and flexibility, and find time for giving frequent feedback throughout the semester while also teaching “conventional” economics theory.
2) I co-taught an independent study elective with the AP Chemistry teacher called “Science Research and Innovation.” We paired 15 high-performing sophomores, juniors and seniors with a University of Houston chemistry researcher to help students prototype a pollution-absorbing paint that the students imagined and designed. I taught UX design principles alongside my co-teacher, who taught advanced chemistry research techniques. As part of our design curriculum, students read Design of Everyday Things and toured the Menil Collection as they prepared the physical presentation of their research.
Our students applied for the Lemelson-MIT Inventeam competition and were one of 15 teams to win in the country. While many of the other schools were elite private universities, our students predominantly came from low-income backgrounds. They presented their work at MIT to an audience that included the then-Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu. Read more about the students’ experience here.
I started playing violin when I was 3 and sat in orchestras through my childhood, playing western classical music across the cannon. When I got to college, I picked up a guitar for the first time and simultaneously loaded up Garageband. I re-discovered my love for playing music and truly began to appreciate the depth of the medium when I no longer only played other people’s music but began to put together my own.
Since then, I’ve treated making music as an opportunity to workshop experimental ideas— manipulating samples and vocals to bend into a new shape, using drone sounds or blues progressions or quotes from favorite historical figures in new context. I’ve also used it as a way to collaborate with friends new and old; rolling up to a recording setup with instruments and voices will never fail to produce endless fun (and often in our cases, at least 16 bars.)
Clarity - This track might not sound very experimental, but I tried out a couple of things that felt like experiments to me: 1) I recorded myself saying a few different sentences, chopping them up into smaller words or phrases, mapping those words and phrases to my midi controller then re-combining the samples to create new phrases and sentences. This shows up in the middle of the song. 2) I stripped a blues progression into a simple backbone for the track. Blues progressions are used as the foundation for so many songs. I wanted to add a variation that was not overt but still gave a familiarity to the track. 3) I sampled a Gandhi speech — I like to use historical figures and speeches to tie together some of the tracks I make. The Gandhi sample I found fit well with the phrases in the middle of the track.
Sketch - I made this beat while exploring Abelton Live. I ultimately decided to go back to using Logic Pro, but this process helped me think about how the software we use influences our musical expression. Maybe more importantly, I made this track in one sitting (and this and this, also one session tracks) to force myself to overcome analysis paralysis and focus on finishing projects.
Like Music - This one isn’t music, per say. As an undergrad student, I took a couple of film classes mainly as a way to work on music when there weren’t interested music courses being offered. One of my favorite ideas to explore was whether we could construct music in our minds without any sounds being played. Could a series of images, colors and textures given motion and rhythm evoke music in the eye of the viewer? While the film isn’t beautiful, the experiment was fun.
Sneak Attack - This was the first song I made to combine tracks from the OP-1, Logic’s software instruments, my live recorded violin. my friend’s vocals and a sample of a Michael Jordan interview. The track was recorded across multiple locations over a few months in fits and starts. All of this made it interesting to try to blend together these different sounds, textures and moods into a coherent whole.
While I was working at Coursera, one of the hats I wore was as the Partnerships team’s liaison to our engineering product team responsible for designing the future of our learning experiences on the platfrom. On the team, we thought about how we could redefine assessments and direct learning content (like lectures and readings) for the internet age. One of the ideas we returned to over and over was chunking learning units into smaller pieces that could fit into any block of time available to students.
When I decided to leave this dream job to pursue a different pipe dream of becoming a Chef, I didn’t want to stop thinking about designing new learning experiences. So- one of my closest friends on the Coursera engineering team, Jon, and I collaborated to build an app that tested out some of our concepts for building a bite-sized-learning interface for my new context in the kitchen.
When I became a chef, I spent 6 months training in the kitchen before leaping headfirst into helping open Pondicheri NY. As we got closer to the opening, I needed to hire a whole team of kitchen and front-of-house staff, many of whom had never interacted deeply with Indian regional cuisine before. (Part of) Our approach to bringing these new team members up to speed: build an app to help our staff learn about Indian food concepts, like 10 essential spices, that could scale to other content.
Jon and I designed the content into “cards,” arranged into “decks,” The cards can contain media— photos in v1— and a text, and can be navigated with swiping left or right. There are assessment cards to test for understanding throughout the flow of a deck— right now, multiple choice between images or text, but not limited to those types in the future.
I designed the UX and content for the app and Jon Wong collaborated with me on the UI and built the app using a React Native/JS framework. We stopped active development, but are continuing to explore the underlying concepts to potentially improve upon this first prototype in the future.
You can find the app here.
As a teacher, I often gave my students a piece of advice that had served, and continues to serve, me well: travel to places that make you uncomfortable until there are few places left that remain outside your comfort zone. This advice is directional and not literal— there are many cases where some reasonable filters should be applied; and the advice does not just relate to material discomfort or require geographic distance— you can travel outside your comfort zone without moving an inch. But the premise remains: if you push yourself to challenge your own orthodoxy of routine, of thought, of taste, you will only come out the other end with a stronger core and a broader body of experiences through which to build empathy with others. This has been a guiding principle behind my travels.
Food has been a surefire way to connect with people I don’t know and learn about new concepts that often extend quickly beyond food into science and the environment, history and politics, race, class and economics. And inevitably, it all ends with a fully belly :)
I’ve added some pictures here that I like from past travels, wrote about some here and kept some traces on my Instagram account, but many of the best memories remain somewhere up here (pointing to my head), waiting to be expressed in some abstraction in the years to come.
Coursera to Chef - This piece is a reflection on my decision to go from the tech world into the kitchen, and the meta-skills that I was developing along the way.
The Untold Story of Indians in America - Did you know Indians were banned from migrating to the USA for a good chunk of the 20th century? I didn’t until I did some research on Indian American immigration, and wrote about what I learned in this short essay originally sent to The Listserve.
Learning to Swim - I learned how to swim when I was 24 while at a friend’s family’s house during a backpacking trip in Africa and Europe. I wrote about that experience and the process of learning a new skill.
I wrote about my mom and my dad while moving to Mumbai, where they were both born. They’ve played a large role in shaping who I am today, but our relationship has also evolved as I’ve gotten older and relate to them in new ways. I write about both ideas in these two essays.
