Mainak Chakraborty

Indian Institute Of Technology Delhi, India

Mainak Chakraborty is a computer scientist from India who works on sensing human identity, gait, and cognitive state from sensors.

the artwork

পদধ্বনি

Bengali - Sound of the Footsteps - 2026 - digital

audio commentary

My research listens to floors: a geophone under a room can tell who walked through it, how they moved, even how their mind was working, just from the vibration of their footsteps. This piece takes multiple real walk and unwraps its spectrogram into a world (each footstep a burst of light radiating outward, log-frequency by radius, time by angle) set inside an alpona, the floor art my mother draws freehand from rice paste during festivals. At the very center sits a single mark: the sensor itself, the fixed point every footstep in the piece was actually felt at.

Mainak Chakraborty

The change from an un-real (unnoticed physical signal) to real (a visible human pattern)

mathematics in Indian culture

In Bengali households, women have passed down the tradition of drawing alpona for generations—freehand floor patterns made with rice paste, shaped by memory, repetition, and geometric motifs rather than rulers or templates. Beginning with the central bindu, patterns grow outward through rotation and repetition, creating radial symmetry. My artwork borrows this structure to frame a spectrogram of real human movement, connecting inherited visual language with the measurable traces of the body.

Mainak Chakraborty