Press / 24 July 2026
Announcing Neural Natak: A Techno-Magic Performance by Spryk
skip-a-beat is proud to present Neural Natak, a new live performance by label founder Spryk (Tejas Nair) that fuses cutting-edge generative-AI visuals and electronic music, inspired by Indian street magic and ritual theatre, into a single mixed-media work. At its heart is a question about memory: how does an archival intelligence remember the rarely documented yet richly layered subcultures of India’s past.
The piece reimagines generative AI as a contemporary street magician, a figure whose gestures arrive too fast to fully parse and whose illusions are built to astonish. Set loose to study India’s folk and street performance traditions, this synthetic intelligence becomes both apprentice and observer, learning the craft of wonder while trying to understand why humans make ritual of it at all.
The work builds directly on the themes of Spryk’s 2024 EP Afterglow, extending his ongoing inquiry into what artificial intelligence can, and cannot, understand about lived human experience.
The Performance
Neural Natak runs roughly fifty minutes and unfolds across five chapters — “The Pact of Eyes,” “Craft & Belief,” “Journeys & Mentors,” “The Return,” and “Boundaries & Boon” — before closing with a segment narrated from the perspective of a distant observer, a machine consciousness watching the human ritual unfold from the outside.
Each chapter follows a stage of an apprenticeship: a pact formed between human performers and an unseen intelligence, a slow education in craft and belief, journeys guided by mentors drawn from India’s street and folk performance lineages, a return home changed, and finally a negotiation of what is granted in exchange for what is learned. The closing movement steps outside the story entirely, framing everything before it as data gathered by a mind trying to understand why humans make ritual out of wonder.
The show is composed of character voiceovers, narration, foley and archival footage, with Spryk triggering and remixing sound and image live throughout — a departure from his previous festival sets. The visuals are built with a hybrid toolkit spanning Touch Designer and Adobe Premiere Pro alongside open-source and commercial generative models, treating AI output not as a finished picture but as sleight of hand to be performed.
On Machines and Meaning
Speaking about the project, Tejas Nair (Spryk) said: “I think so much of modern AI is being designed and trained to closely emulate human behavior. However, what makes human creativity unique is not just knowledge but lived experiences. The emotional depth that we feel and can create through the things we make just can’t be felt by a machine. That is the essence that inspired this project.”
Neural Natak was featured by Rolling Stone India as part of its coverage of Indian artists working at the edge of technology and tradition. Read the feature: Spryk’s Neural Natak on Rolling Stone India ↗
On the Road
Neural Natak premiered at the Bangalore International Centre on 6 November 2025, as part of Creative Convergence, presented by the British Council. Since then it has moved between institutional stages that sit at the intersection of art, technology, and cultural policy. It was showcased at the UK × India pavilion during the AI Summit 2026, placing the work in direct dialogue with international conversations on artificial intelligence and creativity, and was presented at G5A in Mumbai as part of Origin of Thought, supported by the Mozilla Foundation.
The work also featured in Stigmergy, an exhibition mounted through a collaboration between the National Communication Museum and the experimental media group PSEUDO and running from 4 June to 9 August 2026. The show centres on a hand-built, artist-run digital network conceived as an antidote to online doomscrolling — a fitting context for a piece preoccupied with how machines remember and misremember human culture.
The project is scheduled to travel to Australia next for a three-city tour, marking its first run of dates outside India. Neural Natak is created and performed by Spryk (Tejas Nair), who leads its concept, music, visuals, and live performance, with additional visuals by EyeAmSid and visual identity and branding by Madhav Nair (Deadtheduck).