Fields of Vision
Screen spaces define and describe new geographies of inhabitation in contemporary times. ‘Fields of Vision’ presents an array of visual experiments by contemporary video practitioners of Indian origin that expand our imaginative geography through four interpolated fields: art-science, body-desire, real-imagined and hetero-urban. The pluralising of the singular ‘field’ into the multiple ‘fields’ proposes widening of perspectives, multiplying vectors of viewing, and discovering new directions for inhabitation and wandering. 121 videos by 78 artists, distributed into four chapters over four weeks of the VAICA festival will delve closely into charting new coordinates through which videographies rephrase, re-engineer and perhaps puncture our normalised field of vision.
Week 1
Cartographies of Sensation
The first set of videos under ‘Fields of Vision’ attempt to locate the cartographies of sensation – those that attempt to map the coordinates of experience, observation, perception and artistic production. In these mappings, moving images play closely between the dialectics of science and fiction. They become poetries of thought and speculation. Much like the make-up of the cartesian cross-grid, they interweave worlds of science and art – both that relocate the boundaries of awareness of the self and the surroundings. The moving images slow down time, make us pause, repeat and reconsider, or suspend us in limbo towards opening new ways to sense the world. Through such awareness, one may begin to demarcate a space of expanded consciousness.
Week 2
Orbits of Desire
Screen spaces define and describe new geographies of inhabitation in contemporary times. ‘Fields of Vision’ presents an array of visual experiments by contemporary video practitioners of Indian origin that expand our imaginative geography through four interpolated fields: art-science, body-desire, real-imagined and hetero-urban. The pluralising of the singular ‘field’ into the multiple ‘fields’ proposes widening of perspectives, multiplying vectors of viewing, and discovering new directions for inhabitation and wandering. 121 videos by 78 artists, distributed into four chapters over four weeks of the VAICA festival will delve closely into charting new coordinates through which videographies rephrase, re-engineer and perhaps puncture our normalised field of vision.
Week 1
Cartographies of Sensation
The first set of videos under ‘Fields of Vision’ attempt to locate the cartographies of sensation – those that attempt to map the coordinates of experience, observation, perception and artistic production. In these mappings, moving images play closely between the dialectics of science and fiction. They become poetries of thought and speculation. Much like the make-up of the cartesian cross-grid, they interweave worlds of science and art – both that relocate the boundaries of awareness of the self and the surroundings. The moving images slow down time, make us pause, repeat and reconsider, or suspend us in limbo towards opening new ways to sense the world. Through such awareness, one may begin to demarcate a space of expanded consciousness.
Week 2
Orbits of Desire
‘Orbits of Desire’ brings together video works that explore subjects of gender, sexuality, relationships and performance that are circumscribed by bodily acts. Body is the medium through which we make memories or perform inner desire. What fragments of time become worthy of preserving, to what extent does one stretch limits of performativity, how do we inhabit memory and what are our limits of retention? These are questions that the videos in this section address. Videos become sites of retention and release and effectively preserve temporal bodies as archives. They allow us to rediscover our desires in orchestrating strategic encounters with time, accumulated into their visual orbits.
Week 3
Peripheries of the Real
This segment puts together video experiments that explore environmental aspects that remain unattended or obviated due to excessive immersion or inadvertent neglect. Such conditions highlight instances of not only parallel reals but also the surreal, hyperreal, para-real or unreal. The digital space today extends our present lives into the netherworld of the virtual. The pandemic inverted humanity’s sense of reality by locking us within our homes or producing the fear of the outside. Absences and presences interchange their roles in our everyday keeping us within the peripheries of the real. The videos here attempt to come to terms with, or even expose us to a sense that field of reality that we encounter seems to be bounded merely by a mythical horizon.
Week 4
Urban Heterotopias
Urban heterotopias make themselves apparent most vividly through videoscapes. These other spaces create their own psycho-geographies within the shared space of the city. The city inevitably is the most charged site for the performance of politics. It is the ground where multiple ideologies dance with each other. What forms of co-habitations and contestations take place within the city? What rhythms do conflicting ideologies produce and how do they negotiate power? The videos in the concluding session closely contemplate upon the urban condition as well as political actions that consistently rework our landscapes of everyday encounters. Can these revelations readdress our equation with the urban space thereby altering our fields of vision?
Week 3
Peripheries of the Real
This segment puts together video experiments that explore environmental aspects that remain unattended or obviated due to excessive immersion or inadvertent neglect. Such conditions highlight instances of not only parallel reals but also the surreal, hyperreal, para-real or unreal. The digital space today extends our present lives into the netherworld of the virtual. The pandemic inverted humanity’s sense of reality by locking us within our homes or producing the fear of the outside. Absences and presences interchange their roles in our everyday keeping us within the peripheries of the real. The videos here attempt to come to terms with, or even expose us to a sense that field of reality that we encounter seems to be bounded merely by a mythical horizon.
Week 4
Urban Heterotopias
Urban heterotopias make themselves apparent most vividly through videoscapes. These other spaces create their own psycho-geographies within the shared space of the city. The city inevitably is the most charged site for the performance of politics. It is the ground where multiple ideologies dance with each other. What forms of co-habitations and contestations take place within the city? What rhythms do conflicting ideologies produce and how do they negotiate power? The videos in the concluding session closely contemplate upon the urban condition as well as political actions that consistently rework our landscapes of everyday encounters. Can these revelations readdress our equation with the urban space thereby altering our fields of vision?
