CAMP's As If - II

"I don't know what's wrong," he answered on the phone from the terrace of 24 Jorbagh in Delhi. It was past midnight, the weather was cold and I sat on the steps across the building facade relaying to him how his new installation was behaving. Ashok was fiddling with the circuitry of the 'Four-Letter Film' unaware of the way in which the two storey tall electric letters were displaying on the face of the building. They were almost alright as we tested one by one earlier. When put together, they didn't form accurate shapes.

Since the huge letters were controlled by a small circuit box sitting on the terrace, that Ashok was tweaking, he could not see the results of the experiments he was actually doing. We thus were communicating each other through our mobile phones. I became his eyes, while he inhabited the machine. With all connections being almost right, but yet not the correct results, I asked him, "What's wrong, after all with this?". I believed that the creator of the work would certainly know what's going on! Ashok's reply, as stated in the beginning above, encapsulated for me the spirit of CAMP's 'As If - II' at 24 Jorbagh in Delhi, titled 'The Flight of Black Boxes'.

Ashok had briefly explained me about the phenomenon of black boxing during planning the exhibit. To quote Bruno Latour from wikipedia, 'blackboxing is "the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity.' Ashok elaborated that, in order to work with anything, one has to assume a certain disappearance of some of its constituents. You need to hide something in order to engage with that thing. The above idea is similar to what Umberto Eco spoke at a lecture I attended  at Yale University; he said that it is important to forget in order to be able to remember what you must, so that you can make sense of things. Talking of black boxing, Ashok exampled, "If you see the working of the constituents of a car while driving, you will be in a very precarious situation, and not be able to drive at all!" Mobile phones, laptops, televisions, microwaves - almost every other object that we engage with today is a black box. Extending this to the social realm, Ashok mentioned, even institutional setups today have become black boxes - beyond what we put and what we get out of them, we do not know anything about them...

Ashok was into the circuit, or shall we say the building box that was transformed into the machine itself. The huge bungalow was masked through a stretched fabric held through a minimal steel frame. Behind the mask were four letters designed using the 13-segment display mechanism. When seen through the mask, the letters seemed to emerge on a large LED cinema screen. 

Seeing the production of the entire artwork was fantastic. When I reached the site, I saw that a thin but firm metal structure already encased the three facades of the building. I was reminded of the durable fragility one sees in works like the Serpentine Pavlion by SANAA, or works of Junya Ishigami (whom Ashok himself had introduced to me). This framework was not overdesigned, just about right for the project. It was to take on the large fabric, that which is generally used on construction sites, in order to cover the entire building. The fabric covering the entire building had to be a single piece. A local tailor helped execute this job, stitching away long unending pieces of cloth, making provisions for installing the curtain on the building. 

On the other hand, I was busy finishing another piece of the windscreen, this time a smaller size and shape revised to the aerodynamic properties, learning from the previous one. In parallel, the drawing for Khirkeeyaan was being projected on the wall, outlined by artists Amol and Poonam from Clark house, and finally inked by Ashok himself. Multiple screens for various films to be  projected were being stretched on steel frames. Much work was being coordinated by Bala, an architect working in Delhi, assisting us with the exhibition. Shaina rejoined us in  Delhi two days after I arrived. She took charge of the various video installations.

The work seemed to go slow in the beginning. It was winter, and Delhi, for some reason, was experiencing showers over the nights - something completely undesirable for the artworks, as well as the interior works. The walls of the building were wet, refusing to dry off the freshly coated paints. In addition, they leaked current. Shaina and Ashok continued to work through the shocks, literally playing with electricity.

We decided to eliminate placards for captioning each work, writing them by hand on walls using a sketch pen. A lot of preparation went into ascertaining the right kind of lettering. Ashok was quite concerned to not make it look like the architectural lettering. He wanted it to be carefree. I couldn't impose the organized self to be so. Thus I pencilled the captions everywhere and he went over it with the pens we had. We had to get new pairs of pens, for the ones Shaina had purchased from Mumbai seemed inappropriate for the walls. Erasing the guidelines made for the lettering was the biggest task, because the wet walls wouldn't accept erasers. Zinniah had developed blisters getting rid of those lines with an eraser while I kept taking pauses to finish the job! We cursed the wetness -the rain and the dew seemed to intrude a lot into the works.

The curtain was created and finally pulled on the building with the help of many people. The tailor was an intelligent and sincere young man. He monkeyed the entire process of putting up the fabric. While stitching, the effective length of the fabric after being stretched was calculated in a way that the joints appeared on between the four letters. Initially, this did not seem to happen. The workers hesitated to stretch the fabric too hard, since it was tearing off at joints. Yet, the stitched joint unaligned with the letters behind was unacceptable. It needed labour. The lower end of the fabric was looped to take a continuous steel rod, inserted in a way quite funny. It was pushed back into the adjoining property, and brought back into the cloth in the site. Finally, the cloth was stretched enough in a way that all joints aligned correctly. The loose ends were stitched and secured to all ends. It looked fabulous - particularly because it hid all the bruises on the building made by the earlier artists, Raqs Media Collective, on the facade which would have otherwise interfered too much with the present work.

A big window was cut into the building in order to install a work called Interior Design. The project was a play on the working of a camera, once literally a black box. Ashok took much effort in programming the work right, although it took more time than required. It also demanded a lot of extra work in extending the window shades outside the building to protect the machine operated blinds from the uncertain showers, and the managing the excess sunlight leaking in from between the screen and the window frame.

With all this madness, the preview of the show happened on 27th January 2015! As visitors continued to flow in, Ashok was sitting on the terrace trying to understand what is still wrong with the programming of the four letter film. I had a couple of times went up to check the behind the scenes of this screen. Bunches of wires came out of a circuit powering each arm of the letter-framework. Each of such arm was numbered, as was the corresponding wire. I had memorized it by then. However, inspite of attaching and checking that the right wires went to the right socket, the film screen behaved slightly off. Ian was using his algorithmic logic to figure the bug. He was trying to identify the reason for the problem by making various combinations. Just the earlier night, it worked fabulous. People passing by the street read, laughed and gazed! On the opening day, it was put to a snooze mode. Yet I am sure, the artists were not so, for they were living the black box!

The sewer's machine and seat!

The young tailor who monkeyed the installation of the fabric.

The LED framework. The earlier intervention of Raqs on the Jorbagh building. 

Testing the first segmented display.

Anamolies in display - an art in itself.

Snooze Mode

My moment of fame!

Amol and Poonam tracing the diagram on the wall

Ashok finalizing the pencil drawing.

The lettering on the wall - non-architectural.

The revised smaller windscreen with laser cut paper pixels

Inside the black box. 

People at work till late nights.

The Preview opening.

CAMP's As If - I

"Electricity is my material," said Ashok Sukumaran recalling what he told Geeta Kapur long time back. With some courage and eagerness, Ashok seemed to have asked the prominent art critic if she would contribute a text for an exhibition. Geeta, an established art historian having documented the arc of Indian art in the traditional modes of production, felt that she did not exactly understand the medium Ashok was working in. She therefore decided to excuse herself of writing for it. Ashok, a then-emerging new media artist having finished his MFA studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA, continued his experiments and works with his novel "material". Ashok's exclamation and the response by the art critic articulated the 'new' in the new media for me. It resolved, right in the initial days of my work with CAMP, a host of questions that I was carrying for a long time regarding the underpinnings of 'new media'.

What would it mean for an artist's material (medium) to be electricity? How does electricity - something that one cannot see or handle, something that is always escaping, dissipating and fugitive in nature & form, become material? What kind of art does it shape into? What does it mean to use electricity artistically, and in what way can one craft electricity? As a studio assistant, I was excited to be able to witness how CAMP crafted electricity and its forms, and further to see how their works come together in their exhibitions across four galleries in the country - namely Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai.

To be sure, this exhibition series was retrospective in nature, allowing CAMP to showcase much of its past works (experiments). CAMP decided to weave together different projects for each of the four exhibitions into sharp themes, held together by the idea 'As If'. The umbrella-call for 'As If' is intelligent and clever - it offers to claim a reality that has not yet taken place, but looks possible. It brings together metaphor and expectation, comfort and risk, challenge and play, creating excitement and soft fear. 'As If' creates new tendencies to look at the past as well as the future with these attributes. In fact, it resonates with the nature of the artists' primary medium (material) - electricity - that exists, but can not be seen or handled directly.

The first show of CAMP opened at the Experimenter Gallery in Kolkata, titled 'Rock, Paper, Scissors'. The works included in this exhibition aimed to challenge the tripartite equation between the 'author', 'medium' and the 'subject'. I took some time to understand this system and discussed one night with Ashok, when he explained this concern primarily seen in much of Shaina's work. To quickly summarize, when an artist works with a medium, he/she uses the medium to produce a certain experience for the viewer, in other words, a piece of work is often authored carefully by the creator to draw specific emotion off the viewer, or in other words, the subject. In such a situation, the subject, often unaware of the intent of the author gets further inscribed in the medium, becoming a passive consumer. This indicates the vulnerability of the subject to the author as well as the medium (for he/she may be unaware of the workings of both). He/she is essentially subject to a force that seems beyond reach. How can such hierarchy be challenged, or even broken?

In the game of 'Rock, Paper, Scissors', each individual is in control of his/her choice, having equal possibility to turn the game. Three works of CAMP were installed in this exhibition, pushing the question of author, medium and the subject to the viewers. The first one was a film created out of a CCTV footage in Manchester City's Capital Circus. The second was a Windscreen - an animated sculptural screen made out of paper, straw and wires. The last project was called Khirkeeyaan, where a combination of CCTV technology and TV screens (a preliminary skype technology) enabled people within a neighbourhood to communicate to each other at their will. While I primarily worked on the Windscreen, the experience of which I shall be able to share in more detail, I will try to touch upon the other two briefly.

Originally executed as a part of a video class during his masters, the Windscreen was "a joke on video", said Ashok. The installation consists of carefully cut rectangular paper pixels strung on to metal wires by means of an attached straw. These pixels, when subject to air pressure (created by a fan) would be flung off straight onto creating an opaque screen. Any person passing between the wind and the screen would block the air, creating his/her own "shadow" through the fallen pixels.

For me, the beauty of the screen lay in its extremely simple and frugal construction. First, the frame was fabricated in steel through a local guy who makes metal furniture. To be sure, the proportions of this screen (and all subsequent ones) followed the pixel ratio (4:3). In order to string the pixels, holes for wires were made at precise positions to hold these when at rest, and when flung. The wires were arranged at a careful angle just enough to air lift the paper pixels. The pixels were cut out of translucent parchment paper. The next step was to stick to them a piece of straw so that they could be strung on to the wire on the frame. For his first project, Ashok had sneaked a considerable amount of straws from the Coffee Shop. These straws had three holes, and were brown in colour. If stuck on the paper directly, their dark colour would be too much of a visual disturbance. Thus, they were stuck using a double sided tape onto the paper pieces - about 840 of them!

My first task was to labour this process, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Cutting the paper, and then the straws in anticipation  of making a kinetic sculpture kept me going. It took me three half-day sessions to cut paper for the first windscreen. Then I got on to slicing the coffee straws. Ashok cut the double sided tape. We had to slice the width of each piece into 4 thin pieces - a job quite tricky due to the sticky nature of the double sided tape. The entire process was extremely architectural, for we were literally cutting paper and plastic to construct modules for an assembly that would eventually move to air. I can go on and on sharing my learning from this week-long exercise: it made me quiet, focused and productive.

In the process we would occasionally pause to rethink our methods of being more efficient. Ashok would try to remember how he produced the raw material for the first time, while I shared my own experiences of actually doing the job. One of the prime concerns was to tackle the moisture that would affect the paper, causing it to warp, reducing its effective dimension and causing it to slip through the wire framework. Another "bug", as Ashok would say (borrowing from electronic field), was the two adjacent pixels sticking to each other when strung along. This was due to the double sided tape thickness touching the other. This was a serious problem considering that the fan air pressure was maintained just that it would lift the weight of one pixel (read paper - now a physical pixel). We had to make sure that no two pixels stuck together, for it would increase the weight of the pixel. The three holes of the straw also played a role - we had to be sure to string the pixels through the topmost hole. The pixel would fall back to its position only if it had just enough counter weight. Thinking of all such parameters was sensitizing.

We tried to avoid the moisture by keeping pixels in the interior, given that CAMP studio is right across the Carter Road. In order to avoid sticking of two adjacent pixels, I suggested to sprinkle talcum powder on the sides of these tapes. We learnt about each material much closely. Weaving the wire through the frame was also quite a process, for we couldn't allow it to be loose, and neither could we pull it too hard, when it would give away. The wire kept losing its elasticity constantly - when we also happened to discuss Young's modulus! For the first screen, we had to replace some that snapped. Further, as we were serially pulling wires one by one through the steel frame to fix them tight, we realized that the frame was being pulled inwards, making the previously tied wires sag. Improvising our techniques thus, we began to become more careful on how to go about beginning and completing the project.

The project finished on time. And the pleasure of testing it for the first time was unimaginable. We took a wall mounted fan (of a particular size and power) and rested it upside down on a chair, placing a pillow underneath setting up an angle. When switched on, one by one the flaps fluttered. They created a soft sound as they flung and fell on the metal wire. The gliding was slow enough to see the pixels rise and fall. At a  moment, it felt like the peacock's feathers, and at another, it reminded of the flutter of a bird. But more importantly it revealed to me the working of a video - the way in which the blowing wind activated the pixels created an opaque screen. When a person would pass through this, the profile of the body blocking the wind would make the corresponding pixels fall, creating a shadow. This phenomenon is much like the camera capturing an static or moving image. The windscreen had made many unseen things physical - in translating the photo rays as wind and the electronic pixels as paper pieces. It had translated the working of photography or video as if the medium was physically available to be crafted. It took me into the history of the evolution of photography (a subject that I had recently studied in depth), but at the same time heuristically made it possible to extrapolate and craft it for the future.

Beyond its own making, the windscreen creates a distinct reading closer to the theme of the show - the way in which the subject and object create a complete system. The user (subject) almost is in control of his or her image on the screen when passing through this system.

'Capital Circus' was a film made using CCTV footage collected from a large mall in Manchester City, Europe. A lot of work went into the sound editing of this video. Instead of being subject to the gaze of CCTVs the project gets inside the room where these footages are monitored and recorded. Further, people being filmed are made aware of the fact and asked for their permission for the footage to be used for this film project. The film raised questions on who can be filmed, when, and larger issues like surveillance and its politics.

Khirkeeyaan was a project in which new connections were made outside of the Cable TV system within a neighbourhood in Delhi through which people could see as well as talk to each other using their own TV sets and speaker system. I do not have any specific comments on the project, as it seemed a bit voyeuristic and too cumbersome an exercise in an age of the internet. Yet, such network would perhaps be more meaningful for areas with internet censorship, strong state control over communication and similar such restrictions. It might be interesting to consider using the freedom of this system from being tracked by any other. It creates its independent network, completely non-institutional. In this way, yet again, the users are empowered to harness the system for their own purposes. They only need to take over the infrastructure of media, infrastructure of communication.

It is inherently difficult to display media art because so much of it is virtual, and a gallery space often craves for a formal intervention. Even if paintings are static, they demand movement, which help navigate the gallery space in new ways. How does video and audio perform this task? The objects of display then, are environments created by such media constructed in video and sound. These are not physical, merely simulated. Structuring simulations of different geographies is a difficult affair within the contiguous space of a gallery. They tend to create an alternative experience, a reality different from those we actually see on screens. Media art always struggles to remain itself thus.

I am not much of a media artist and my understanding of these works is perhaps very limited. The above account has been purely descriptive - that's all that is left with me! Rather, that is what I took from it? I am also distanced from the concerns of media until it directly affects me. I can relate to these concerns but can not be instrumental enough to take action on this aspect. Beyond academic view, it is hard for me to politicize them. In my broad view, we live in a society where letting out personal information has not yet become a matter of concern. It is something that perhaps yet belongs to the developed societies. To that, we have not even interconnected our entire society. Yet, CAMP's works suggest a solution to the assumed warnings as the state makes way for smart cities and smart nation. It offers a pre-solution to issues that shall come to describe the crisis of the future.


(further reviews of CAMP exhibitions in subsequent posts)

Prelude to subsequent posts

I believe I haven't written for weeks together. That is not to suggest that I don't have any thing to write about. Infact, of all times, I have the most to write now - about the activities at School of EA, learning from CAMP and a numerous other discussions I have been having with many colleagues. I no longer like to have posts here as babbles (yet this may turn out to be one). I have realized the political instrumentality of the (this) blog. Some time ago, I was pondering on how this writing space has grown publicly. The more one comes into the public eye, the more the openness of one's thoughts shrinks. One has to constantly be careful of what one is throwing out in such open space, which once used to be a naiive, innocent diary which recorded all events of one's life. The internet has created this as a new form of public space that begins to take the characteristic of a real public dialogue. I can relate to Rohan Shivkumar when some time ago, his blog became a dumpyard for his material from being an active blog buzzing with ideas. Originally, Rohan's blogspace used to thrive with posts, ideas, critical thoughts and discussions. At a certain point, people seem to have become too sentimental about what was being written about on that blog, after which Rohan took a detour. After all, the last thing a writer (or thinker) wants to battle is unnecessary politics.

Today, Rohan's blog is merely a dump of pictures from his travels, with occasional captions. I must recall that there has been so much I have learnt from his writing which was only accessible to me through his blog. I have repeatedly found myself citing him in all my significant theses - be it my undergraduate thesis, my fellowship thesis or even my masters thesis. I find it surprising how all of my three research projects borrow from his ideas - those that passionately came across in his blogposts. He no longer writes such posts on his blog.

I used to record the inner happenings of Academy on this blog. My friends used to ask me - 'how do you write critically about a place you yourself work in?' Thinking to this question, I feel the management of Academy was not concerned, neither active on the internet. That is how perhaps, I was able to sustain my writing. The other thing could have been that they were far too involved in the larger level politics to care for my critique on their working. But all these factors helped my reflections then. Today, I can no longer have that freedom because the new school I work in has people who are quite active on the web world, who are constantly on the internet reading who is doing what.

I can no longer be open in the same way as before, as this will lead to the death of my own thoughts. Yes, this is indeed a self-censorship, and I am sure this repression will come out in ways unknown. This blog, as I have perhaps mentioned a lot of times before, has been a space where I have tried to purge my emotions through writing. Now I have taken a lot of my writing back to the good old form of manual diary writing - just to mitigate the reaction of my repressed energy. Seemingly this blog has become popular in its own way. This makes me very conscious while writing. I know people are reading. I know people are waiting for next posts, even if they don't really reply on posts here.

But to come back to the numerous things I wanted to write - I will be writing about my engagement with CAMP's exhibitions across India. I must say that there indeed were many novel things I got to learn about myself in the past three months. Secondly, I wanted to revisit the issue of 'general knowledge' that I have commented in the past on this blog with relation to the visit of a journalist at SEA. Thirdly, working with artists for the past three months, I have been wanting to critically look at the ways in which art and architecture interact with each other in India. This reflection perhaps particularly stems from my work with Ashok Sukumaran, who studied architecture, but now practices as an artist. The question of interaction between art and architecture in our country needs to be investigated, for it has remained for long with me, and I have not had the time to thread examples together. I must be doing some serious work on this aspect. I also wanted to record my thoughts on the Dharavi Biennale that happened two weeks ago in the city. Just last week, I also attended Steven Holl's talk at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, where he spoke about his projects as well as ran quickly through his selected proposal for the extension of the museum's north block.

There are more general things I used to write about before, those that still come to my mind. But I keep questioning if writing about those same things would be relevant. May be? Anyway, now that I have made an inventory for myself in the last paragraph, I should be able to make posts without much delay. With concerns that this blogspace will become more articulate, more formal over time, I am going to continue to write until the point I have faded like Rohan.

The Natural - Man-made Debate

On Organism & its Habitat

The concept of a 'body' is central to understanding of the 'habitat' it creates for itself. As we know, organisms in the process of creating their own living environment, are merely responding to their respective bodies. (a bird makes a nest to contain itself, a termite makes a hill to contain a colony of its members) The environment is thus a response generated to and through the physical attributes of their own body, as well as is a product of their own capabilities and limitations. The habitat they produce thus, is a map of their body, since it indexes these processes. The body of the organism is thus inseparable from the study of their habitat. In other words, both, the organism and the habitat form a system in  itself.

Can we understand the way organisms make their habitat as a cultural process? I use the term culture to hint at the 'practice' of building by animals. And it is in this spirit that we constantly contest the word 'natural' - that, if the spider (as a body) creates an appropriate response for itself as a web, or a termite as a hill using the materials that are available and amenable to them, why should the building of a house by a human being (as a body) be considered man-made? In other words, both are as natural, since both are created by living organisms. It is for this very reason that we have avoided the use of the term 'natural' in our brief, as well as discourse. 

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Discussions during first AD module, SEA.

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Poster image below, from the Bienecke Library Archives, Yale University.

Last month

I have not been able to record quite a lot of things that have been going on in the last two months. I was invited by my friend Nisha Nair to host/conduct the book opening of her very first curatorial project 'People Called Mumbai'. The event took place at the Hive in Bandra - a fascinating labrynthine building that creates cells for working and different cultural activities. I wasn't able to document the place extensively, but I will probably go there again to capture it.

Before all that, I was busy putting up an exhibition at SEA for the advisory meeting that happened on Jan 9th. I also intended to bring out our first newsletter then, however, it will only be released now after the student works have been put in - those that were displayed in the exhibition. The newsletter also underwent some revisions and scrutiny.

The next week after the exhibtion, we went for a study trip to Dahanu for a week. We spent considerable time with Design Jatra that includes Pratik Dhanmer, Shardul Patil, Mayukh Gosavi and Anuradha Wakade. We also met Rima, a third year intern from Academy of Architecture who is currently assisting the practice. I enjoyed all of their enthusiasm, passion and command over their subject of traditional building practices in Murbad and its engagement with natural landscape.

Right after my return from the study tour, I flew off to Delhi for putting up CAMP's exhibition; after which I have been in Bombay compiling the study tour work with students at school. At the same time, I have gotten busy with CAMP's next exhibition that will but put up at Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Byculla. The different geographies I have cut in this short span of time need detailed posts, those that get formulated in the head, but I have not been able to put things down on the blog only due to the lack of committed time.

For example, setting up the exhibition at Jorbagh in Delhi deserves some attention, for I got to experience a many eccentricities of art and artists. Covering up a whole building in a single mask, chopping off windows from walls, drilling into beams and columns, hanging objects from ceilings, removing windows - all was done to make the space suited for the planned exhibit. Further, installing the exhibits and the way they come together in the chaos of the space was even exciting. I want to recount these events in detail.

While at Delhi, I got the opportunity to meet people like Jeebesh Bagchi, Ashish Rajyadhyaksha, and some others of whom I have heard of being prominent in the contemporary cultural scene in India. At the same time, I got introduced to Amol Patil and Poonam Jain from the Clark House Initiative (artist group in Mumbai) with whom we did some parts of the CAMP installations in Jorbagh. Poonam and Amol were in Delhi for putting up their own art shows at the Japan Foundation. They happily came to help CAMP after finishing their work at the foundation. Both, Amol and Poonam studied at Rachana Sansad, and that immediately opened up a common circle of people we knew. Further, we found out that we live in the same neighbourhood in Mumbai! We connected quickly. After my return, I got to meet the entire team of Clark House for a collaborative project that will be executed at the Bhau Daji Lad museum.

I may not be able to write on all of these different engagements in detail - since it all depends on the moods of the author and the space I am in, and also because then the time for reading or thinking about it will be gone. But I must certainly record some instances that gave me satisfaction, pleasure and added to my knowledge of understanding the world. Details will come subsequently.

Watercolour

A4
watercolour
Anuj Daga.

Khoj, Delhi

I was in Delhi in the last week with CAMP for setting up our exhibition "As If - II: The flight of the Black Boxes" in Jorbagh. While there, I was put up at Khoj, an artist residency in Khrikee - a place that I have been to long ago as a part of the research 'Cultural spaces in India' initiated by the Goethe Institute in 2010. Then, Khoj was small bungalow with beautiful spaces and a central little courtyard. Now, it seems that Khoj has acquired some more adjoining property and enlarged its facility to include formal spaces for different activities. There are rooms for resident national or international artists, a library, cafe and other staff quarters - all organized around a courtyard. The space still is charming, although not as colourful as it was before...

CAMP began as an offshoot of Khoj when it wanted to extend its roots to Mumbai. However, CAMP went on to be an independent studio with Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran ofcourse with its "background member" Sanjay Bhangar. Our brief stay in Delhi was thus hosted by Khoj in the background of this association. 

While Khoj was inactive when I went there this time - with its library closed, its director traveling, with no artists yet in, working on any project as well as the terrible weather due to which the place looked cold and grey; it certainly seemed quite appealing to me in its silence. The place has many different spaces that are funded by established artists in India, as well as some international grants. I wasn't able to interact with any one there so I am not sure about the presence of this place in Khirkee. However, of the little I know, Khoj anchors the neighbourhood in its place.

The building is visually boxed into an empty steel framework, parts of which are visible at its entrance. The little offset of the building within its plot passages into the main studios, but is converted into an information cubicle where events happenings and brochures of exhibitions are kept for pick up. Once inside, the building frames its surrounds through the metal frames and window cuts. Right opposite to Khoj is a dilapidated building - a ruin which has remained in the derelict state for about five years, Ashok mentioned. The five floor building is peeled off its walls, and has large holes on its floors. As an architect, it was fascinating to see the building in section, literally. Further, as an artist, it reminded me of Matta Clark's violent artistic acts of chopping full scale buildings. 

Inside, Khoj is hollowed into a staggering courtyard from where one gets the anatomy of the entire place. One can see the studio spaces, staircases and bridges as well as the staff quarters in the far upper corner of this box. This interior space is entirely white washed bricks. The tree within the courtyard is cute, romantic, but scales the space well. 

I am sure that each corner of Khoj creatively activates through the imagination of the artists it hosts. The culmination of the building into the terrace gives a breathtaking view of the ruin that faces it. The surprise of destruction, the forced voyeurism invited by the handicapped building, the poetic incompleteness, its political situatedness in its context and the dramatic way in which Khoj reveals the building in the end makes it truly an artistic discovery. The terrace, borrowing its partial background from the adjoining naked brick building facade is thus a viewing deck exposing to us the world it sits in.

Yet, In Search of Academic Space

In a recent meeting with the academic council at SEA, Prasad Shetty pointed out that while there are already many schools (of architecture) in our city, there is hardly any academic space. His observation particularly resonated with thoughts I shared in my essay 'In Search of Academic Space' before leaving for my masters' studies contributed for Rachana Sansad's magazine. In this same week, one of my cousins shared an article titled "Mumbai's crime is its intellectual death" by Aakar Patel. Of most things that I disagreed in the reading, I found myself ambiguously convinced about the claim of the title. In parallel, at the studio CAMP (run by artists Ashok Sukumaran and Shaina Anand) whom I am presently assisting, Ashok too pointed out the lack of people in the city whom one could have a cultural discourse with. These recurring speculations on the feeble cultural space for discourse and discussion in a thriving cosmopolitan city like Mumbai made me wonder if there really is, a lack of space for dialogue here as compared to other places?

I wonder upon the claim of the city's intellectual death (or let's say the meager existence of cultural space) in light of the fact that every other year, we witness umpteen schools opening up, new courses designed for all kinds of people - working, traveling, migrating, students, adults; new centers for art and design and so on. This would certainly mean that a significant amount of population is being mobilized in the industry of teaching. Would teaching not mean to engage in a discourse? And would it not mean that we would have a good amount of 'thinking' population. However from the speculations mentioned earlier, the intellectuals of the city don't seem to think so. 

Well, to consider that the population enrolled for teaching is 'thinking' may require some closer examination. Without a good survey, one would not be able to articulate any well rounded opinion. But what it certainly demands us to ponder upon is several aspects about 'teaching' and 'thinking' - what is the relationship between 'teaching' and 'thinking'? What differentiates the two, and how do they support each other? What does it mean to teach versus think? Finally, how does it create its own space, rather how should/can these practices carve a space for themselves? Subsequently, why is it important to have such a space and why has the city of Mumbai, after all, failed to sustain a space of discourse?

Prasad has shared an example on several occasions on the above dilemma. He says, "When a tree grows, one can understand it in many ways. One can be interested purely in what you put in and what you get out of the tree. That is, the amount of water, manure, fertilizers you put into nurturing the tree and what it produces in the form of product, as fruits, leaves, lumber, etc, (that can be sold in the market). The second way of looking at the tree is a list of 'how-s' under different conditions. For example, how does a tree behave, change, evolve, adapt or respond to the changing conditions of weather, watering, providing fertilizers, labouring and nurturing."

An academic or academia in general, he hints, must be about the latter way of looking at the object under scrutiny. While the first way of looking easily becomes an instrument of the market, or the capitalistic society in the current economic system, the second method sensitizes one to the dynamics of operation and helps intervening into it. Rather than simply consuming the norms laid by the system, one has to be able to ride on them not only towards one's own personal quests, but also to inquire, question and challenge them.

The question of the difference between teaching and thinking is complex. While it is popularly believed that teaching must enable a student to acquire enough skills to cater to the market, in other words, to understand how much to "put in" in order to "get maximum out", the academic space gears individuals to think of emerging situations and co-adapt and co-evolve with them. Providing vocational skills is what teaching often succumbs to. In the case of architecture, it would be to make sure that the student is able to draw out accurate and reasonably legible drawings using simple to complex softwares. Such a goal makes the teaching objective tangible far too quickly, and also gives a managerial agenda to the teachers - to make the students best in commanding any production tool they are handling. In addition, they want to enable students in architecture to achieve reasonable judgement over shapes and forms. Yet, this is not thinking, for it merely freezes thinking to a limited set of tools that students can utilize in their professional futures.

 To think of a tool is different from merely using it to create a product. For example, to use AutoCAD for making architectural drawings is different from thinking of it as a tool to draw. It will be helpful to mention here, for example, that Prasad publishes many of his books on an application like Microsoft Powerpoint, in addition to using it as a presentation tool. What Prasad has successfully been able to exploit is Powerpoint's facility to work with text and images/graphics in a free flowing space. He constantly tweaks the features of the system to creates books of different formats, sizes; layering multiple graphics that seem at par with others produced using more sophisticated softwares today like CorelDraw or Adobe Indesign. Does it mean that we are underutilizing these new advanced softwares? Or does it mean what Prasad is abusing Powerpoint?

Neither. The answer lies in his example on the way we look at the tree. Prasad has simply understood that each of the softwares allows one to work with text and images in different capacities. And Powerpoint is able to offer him reasonable tools to create books and publish them at his will. Expoliting its features has saved him the trouble of investing time to learn a new, highly sophisticated software. Yet, this doesnot mean that he is unaware of the potentials of the software he doesnot know. But by being cognizant of the simple rubric which lies at the heart of these programs - ie the play between text and the image, he is able to gauge the capacities of each of these production tools.

Teaching and thinking are thus different, but mutually supportive. In today's world, one could confidently claim that teaching has become redundant. With the huge amount of tutorials and self-help platforms, teaching oneself is hardly a hurdle. One just needs access to basic infrastructure like an internet or a good library. Even without these, people in India have tremendous aptitude to adapt. Take a walk along the electronic lanes or the small mobile repair shops where you will find young drop-outs fiddling with mini components of the black box and getting your dysfunctional devices operational. This is a matter of practice, that skips text books or rote learning. 

It is thus time to imagine of a form of teaching that facilitates thinking. We have to work towards a way of teaching that enable students methods of thinking and analyzing. But these pointers do not really tell us why the discursive space in a city like Mumbai has been dead? In my mind there are several speculations. Firstly, I feel there is a lurking dissonance of thoughts and values between the intellectuals of the city. They do not comply with each other and in general, there is a narrowed sense of respect. Respect is ghettoized. Secondly, there is a dire struggle to achieve power, to gain reputation. This has made the intellectual landscape extremely insecure, resulting into a kind of coldness, an inertness. Such insecurity manifests into perpetual bubbling of new institutions, where new monies are pooled in, and new resources are created. To talk in the field of architecture, there is no single space or archive which any one in the city has access to. There are no individuals or names in our city, as Aakar Patel rightly mentions as Mumbai's crime. There are no holistic institutions that offer space for different kinds of discourses to co-exist. There are several camps, there are several schools, but still thus, in my opinion, there is still a lack of an academic space.

(there are more thoughts, but in keeping the length of the blog post, more ideas will be discussed in some other writing over here subsequently)