Projective Histories by Sameep Padora \ SEA

CAMP's As If - IV

The last exhibition that I was involved with CAMP took place at the Chemould Art Gallery in Mumbai, and was titled 'Night for Day'. The exhibition hosted a collection of several video works done by CAMP over the years since their inception. The gallery was imagined to be converted into the environment of the night - in reference to several things. Quite straightforwardly, one needs a dark environment to project film. Further, the artists' introduction refers to the technique of 'Day for night' which involved putting a dark filter over the camera lens to shoot night scenes during the day in the olden times. The larger overarching of the exhibition idea alludes to the "Nights of Labour" in which philosopher Jacques Ranciere begins to imagine the life of labour in the night, when after work, they enter a new world of pleasure, imagination and rest.

'Night for Day' brings these ideas in common discussion with each other. Ashok and Shaina were quite clear that the gallery space would be populated with screens for this show. However, merely putting same sized screens showing different projects was not enough. The projections had to create an environment, a journey of their own for the viewer. Thus, several iterations of different screen sizes and their arrangements were made.

I quickly put together a model of the interior gallery space so that we could visualize the different screens on different walls. For the project "Interior Design" (which was also shown at Jorbagh in Delhi) one of the existing windows of Chemould was opened up. A cornered altar space was carved for this project by creating an artificial wall, which reconfigured the gallery. After substantial juggling, the screen sizes were finalized. The projectors for the show (8 in all) were sourced from across different galleries in the city, including the ones in Chemould itself. Perhaps this was the most ambitious aspect of the exhibition.

Since the interior environment was to be dark, Shaina proposed to have the wall text in radium. I made some basic research to find people who could actually help create this in radium instead of conventional vinyl. It was a fun task to understand how vinyl texts are actually made. I finally met a guy in the industrial area of Goregaon who had been doing this job for decades. Originally he would do radium sticker cut outs manually. Today, he has a machine installed at his home in which he is able to do execute smaller jobs.

On site, we had to figure out ways of suspending the projectors in accurate angles and positions to get accurate projections. The screens had to appear "floating". They were in two ratios - 4:3 and 16:9. Some were painted on the wall while others were fabricated and mounted with the screen fabric. Making a frame for large screens is tricky. We had learnt from our experience in Kolkata, Delhi and Bhau Daji Lad in Mumbai that either wood or steel structures bend / cave in when the canvas is tightened onto them. The structure and material of the screens were thus improvised. The new challenges were to project on an angular surface.

The projectors were hung at angles in quite ad-hoc, but workable ways. They were suspended on steel cross beams put onto the existing I sections in the gallery at different lengths. Such an assembly helped manipulate coordinates w.r.t. the constantly shifting screen positions. Once the projector positions were finalized, they all were connected with wires in a way that they were concealed. The last step was to connect speakers wherever applicable.

The works of Interior Design and  Marine Drive were to be made technically sound, and were handled by Ashok. A lot of background work remains invisible behind their smooth functioning. I remained, to a large extent, a passive observer in the way the artists took final decisions. All of this was too new for me to contribute. In addition, I was not confident if I understood and aligned with the aesthetic of the final show that Ashok and Shaina were anticipating. A lot of times, artists are working towards something that they cannot express or communicate. It is only in the making that the aesthetic and other decisions become clear.

A lot of fine tuning goes into the final reception of video art. In this case, for example, the simultaneous working of the different screens all round in a single gallery space creates a unique experience. The artist does not necessarily have the luxury to experience it while editing single videos in his / her own studio. What meanings do two images appearing together make? How does one choreograph them? The simultaneity of images creates new art, new poetry - something that Shaina would always keep drawing attention passingly during the edits. The way in which the different films being projected in one time brings unity to a story, a project. This was perhaps crucial for the perception of 'Night for Day'.

The opening of the show was attended by Steven Holl himself, who had come down to the city, for his office has been selected over an architectural competition to build the extension of the Bhau Daji Lad Museum. Steven Holl thus also saw CAMP's intervention at Bhau Daji Lad. There were several ideas the Shaina and Ashok opened up with the simultaneous images reeling in the gallery space. They would perhaps be best to discuss the overall show.

For me, Steven Holl's presentation 'Urban Hopes' at Bhau Daji Lad was quite an occasion - almost a co-incidental spatio-temporal curation in my career. Steven Holl  had collaborated with Opolis, where I worked as an architect for a year after graduation. CAMP was an artist group with whom I collaborated with after my post graduation. Bhau Daji Lad was the museum where the intervention of CAMP was running when the architect came. Incidentally, Ashok and Rahul Gore (principal, Opolis) have both studied at UCLA, USA. Holl's lecture at BDL collided all these people, spaces and times together! I think that was a good finale to my engagement with CAMP. Not only is such coincidence serendipitous, but it offers a certain resonance in choices that I seem to have (consciously) made thus far.

CAMP's As If - III

Last week would have been a better time to write this piece. Ashok and Shaina took students of School of Environment & Architecture to three of their ongoing exhibitions in the city. These included "Country of the Sea" at Bhau Daji Lad, "Night for Day" at Chemould Art Gallery (As If IV) and the last one, cleverly titled 'As If tV' at the Clark House Initiative in Colaba. Infact, the one at Bhau Daji Lad, Shaina reminded me this morning, ended today!

Yet, I must revisit CAMP's intervention at Bhau Daji Lad - one of the sharper interventions among the many that have taken place by far at the museum. As we all know, Bhau Daji Lad is the city's oldest museum and houses much archives of the city itself. The exhibits here include some of the early relief maps of Mumbai, the cartographic drawings of the city on sea, showing its development from seven islands to the cotton mills. Within such collection, CAMP's "The Country of the Sea" stands at the edge of the city to look beyond into the sea - a space so close to us, yet seemingly so far. What happens just beyond what we conventionally understand our city's limits? Does it really end there? What is the relationship of land to the sea? What happens at the interface and how does it get articulated? How do we enter into the sea and where after all would the venture take us?

The Country of the Sea walks us into our outside. It provokes the imagination and articulation of a place that lies beyond the boundary that has come to define our "lived" territory. It attempts to look at the sea as a place in itself, with its own ways of working and dealing with its issues. The different works bring forth much that is otherwise not visible - the sea farers and their lives, the goods that are transported across countries, the trade activities on docks and what goes within cargo containers and customs. Within such works emerges a cultural ecology of the sea.

Typically water bodies as large as seas are seen as those that divide land masses, more recently, that which separates countries and cultures. Nevertheless, as Shaina mentioned, The Country of the Sea looks as the boat as the medium, the carrier - the vaahan. It looks at how the sea facilitates the communication of a host of activities between the otherwise separated lands / cultures. It is a place through which objects of all shapes, sizes and functions are traded to countries across - from chyawanprash, to cars to even petrol pumps! Who takes these goods across the seas? How is all this done? What is the biography of the sea?

The film Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, one of the first encounters within the museum space introduces us to this landscape of sea farers. It documents different activities happening across the docks of different countries ranging from Gujarat, moving up to Karachi, Arabian Gulf, Persian Gulf and coming down finally to African coast. It shows the ship making pans, the docks and the ports where one already begins to see how the cultures have traveled along with the goods. People from different cultures appear to be in different geographies, much like the goods that travel from one place to the other. A lot of these people spend much of their lives on the sea, away from their homes. The sea is their home, the ship is their place.

Sea farers move within the water with few rules. They talk to passing boats using their own satellite phones, they navigate using GPS techniques (much evolved from earlier counter parts like cartographic maps). Goods and things are exchanged without laws, routes are defined yet undefined. Many of these sailors may not have visited Mumbai as much as they frequent to Dubai or Sharjah! For example, Ashok mentioned that many Gujarati sailors end up spending more time over a year in Dubai than perhaps their own homeland. Children of the edge, right from a young age, live and play on water. The sea is forever a part of their growing up, blurring the separation between land and water. It is this "place" that gets defined in the work of CAMP.

The large cinema screen introducing us to the intervention sits in the atrium of Bhau Daji Lad, transforming the whole space into a cinema hall. Elaborate stepped seating, introduction of sound and dimming the lights help this transition. Not only were the artificial lights illuminating the exhibits were controlled or put off, the excessive daylight leaking into the museum through its large lower floor and clerestory windows were also blocked off using six layers of fine nets. This finally created a workable condition of the projection of the film onto the screen suspended from a 20 feet long steel rail put across the first floor.

As Ashok briefed, the introduction of the film brings in a moving element in the museum space which otherwise houses only static objects. It also brings sound into the space changing the experience of displayed objects themselves. The intervention turns the museum into a dual cinema of sorts in its tweaked structure of viewing. In the first case, it brings to rest the mobile viewer who moves into the museum to look at the displayed objects, making the exhibit (here, the film) moving. This film takes the person into a different geography / (ies). In the second case, the soundscape in which the viewers move to see the existing objects that have themselves come from different geographies create a space of its own within the minds of the onlookers. This duality operates subconsciously, and much indirectly. The introduction of sound and moving image hints at the possibilities of re-conceptualizing the idea of viewership within a museum.

The setting of the intervention turns David Sassoon into an onlooker. A poetry emerges when the maker of the city stares the cinema screen, into the trade and exchange that happens across the sea, essentially the activity that characterizes cities. The upper floor of the museum turns into a balcony when passers by rest onto the handrail, gazing into the screen. The soft murmur of the sea and boat give new meaning to the reading of maps within the museum.

Another exhibit along the journey is 'The Country of the Blind' that brings to us footage of what the coastguards see through their long distance telescopes across the Copt Point in Folkstone. The film takes us into the unseen places and how the officers who man the coast look at these activities. After this, we move to 'Gujarat & the Sea' - a playful take on an exhibition that spoke about the maritime history of Gujarat. CAMP describes the political underpinnings of the work more succinctly here. The crafting of the frames was all done inhouse in the studio. The iconography of the photo frames exaggerate the fact that the images have been "cropped" from an earlier exhibition. The fact that they have been edited has been made loud and explicit in the four-corner black-mark frames. They have been re-annotated by CAMP challenging, playing and pushing for alternative history of the place. The center of the room has a series of miniature paper boats with the names of actual ones that carry goods across the seas.

The next room has a magnanimous map - one that gives a geography to the primary work and title of the exhibition. The story of the making of the map needs to be recorded, for it is an act of bravery, boldness and ambition. The brief for this map was weird. Ashok wanted to create a non-map, essentially because he did not quite believe in conventional cartographic maps. The map had to situate the argument of the show, which was difficult to articulate. All one did know that it was to be big, to suit the scale of the space it indexed, and that in which it would eventually be displayed.

In order to make a beginning, Ashok had managed to download a map of the coastline of the world from the internet (I am already forgetting where we got it from). This was an extremely detailed map which showed each millimetre of indentation on the coast. Viewing the map wasn't possible until Ashok cracked a way to download an Autocad format file. Once done, I was able to access and edit it using AutoCAD. Our task was to make an open piece of coastline into a readable territory. This meant the rationalization of the extremely detailed map, and tweaking it to  come together as a whole.

To begin with, we had several references to draw from the past for imagining our own map. Firstly, we wanted to refer to the evolutionary territorial connection between the Indian and African continental plates. It has been well proven looking at the shapes and ecosystems along the coasts of the continents that they once shared a relation, even were a single mass. This jigsaw fitting had to be reminisced. Secondly, the Gujarati sailors had their own version of the sea map for their own trading activities. This was in the form of a long scroll, where routes between different places across the sea were marked. The map was not cartographic, rather notional. It treated the sea as a medium full with gujarati annotations and information. The resulting map thus, had to evoke this history notionally, yet demarcate and establish the Country of the Sea.

We worked on the map for two weeks carefully removing excess information. It went through a series of simplification versions. Since working on the computer screen, the scale of the output was hard to visualize. We then switched on a grid in the software to be able to get hold of the largeness of detail. It appeared that even in a square of 2 x 2 mm, there were details worth kilometres huge. Those details had to be straightened and ignored for the purpose of printing. Over three days, I kept working and reworking on the map to make it leaner. Finally, Ashok extracted a command from the internet on reducing the complexity of a polyline on autocad. This was absolutely new for me, for it involved the installation of a command that could be plugged in onto AutoCAD. Once done, we took some time to understand the command itself because it had several parameters. We did some experiments and found that the command while useful to some extent, wouldn't help us right till the end. It changed the character of the map we intended to make. Eventually, we used a combination of manually retracing the map along with this new found command.

Originally we aimed to laser cut this large map in steel, ofcourse after discussing a range of materials like acrylic, wood, mdf, aluminium and so on. The discussion took place with artists from Clark House. Industrial cutters of steel or wood gave up to the scale of the project. It was far too detailed to even get a sample, since their machines could not, in the first place, process the complex drawing! Amidst all this, we had taken two large print outs of the map on paper to visualize its largeness and complexity. In the discussion with Clark House artists came up the mention of cyanotype printing. Cyanotype printing is similar to the blue print quality that architects have been using for long. While no one knew the process, we googled it to understand the basics. The next day, Clark House came with their multiple experiments on cloth, paper, and what not. They had hunted the market for the chemicals, mixed them in their own studios and performed a series of iterations of how the process behaves under different material conditions. After a lot of deliberation and tests, we decided to go ahead with getting a cyanotype print on cloth.

The maximum size of one piece cloth that was available to us was 6 feet wide and about 18 feet long. From the initial ambition of a larger artwork, we had to shrink it to the market availability of material. Following the nature of our work, and from his past experience, Ashok had right from the beginning asked Rupali (Patil) to get two sets of cloths and chemicals. Accordingly, Rupali had gotten two pieces of these huge cloths. In the mean while, Ashok and I were working our way towards making the final cut of the map ready. We had to create a mask out of it such that it could help in getting the inverse as the exposed cyanotype print on exposure to sun.

Going through the throusands of kilometers of coastline along with Ashok was quite an experience. While Ashok panned google earth locating his memories of many ports he had visited or known of over the five (or more) years of his research, I kept marking them on my abstract Autocad outline which was already tweaked. It was amazing to see Ashok remembering qualities and characteristics of several ports. Many of these, he had only researched through secondary sources. Missing any of these on our map - a required move given the scale of the map - made him guilty. In the end, we had to sacrifice a lot of smaller ports along the large coastline, some even as less as a single jetty.

Finally we identified and decided to keep about 80 to 100 ports that could define the outline of the Country of the Sea. The map began to look like a monster, a dinosaur of sorts. The shape of the map seemed to suggest as if the sea was a river, a conduit of cultural exchange enlivened by the numerous activities of sea trade. Seemingly distant places came closer, refreshingly bringing new relationships. We finally took this outline to photoshop which wasn't able to handle the size of the graphic. Ashok figured a way to make it smaller such that the mask could be prepared.

On the other hand, the cloth for the print was to be washed and made free of any starch, such that it could soak the chemical well. We needed a very large bucket that could take this size of cloth. After thinking much, Shaina helped the Clark house guys with Ananda's (her son's) bath tub! The cloth was soaked and washed thus, and made ready for printing.

The printout of the mask was brought to CAMP studio by Clark House artists by the evening. Everyone sat around and stared at the largeness of the work which was still about the complete. The plan was to coat the large cloth with the appropriate chemicals overnight, such that they are not exposed. The work was to be exposed to sunlight for exactly 15 minutes, when the chemical would react with light to turn blue. After 15 minutes it was to be washed off all its excess chemical which would otherwise turn blue too, and ruin the work. Things went according to plan, and CAMP's terrace was much helpful! The artists were able to spread the work in the large space.

The cyanotype map emerged brilliantly. It was to be washed now and then ironed to be installed onto the final frame. To remove any trace of the chemical from the work from further exposing, some of them thought of using detergent powder. As they applied the detergent, a reaction with the chemical took place, and spoiled the entire graphic. It was a disaster. We decided to work again.

In this situation, Ashok's wisdom of getting two cloth pieces became clear to me. Ashok summoned me to get a new print out for masking the cloth for exposure, while the Clark house guys began to prepare for the second exposure. The day was frantic! The guys hadn't slept the night before and terribly tired. Still, the show had to go on, because there were only two days to go for the exhibition opening. The unfortunate part was that there was no water in the tank that day - someone forgot to turn the water valve on! There was thus no water to either wash the cloth before, or the chemical after! After much beg, borrow and steal, Ashok barged onto the neighbour's tank and got water! It was a crazy night! Finally, the print process was repeated. This time people were more careful. The sun showed, and the print was out! This is the story of this map, as huge as itself.

After sharing its story, I am too tired to talk of the dialogues it opens. It is a fantastic object, and has a history of its own! In Ashok's words, it looks "weird", something he would like. It underpins a lot of historical and artistic references. It is the blue print of the Country of the Sea, a river of exchange, a puzzle of lands and the scaled to the sailors reference or the scroll map. In is display, the map is seen across cruciform photographs which hang from the ceiling within the room. These are arranged in the form of the Thurrayya, a star constellation which helps sailors position their way when sailing. The cruciforms have photographs from the activities of this geography.

We pass to the last room on the floor thorough a radio project set up by CAMP in Sharjah. It's a short video. The last room consists of a printer held high up in the air which prints a list of goods every half hour. It accumulates these lists within the room over the day. The project references the numerous records that the artists archived from Sharjah. These are innumerous records of objects that have changed lands and boundaries, that have been compiled into a publication by the artists.

One of the last works that we encounter is a set of four screens in a room on the lower floor that reveals the loading and unloading that happens in cargo containers. The videos allow us to peek into what happens within the boundaries of customs, etc. The installation of this work went through a lot of reconsideration right from the beginning - from its place within the narrative of the show to the display strategy with respect to the different screen sizes that were borrowed from different art galleries across the city. The final layout of the screens tackles the constraints very well.

I have tried to record the journey of the making of the Country of the Sea. It is hardly a review of the exhibition, for it doesnot talk about the concerns that the artists would have liked to perhaps talk about. As mentioned before, my documentation here attempts to talk of what goes on behind making art, taking challenges, and affording risks. In this manner, the process demonstrates the title of the series - As If. The exhibition has been put together quite bravely in its scale, intent and content, as discussed. Sometimes however, the overpowering scale might puzzle you in the resultant blandness of the art works. However, more accurately, it is just asking you to recalibrate the proximity with which you see them, or the subject at large.

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.