The Deictic Garland

Some views of the 3 channel installation

The Deictic Garland
2007
3 channel video projection

Dysfunction, particularly technological dysfunction, is an interesting moment for me, as it offers us a glimpse into the underlying texture of dynamic relations - a complex web of technological artefacts and social practices surrounding them - that mark the presence of technology in our contemporary times.
Though a foregrounding of dysfunction is sometimes equated with a Luddite position, I share no such retrograde utopia. Neither do I see myself as an evangelist of new technology. So, my engagement with technology then is that of critical engagement. In this work, the trope of dysfunction has been carried over into multiple contexts - from servers and routers to the organized practice of a particular discipline. The transient eddies of engagement and exchange that circulate along with more prominent and acknowledged conduits of interaction have always fascinated me. What happens when something or someone goes underground? How are new processes imagined into existence when one falls outside the visible gaze?

www.ebayaday.com

Part of the www.ebay.com page where my voice was up for auction

A section of the hand copied Bengali translation of the Communist Manifesto

www.ebayaday.com
2006
online interactive work with real objects
using the website www.ebay.com
Dimensions Variable

ebayaday was a month-long serial exhibit, that used eBay as a site - literally as well as conceptually. The project started at 9 a.m. PST, Dec. 1, 2006 and closed on January 1st, 2007. Though it is not possible to bid on the artworks anymore, one can still view them and their respective bidding histories on eBay or on the project site, www.ebayaday.com

Curated by Rebekah Modrak, Aaron Ahuvia and Zackery Denfeld, ebayaday invited 25 artists to produce work that would respond to the spaces and practices of eBay. For many of the artists, eBay became the very material of the work that actively deployed the format of the eBay listing - item for sale, descriptive text and imagery and placement within chosen categories – for its conceptual traction. The attempt was to challenge the idea that online auctions are primarily for the exchange of money for goods and to figure out ways in which the space of the auction could be opened up for further dialogue, debate and even resistance.

www.ebayaday.com started off with an original manuscript where an anonymous author had copied out the entire Bengali translation of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto by hand. Abhishek Hazra, one of the participating artists, later tried to unearth the identity of this dedicated communist–copyist. The results of his investigation are narrated in the small essay, “Up for Auction: A Devoted Communist’s Labour of Love” first published in Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers. In the other work, I offered up my voice for sale. The winning bidder could get recorded audio samples of my voice from which he would be free to do whatever he pleases as he would then own that ‘voice’.

Gallery of Fakes

This illustration was commissioned by World-Information City for the info-paper on Intellectual Property that was published in conjunction with the one-week programme of events addressing global issues of intellectual property and technology in conjunction with changing urban landscapes. Held at Bangalore from November 14 - 20, 2005 , World-Information City was a cooperative project of the Institute of New Culture Technologies/t0 (Vienna), Sarai CSDS (Delhi), Waag Society (Amsterdam), ALF (Bangalore), Mahiti (Bangalore) and local partners.

In connection with the programme at Bangalore, World-Information.Org released an info-paper on intellectual property and the city. The paper, produced with the financial assistance of UNESCO, brings together concise and to-the-point contributions on the politics of intellectual property and urban change.
The info-paper can be downloaded from here.

The illustration, framed as a fragment from a fake anthropological exhibition, started off as a response to ALF’s fascinating archive of Indian newspaper reports on ‘fakes’, increasingly a staple of the crime beat. Apart from the mandatory paranoia about fake CDs and DVDs these reports occasionally warn us about ‘fake nappies’ and ‘fake paint’ as well. So what I attempted here was to open up this space of the quotidian object even further to include some non-objects as well. For example, the fake dentures that are labelled “Fake Accent” is a clear reference to India’s BPO industry and its complex politics of impersonation.

The Hydrogen Bond of the Communist Manifesto

The Hydrogen Bond of the Communist Manifesto
2002
Multimedia installation involving interactive animation, and artist’s books

How can one revisit a canonical text in ways that can open up fresh ways of engaging with it? That was my primary concern in this project where I attempted to work with Marx and Engels’ seminal text of 1848, the Communist Manifesto. This project was exhibited and installed at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology when I was in my third year of studies there. The project addressed the notion of site specificity and tried to grapple with the vexed question of ‘political naiveté versus political radicalisation’ that often crop up in elite, urban institutes. A certain degree of pedagogical polemics was therefore an inevitable part of the project.

The main armature of the work was based on a ‘classic’ deconstructive reading of the text. I attempted to locate those precise points where the text begins to contradict itself. These points of contradiction were then treated as entry points for the reader to catch a glimpse of the manner in which the text privileges one set of meaning against a competing set of meanings. The work looked at these aspects through a set of three interactive animations. Each of them explored a particular set of semantic privileging that the text indulged in. For example, there was a set of animation that looked at the manner in which the urban is consistently valorised over the rural (“the idiocy of rural life”) while another set of animation explored the contradictions between collective action and private property.

These explorations were attempted with a stronger reliance on contemporary reference points that with the usual optics of theoretical humanities /political science. In many cases there was a deliberate blurring of historical reference frames that also cut across the distinctions between the ‘serious’ and the ‘frivolous’. Therefore for example, in an animation that dealt with the notion of privacy one would be confronted with password protected screens. Success in cracking the password allowed the users the to get a peek into random selections from the agony aunt column in daily newspapers. Therefore, within the space of a single animation one could confront very diverse modalities and mentalities of privacy. The main set of animations was accompanied by a set of large prints and hand crafted artist’s books that amplified and worked with other aspects of the Communist Manifesto.

A Given Rate of Dweposition

Dweposit
2006
A Short Animated Narrative
Single Channel Projection
5min 50sec

This work was done at the KHOJ International Artist’s workshop in Kolkata, 2006. The workshop took as its site an old zamidarbari (landlord’s mansion) in Baruipur, a place close to southern extension of Kolkata. Dweposit, the animated narrative that I worked on was my response to this particular site and its politics. The zamidarbari seems to occupy an important place in the popular Bengali imagination as a site of ‘traditional Bengali culture’. Articulated as a site of memory, the zamidarbari and its network of architectural spaces typically associated with specific rituals and festivities, repeatedly surface in films, TV serials, advertisements, literature and music as the very embodiment of tradition. But as we all know, tradition is always an ambiguous and contested terrain: the purported timelessness of tradition is often a political ‘invention’ of a very specific nature.
My way of engaging with the Chaudhuri Bari was to try and scrape through this patina of ‘traditional culture’ and look at other recalcitrant artefacts of history. In fact, what interested me more in the Chadhuri Bari site was the large expanse of land that surrounds the actual house. The animated narrative that I present here started evolving from this point. One could possibly view Dweposit as an allegorical take on the “land question”. From the Permanent Settlement of 1793 that chalked out the basic legal framework of landed property in colonial Bengal to the tribals who are rendered landless by the postcolonial state obsessed with a flawed vision of ‘progress’, land and its ownership remains a crucially important node in the complex ramifications of power.

Codework: Animated Short in two parts

Random frames from Codework, an animated short in two parts

Codework
Animated short in two parts, single channel projection
6 min, 24 seconds
2006

This work was exhibited first in a group show, "Ghosts in the Machine and other Tales" curated by Pooja Sood at the Apeejay Media Gallery in New Delhi. In Codework I have looked at a very simple piece of PHP (a scripting language widely deployed on the internet) code that enables a user to subscribe or unsubscribe to a mailing list. Through two small narratives, I formulate speculative scenarios to attempt an expanded annotation of this code. Though the code at hand is the primary focus, I also try to tentatively reflect on some of the larger implications for our cognitive understanding of the world around us. At a fundamental level Codework then is an invitation to engage with the technologies of software that undergrid the practices of our everyday life: sending and receiving e-mail, using search engines to ferret out information, sharing mp3 playlists, etc.

But the question of engagement here is not exhausted by mere didacticism. Engagement here would also include negotiating the contours of one’s imaginative universe and refusing to view these technological processes as mere instrumentality. An engagement becomes that much more poorer if it defers the lyrical and the whimsical for the instrumental and the efficacious. As a visual artist who is interested in science and technology, it is also about being able to stake a claim for the legitimacy of a plural mode of engagement with a discourse that is framed by a highly technical language: solving encryption algorithms oneself cannot be the only way of engaging with the mechanics of secure communication on the internet. Codework then looks at code tangentially, and in attempting to refigure it through narratives and images that allegorically amplify the very structure of its formal logic, seeks to find fresh ways of engagement.