How would building a live kaleidoscope work?
Wallpapers.
Collages.
To reduce the visual to a pattern or repetition of itself. subjective>objective>subjective.
This video installation employs two cameras pointing outwards from fourth-floor windows at Kitab Mahal, in Mumbai's Fort district. One camera looks horizontally at the skyline, and another looks almost vertically downwards at the street below. Both these cameras can be panned and zoomed, but not tilted, by the audience. A computer program isolates moving parts of both video streams-- i.e. it follows birds, people, plants moving in the wind, and so on. These selections are then tiled into an kinetic interior projection in which the "sky" camera views form the upper half, and the "ground" forms the lower half of the screen, separated by an artificial "horizon" at about eye level.
Each tile is delayed by a certain number of frames (randomly generated, within limits) from its immediate neighbour to the left. This creates an overall wavelike behaviour that expresses the tracking movement, similar in effect to Muybridge's seminal studies of motion through photography.
This project, with others (1, 2) reconsiders the role of architecture as a viewing space, a condition where architecture is looked through or from, not at. This notion has roots in the Western tradition of the "picturesque", which is has dominated the visual arts for several centuries, and is now recovered in photography and film, and in questions around visual surveillance. At the same time this work draws from my recurrent interest in older forms of media, and the instrumentation of vision. In this case the most direct reference is to the Room Camera Obscura of the 19th century: a public viewing space where Kamra and Kamera were one.
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This is a project done in Bangalore, Shivajinagar, Elgin Talkies.
Elgin Talkies is a 110-year old theatre in Shivaji Nagar. This electrical installation, mostly held up with cellotape and binding wire and reconfigured almost every day, was up for 5 evenings at the theatre and on the street outside it.
The principal idea was that "digital" technologies typically involve atleast two states, both equally valuable. For example, on and off, typical states in an electrical system, can mean various things from various user-positions, depending on contextual factors such as who owns the switch, what is assumed about what may be turned on or off, where the result occurs relative to ones body, and so on. One implication even at the simplest electrical level is that one or the other state may be "hidden" at a given time, and may contain potential for revelatory, dangerous, disallowed, or otherwise tranformative acts.
In this work, the default condition was a decorated building. This was also what we had official permission to do. At the same time, multiple switches (sometimes three, at other times four) were placed on the building facade and across the street on lamp-posts. These switches were momentary, on-if-pressed type, and triggered 'changes' or transformations in the decorated building facade, as follows (in one typical scenario):
1. Poster lights go off, overhead tape player comes on.
2. Window lights go off, 'now playing' film poster flies out.
3. Smoke machine plays.
4. Edge lights go off, disco ball comes on.
An audience on the street could thus switch from a light-decorated facade to other, displaced conditions, evoking a cinema 'leaking' its media out onto the street, as well as an architecture of 'special effects'. All of the pieces and lights were sourced from a decorator whose shop was about 50 feet away from the Elgin gate. Many times the arrangements were changed, after discussions with the decorator and owner. At night we would take the switches out, to reduce the chances of the PWD (public works department, which is on the lookout for electrical violations) finding them.
Pressing any of the buttons was technically a crime, because it caused electricity to 'leak' out of the movie house, beyond its property line, to activate the 'changes'. To place a total of four final switches, two non-legal street crossings were made, and one electrical connection was drawn from the corner meat shop (see map).
The illegality of this setup is ultimately trivial, because of the fact that any number of wireless technologies could technically accomplish the same results, and also because such regulations (including the one banning a street crossing) are routinely stretched in outdoor decorations for example. Still, the deliberate use of mains voltage, and the semi-official show of "rewiring", caused both drama and anxiety on the street.
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This project, i thought, really covers the idea of 'looking' at a place by allowing the viewer to 'scan' the architecture of a place. The act personified in itself.
An installation project done in Mumbai by artist Ashok Sukumaran.
The video was unfortunately not downloadable, watch the video here
There are many ways to "locate" a city, and oneself within it. One way is to distance oneself from it - to look it up in an atlas, a picture, or to go out to sea or up a hill to watch the twinkling lights, and point out the sights we know. Another way is to move within the streets themselves; to awaken the more proximate senses, to touch the city itself. The historical space across these two extremes is richly populated: with maps, movies, mondo nuovo, grids and drifts, 'oramas and 'oscopes, travelling shots and shooting travellers.
In recent times, GPS (Global Positioning Systems) have allowed for an unprecedented notion of "location", or the connection between the mover and the map. GPS devices tell us where we are at all times, potentially everywhere on the globe. Implying that we will travel, globally. In Glow Positioning System, a different kind of travel takes place. This is an interior voyage, a circular tourism... of a place many of us (the audience)know.
A 1200-foot ring of lights encircles the General Post Office intersection in Fort, Mumbai. This is a triangular chowk that is a quieter, somewhat neglected cousin of its neighbour the old VT station. In the center of the intersection is an old pyaav or drinking fountain, and a pigeon-feeding area- the kabutarkhana.
Lights patterns travel between buildings, across roads and onto trees and lampposts, forming an image-scape that is starkly visible at night. A hand-crank mounted on the pavement provides a way for the audience to "scroll" this landscape. The ring responds to panoramic desire, the age-old search for an image to immerse our selves in. From Cycloramas to VR (via panoramic traditions in painting and photography), the "surround view " is a familiar presence in both urban and cinematic manifestoes. Of course, here the city surrounds us already. We just connect some dots, and look again.
This work evolved as a large collaboration between various neighbourhood agencies, extending the orginal permissions to do a lighting work at the GPO. The different types of lights (mainly cheap "chinese" string lights) were installed on the facades and rooftops of several homes , a real-estate office, a razor-blade manufacturer, a transit lodge, an abandoned bank, several shops and restaurants (see map), as well as the 150-year old 'heritage' structure, the General Post Office. Occasionally, existing interior or exterior lights were also connected to the dimming system. The principal, lighting decorator/ installer was from the neighbourhood, momentarily distracted from his wedding-decoration business.
The lights were installed often by negotiating convenient locations and shapes in-situ, and their form was largely determined by the decorators and residents themselves. As you turn the crank, the lit part of the ring of lights moves, for example from the Kothari building onto the trees, or from one minaret to the next. Changing the speed of rotation causes variable persistence effects, both actual and perceived. A path of movement is thus traced upon the concrete city, and our heads turn to meet it.
This crank mechanism itself refers to not only its specific history in the moving panorama, but also a general history of the moving image: as a driver for cinema. Like cinema, the experience does not depend on the observer being physically displaced. You are clearly not going anywhere. Yet there is the clear sense of a physical landscape, and the promise of a haptic journey.
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