Extractive Media, Center for Comparative Media
Backwards integration in the language of capitalism (Reliance in India uses this as a self-description of its journey from textiles to gas exploration, Amazon’s warehouse automation and its own products are examples) is to go backwards from your product, to constituent raw materials and processes, usually as a way of guaranteeing the supply chain. We (CAMP) are proposing this term to think more broadly about extraction, waste, dependency, rear-guarding, mediatic conversions, in- and out-sourcing, and other aspects of such chains of translation and steps of decision and production.
Forward integration is to try to convert such infrastructural capacity into new consumer facing “products”: museums, film production (Reliance again), consumer goods, but also, each of their specific bets on the future. There are many examples of governments, political parties, corporations, families and other smaller assemblages, attempting to “forward integrate” into culture.
We think it is useful to assess such vertical moves for artistic practice today, both as analysis and possibility. Our practice suggests concepts and techniques on this axis: privilege escalations, parasitisms, sensorial extensions and "sacrifices", among types of actions performed at each layer, each moment of dependency or conversion. In this way, art is not only the “content” of someone else’s infrastructure but is testing and modifying the chains of its own existence.
In these stories of vertical integration, we describe downstream and upstream effects and potentials of long-running open-access projects, a reading of media theory in vertical terms, a story about the British Museum in small-town India, another about CCTV cinematography – how a bit of “vertical" thinking and doing may help us all.
with Visiting Scholars CAMP
(Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran)
We begin this fall semester's film class with a moratorium on audio-video capture.
100 days without your own images:)
The Neighbour before the House
+
A Stone's Throw
August 1 – 7:30 pm
August 7 – 7:30 pm
August 12 – 7:30 pm
August 31 – 7:30 pm
with filmmaker q&a
CROWDED HOUSE
machines, skins, traps and five-year plans
CAMP, Urvar and Studio ON invite you to a one-day Open House of artworks and interactions with the 2024 Inlaks Fine Art Awardees, who have been in residence in Borivali for the past 4 weeks.
as part of
Heavy Metal Containers
July 9, 10 pm
July 13, 7:30 pm
July, 17 pm
July 29, 7:30 pm
Months long workshop initiated by a group of artists in and around Delhi.
To analyse contemporary mediation and media theory as a general phenomenon, to discuss emerging practice and theory, and to produce new work.
Part 1 @Sarai, April 20-22, 2024
featuring
The Neighbour Before the House
Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar
الجار قبل الدار