Experimenter, Kolkata
September 23, 2011 - December 8, 2011
This exhibition proposes an after-form and before-form for two of
art's (and our own) usual objects. The first is a film that was shot over last
year on the English Channel that is now re-installed in Kolkata, making a certain claim for its universality.
The second is a "not-yet-film" treatment of the
Radia leaks as a screenplay, with an audio guide as its
soundtrack. Both these are moments lit up by separate alignments of, broadly, government,
technology, and opportunity...
TWO STAGES OF INVENTION
In a recent CAMP project in Folkestone on the English Channel, volunteer guards filmed the sea through their telescopes for over a year, in a reinvention of "duty", a cultivation of new interests and humour, and an untooling of tools, that could be seen as universal. That is, watchkeepers, timekeepers, guards, guard-machines, fishing and shipping elsewhere are implicated, but so is the Big Society, and other questions of what happens when the state "withdraws". A film made from this footage that was installed at the location it was shot in, is now put online and simultaneously installed in the gallery in Kolkata, thus moving past its own "horizon", and starting to act at a distance.
Part two is a sketch in response to the question: when data leaks, how to approach this as an aesthetic problem? Which catching positions or hungry gods are invented by leaks, that did or didn't exist before? How to feel a leak, and by what means, especially at the scale at which recent digital leaks have occurred? In the case of the Radia tapes, TV-sized sound bytes were enough to make us all engaged voyeurs. But perhaps a more interesting kind of feeling, recognition, or effect, lies somewhere between the allure of individual conversations, and the big dump of information that the leak represents... a level that has to be invented. Suggesting such a level in the exhibition is a screenplay treatment based on the Radia tapes released so far, along with a comprehensive "audio guide" as its soundtrack.
If creativity is chain-like, with inspiration, calculation, handover, surrender, and revelatory events
in the world all appearing regularly, then what part of this is to be
displayed? No, we don't have to exhibit artistic "process" as
incompleteness, waiting, and so on. The proposal here is the opposite one: that "process" is best viewed as a concrete set of
stages, each of which offers a certain space for invention.
A screenplay in Courier 12pt melodramatic format, spanning the first three days of lobbying for cabinet spots, in the wake of the Indian general elections of 2009. The dialogue is entirely from phone taps made by the government. The screenplay slows them down and asks: what kinds of environments and scenes may lie behind them, and how are they connected?
Printed screenplay and IVR-based phone line, audience can type in scene numbers to hear dialogue in the original voices. Also performed as a reading.
Opening November 10, 6pm
With a reading of the screenplay
Act I: Swearing-in Whispers followed by a screening of
Act-II: Hum Logos
Corruption: Everybody Knows curated by Natasha Ginwala, continues through December 19, 2015 at E-flux, NY
A film that compiles observations made by volunteer guards watching the English Channel, over one year. Filmed by small cameras connected to the eyepiece of telescopes. Produced with the National Coastwatch Institution, Folkestone, Kent, UK.
60 minutes, 5.1 surround sound.
A project of listening, including with our ears, to some materials that seem to not touch us directly, but make up our "environment".
Ashok S participated in the School of Environment and Architecture annual conference, with a suggestion on the deployment of abstractions.
Ashok (remote) and Shaina (in-person) participated in the last panel of the March Meeting, New Forms of Surveillance and Extraction.
A reading by CAMP
Opening of Passages Through Passages
A survey exhibition of the spatial, technical and cultural imaginations cultivated by CAMP.
A performance by our collaborators on cctv.camp, Seoul Express. More details: https://njpart.ggcf.kr/when-the-cold-blows/.
EYEWITNESS
New Media Gallery
Watch and Chill
M+
West Kowloon Cultural District
Watch and Chill
MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum
Nam June Paik Art Center Prize
An exhibition of the contextually rich, environment-shifting media works of CAMP