The X-Ray Files

June 10, 2014 - June 13, 2014

From Stings to Leaks to Citizen Vigilantes

A video lecture 
at 
CAMP Roof
Tuesday June 10
7:30 - 10:30  pm

As the story goes, villagers in Jaunpur, or women labourers in Bangalore (depending on if you want to believe Tejpal or Bahal on this) responded to early sting operations by invoking an image of tehelka dot com as an x-ray machine located in Delhi that would expose everyone’s corruption as soon as they came in front of it. This apocryphal story became a kind of intuitive marker for conceptual connections between hidden cameras and transparency in governance and political intentions. 

But all metaphors have their limits. X-rays don’t usually tell you if their subject is even alive or not. People (we will see) are being slapped and pinched even while under “truth serum”. Truth in other words, is extracted or built by a combination of means. The “transparency” produced by early hidden camera recordings relied on elaborate mise-en-scene or “setting”: fictional scripts, unreliable narrators, great performances and hungry network audiences. Stings and leaks in India have been largely an audio-visual medium, framing violence and encounter, far from transparently or opaquely, as a new skin of documentary experience. 

This evening we present a long-format (2 hour 30 minutes) artists’ rendering of a history of images and sounds produced by stings, leaks and more recent citizen vigilante media, with TV overlays and edit styles removed or undone. We follow an evolution or descent of these forms from energetic origins in new media journalism, via proliferating leaks, into an ordinary in which “every citizen now becomes an anti-corruption inspector”, in the words of Aam Aadmi Party’s new Chief Minister of Delhi, at the start of this year. 

There is a difference between ideology and the way things actually look. (It can look worse too). Direction, framing, timing, empathy or lack of it, and again mise-en-scene, count in the difference. Video in this form is a crafted relation between selves and others, a test of ethics far beyond the law, and a precedent for what distributed technologies can do. Video's own protocols are far from settled, and it cruises the edges of "the networks". There are a lot of questions here about what a democracy or community of images might look like. For while the selfie says radically, “I represent myself”, the easier wrist position, or higher Mp camera, still points outward. 

(Part of this material was presented recently as a two-hour video lecture at the 3rd Berlin Documentary Forum, HKW, Berlin.) 

Acknowledgements

In Delhi: 
Tehelka, Cobrapost, Gulail, AAP
Aniruddha Bahal, Satyashree Gandham, Shaunak Sen, Aastha Chauhan, Ankit Lal, Vinay Shukla 

At CAMP and Bombay:
Zinnia Ambapardiwala, Prerna Bishnoi, Omkar Khandekar, Ashwin Nag, Geeta Sheshu

At Pad.ma:
Lawrence Liang, Jan Gerber