[Works] [Exhibitions] [Catalogs/Essays] [Residencies/Teaching] [List of Interviews] [Research]
Raqs Media Collective Raqs Media Collective is based in Delhi, India Members of the collective are resident at the Sarai Media Lab, Delhi, where they work on projects interpreting the city and urban experience; make cross-media works; collaborate on the development of software; design and conduct workshops; administer discussion lists; edit publications; write, research and co-ordinate several research projects and public activities of Sarai. They are co-editors of the Sarai Reader series. From the Wikipedia Entry on Raqs Media Collective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raqs_Media_Collective "Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 by independent media practitioners Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Based in Delhi, their work engages with urban spaces and global circuits, persistently welding a sharp, edgily contemporary sense of what it means to lay claim to the world from the streets of Delhi. At the same time, Raqs articulates an intimately lived relationship with myths and histories of diverse provenances. Raqs sees its work as opening out a series of investigations with image, sound, software, objects, performance, print, text and lately, curation, that straddle different (and changing) affective and aesthetic registers, expressing an imaginative unpacking of questions of identity and location, a deep ambivalence towards modernity and a quiet but consistent critique of the operations of power and property." |
Solo Exhibitions: 2007 Building Sight , Watermans Gallery, London [Curatorial Project] 2006 The Anthropometry of the Soul, iniVA, London [ Lecture Performance] 2006 There has been a Change of Plan, Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi 2004 The Impostor in the Waiting Room, Bose Pacia Gallery, New York 2004 The Wherehouse, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels 2004 The Listening Room [Performance, with andcompamy&co], Das TAT, Frankfurt 2003 Co-Ordinates, Roomade Office for Contemporary Art, Brussels Exhibitions: 2007 Horn Please , Kunstmuseum Berne 2007 Urban Manners , HANGAR BICOCCA, Milan 2007 Istanbul Biennial 2007 India: New Installations , Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh 2007 Shooting Back , Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna 2007 The Thermocline of Art , ZKM, Karlsruhe 2007 Touring Show , Rhizome.Org at the New Museum of Contemporary Art http://rhizome.org/events/timeshares/ 2007 World Factory, San Francisco Art Institute, USA 2007 Art of the Possible, Lund Konsthalle, Sweden 2006 Dictionary of War, Graz 2006 Ogaki Biennale of New Media Art, Ogaki 2006 Academy: Learning from Art, MuHKA, Antwerp 2006 Public Moment, Seoul 2006 Sub-contingent, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin 2006 Zones of Contact, Sydney Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2006-2007 The Backroom, San Francisco (New Langton Arts and San Francisco Camerawork), Los Angeles (Culver City), Mexico City (University Claustro de Sor Juana), Paris (Kadist 2006 Utopia Station, Princeton 2006 "Building Sight", On Difference #2, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart 2006 "Dark Places", Santa Monica Museum of Art, California 2006 - 2005 Digital Discourse, Malta 2006-2005-2004 Edge of Desire, Perth, New York, Berkeley, New Delhi 2005 Linked: Connectivity and Exchange, Govett Brewster Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand 2005 "Cultural Futures", AUT, Auckland 2005 Icon: India Contemporary, 51st Venice Biennale, Venice 2005 Beyond, 2nd Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou 2005 Citizen, London, Leicester, Belfast 2005 Ephemeral Cities: A Project Space, Deptford X, London 2005 Building Ghost Transmissions, Cubitt Gallery & Studios, London 2005 World Information City, Bangalore 2004 International 04, Tate Gallery Café, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool 2004 ISEA04, Tallinn 2004 Adaptations, Apex Art Gallery New York 2004 Adaptations, Fredrecianum, Kassel 2004 Do you Believe in Reality?, Taipei Beinnial 2004, Taipei 2004 Frauen Museum, Bonn 2004 Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo 2003 The Structure of Survival, 50th Venice Biennale, Venice 2003 Utopia Station, 50th Venice Biennale, Venice 2003 Georgaphy and the Politics of Mobility, Generali Foundation, Vienna 2003 Image Asia, Copenhagen 2003 How Latitudes Become Forms, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis 2002 Emocao Art.Ficial, Itau Cultural Centre, Sao Paulo 2002 Kingdom of Piracy, Ars Electronica, Linz 2002 Belfast Festival at Queen's, Belfast 2002 Documenta 11, Kassel |
Insurance % Investment Insurance%Investment illustrates the mental arithmetic of investment and insurance, two mechanisms designed to administer, anticipate and forestall risk, speculation and the possibility of failure. Whirling motorcyclists in a fairground ‘well of death', giant rotating fan blades, oxygen masks, empty rooms with ornate wall paper and a soundtrack that suggests the respiration of strange machines constitute a constellation of uncanny effects that poise the visitor in a space full of riveting ambivalences. The proliferation of cautionary motifs only emphasizes the latency of danger. Everything is anticipated, yet anything is possible. Sightings Sightings is a photographic experiment with decaying architecture that suggests cartographic resonances. The images, taken together, seem to indicate the possibility of an entire map of the world that can be deciphered from the close observation of walls that need repair. The images are annotated by a set of texts that recall a quartet of figures who constitute a whimsical but carefully constructed navigation aid for the contemporary world. Presented at World Factory curated by Hou Hanru at the Walter & McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, January-April 2007 The Anthropometry of the Soul Skulls, fingerprints, composite photographic portraits, anthropometric photographs, reports of police officers, colonial administrators and forensic scientists along with letters written by recovering Indian soldiers during the first world war and anthropological notations on the people of India and Britain are juxtaposed in this process to constitute a compelling ‘narrative in progress' that considers how the detritus of Empire produced new disciplines for looking at and measuring human beings. When measurements of the body are sought to answer questions about the dispositions of the spirit, we arrive at an Anthropometry of the Soul. This practice of measuring the humanity of people against the harvest of presumed certainties gleaned from their bodies continues today in different forms. Presented at IniVa, London, 2006: http://www.iniva.org/season/atlasII/project_06 Ashwatthama Ashwatthama is a character in the Mahabharata, cursed to live forever, as a kind of wandering warrior... The Dictionary of War is a collaborative platform for creating 100 concepts on the issue of war, to be invented, arranged and presented by scientists, artists, theorists and activists at four public, two-day events in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz and Berlin. The aim is to create key concepts that either play a significant role in current discussions of war, have so far been neglected, or have yet to be created. Presented at the Graz Edition, 2006. http://dictionaryofwar.org/en-dict/graz View/Download: http://www.v2v.cc/v2v/Ashwatthama_-_Raqs_Media_Collective The KD Vyas Correspondence Vol.1 The KD Vyas Correspondence Vol. 1 is an installation embodying an epistolary enigma. The basis of this work are a set of eighteen 'letters' between Raqs and a person or entity who is identified as KD Vyas, sometime redactor of the Mahabharata. The Installation manifesting the 'Correspondence' brings together eighteen video enigmas that could be an abbreviated contemporary concordance to the eighteen cantos of the Mahabharata, densely encrypted messages, annotations to the letters themselves, or memories of places and times where they may have been read - once, twice or an infinite number of times. The work involves video, sound, a dossier and a dialogue with the architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Muller that results in a structure 'The Node House' that holds the images and sounds, hovering like the disembodied memory of an instance of the epic's hyperlinked incantation. The eighteen floating fragments that constitute the installation function as indices of Raqs' continuing investigations on the theme of 'declining time', on the protocols of the production and transmission of narratives, on the vexed questions of the verification and authenticity of being, and on some methods for remaining sane in the early years of the twenty first century. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/kdvyas.html The Mathematics of Anacoustic Reason The Mathematics of Anacoustic Reason is an aphoristic 'image-text' work in response to an invitation to respond to the concept: ‘Out of the Equation: Roads to Reality’. The Mathematics of Anacoustic Reason responds to the invitation by expressing an equation written primarily in the formal language of mathematics and by elaborating on this expression with images and a brief accompanying text. The equation attempts to condense an articulation of the relationships between silence, disquiet, power and the actions of the multitude with a view to yielding a measure of understanding about who or what gets a hearing in the world. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/equation.html Fragments from a Communist Latento A contribution in the form of an image-text essay that re-asseses the possibilities of communism as an idea, to the book 'Communism-Make Everything New' edited by Duncan Grant, Book Works, London, 2006. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/latento.html A Dying Man Sings of That Which Felled Him “A dying man sings of that which felled him” presents its viewer with a silent song of a thousand words, a bier of iron rods for the repose of a fallen man, a setting sun, and an empty chair awaiting a visitor. Here, in this long twilight, a story from the Bhishma Canto of the Mahabharata realized with construction materials, is configured to form a meditation on contemporary global capitalism. The list of a thousand words (reminiscent of Bhishma's death-bed incantation of the thousand names of Vishnu) may be thought of as a 'dying declaration', or as a eulogy chanted by a dying man to the power that felled him. The installation involves us all as witnesses to this terminal state. At a time when the rhetoric of impending ‘super-powerdom' resounds in the metropolises of South Asia with an exhausting monotony, this installation is a reminder of the whimsical contingencies of the operation of power which spare no one, not even those who imagine themselves at the helm of affairs. The iron rods - a notational trope that recalls both the building and destruction of cities as well as Bhishma's deathbed of arrows made by Arjun during the Mahabharata battle - act as a reminder of the fragility and tenuousness of our hold on the world. The visitor is invited to contemplate their own recorded image within the matrix of this installation, and to reflect on the caveats that this work offers to the discourse of triumph that surrounds us today. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/dyingman.html 3 Caveats on a Bare Wall | 3 Caveats to be Worn Casually “3 Caveats...” are a set of inscriptions designed to be read on a bare wall, or worn as wristbands, that ask questions about viewership, curation, exhibition and distance. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/caveats.html On the Question of Standards while considering the Freedom of Speech, after Duchamp A piece in response to the invitation from Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija on the occasion of Utopia Station_Free Speech at the Davis Centre, Princeton University, March 2006 http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/on_considering.html Building Sight: Curatorial Project for On Difference #2, Kunstverein Stuttgart, Germany 2006 [with Sanjak Kak, Ruchir Joshi, Satyajit Pande, Solomon Benjamin, Ravikant Sharman, Prabhat Kumar Jha, Nancy Adajania, CyberMohalla Ensemble, Sarai Media Lab and the Sarai.txt Broadsheet Collective] Cities are building sites. Construction never ends; work is in progress. "Building Sight" - brick by retinal brick, pixel by pixel, frame by frame - is a consideration of what it means to start a conversation, standing where we are located, in Delhi, with the body of the world, and its soul. The city can strike you as a maelstrom. The city swells, becomes strange, crowded, dense. Evictions breed evictions. A city becomes something you hang on to as you lurch into daily uncertainties. Yet, time is sought for pauses, for breath, for play, for dreaming, for the carving out of spaces, handholds and corridors which make the city livable. "Building Sight" is a sketch of how a way of thinking about a city can be constructed. It is also a provisional index of conversations that we have been having for some time with friends, colleagues and correspondents - architects & urbanists, filmmakers & cinematographers, researchers, practitioners, editors and designers - who have helped us to think about what it means to live in cities. Many of them are from Delhi, some from Mumbai and Bangalore. To us, their work anticipates, rather than represents, what the response of contemporary art practice to the South Asian city can be. http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/en/programme/2006/exhibitions/on-difference-2 "There has been a Change of Plan" http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/another.html Contribution for "2006 Peace Tower" A piece in response to the invitation from Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija to contribute to the 'Peace Tower' for the Whitney Biennial 2006. The 2006 Peace Tower, echoes the 'Artists Tower for Peace and Against the War in Vietnam' designed by Mark di Suvero in the 60s with contributions from 400 artists (the Artists' Protest Committee). The new 'Peace Tower' (2006) invites some of the artists who contributed to the earlier tower, and several other artists working around the world today, to revisit themes of peace and war. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/peacetower.html Contribution to: Report (Not Announcement) A transitionary report on the state of mobility at the beginning of the 21st century. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/nonplace.html With Respect to Residue: 4 Illuminated Maps for the Pearl River Delta 2nd Guangzhou Triennal, Guangzhou, China, 18 November 2005 - 15 January 2006 With Respect to Residue: 4 Illuminated Maps for The Pearl River Delta is a project designed to provoke reflection about the things, states of being and histories that end up abandoned as waste, as the detritus of the routine processes that constitute and maintain the world. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/residue%20table.html They Called it the XXth Century: Poster Rescension Ephemeral Cities: A Project Space, Deptford X, London, 29 October - 27 November 2005 http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/invalid.html Erosion by Whispers Erosion by Whispers is an intangible presence of words, whispers and rumours across our dense urban infrastructure suggesting that fragility is as much part of the experience of cities as the claim to endurance is built into their design. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/erosion.html Preface to a Ghost Story Building Ghost Transmissions, Cubitt Gallery & Studios, London, 2 November - 18 December 2005 http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/preface.html Ectropy Index "Ectropy" means a general increase in organization. An ectropy index is a measure of the increase of information, or of order, in a given system. Identity cards and identity theft, fingerprints and forgeries, surveillance cameras and shadows, data bodies and data crashes, biometrics and body sculpting seem to define significant features of the topography of contemporaneity. A host of everyday practices provoke anxieties of agencies invested in knowing that which can be known. Ectropy Index seeks to create a tension between entropic and ectropic impulses, between forces that tend to increase and decrease the levels of order and systematization within a system. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/ectropy.html They Called it the XXth Century (from The Impostor in the Waiting Room) Kunstlerhaus, Theater der Welt, Stuttgart, 21 June - 10 July 2005 Indian Summer, ENBA, Paris, 7 October - 31 December 2005 http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/xxcentury.html A Measure of Anacoustic Reason ICon: India Contemporary at Venice Biennale 2005 As the world turns, so does the deaf ear of power. A Measure of Anacoustic Reason registers our thinking about forms of reasoning that insulate themselves from listening. The word anacoustic refers to a zone in the atmosphere where air particles are too distant from each other to be able to allow for the conduction of sound. It also denotes any environment, device or condition that effectively blocks out sound. The term 'measure' suggests the deployment or operation of such forms of reason (as in 'measures taken') as well as an account or audit of the acts of reason that are realized in the form of measurements. It is, in that sense, a measure of measuring. The installation sees the act of 'turning a deaf ear', as the unwillingness or inability to listen to the voices that refuse to be accommodated into the master narratives of progress, of instrumental reason and the domestication of space through the geomancy of corporations and nation-states. In this turning away lies an aggressive disavowal of the possibility of the humanity of other forms of expressions and speaking about the world, that privilege realities and experiences that cannot, or need not be counted. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/anacoustic.html Lost New Shoes
Citizens - a touring exhibition of international contemporary art on the theme of citizenship curated by Cynthia Morrison-Bell (Art Circuit) and Laymert Garcia dos Santos Pitshanger Manor & House, Ealing, London 30 Jan - 4 April 2005 Lost New Shoes confronts the notion of the 'citizen' by looking at the absence or void where a person may be. One way of looking at a pair of shoes (just shoes) is to regard them as hollow objects from which someone has withdrawn themselves. Used and thrown away shoes, like used-up people, are hollowed out by the absence of meaningful usage. One is shorn with citizenship as one is with shoes. And often the fit is much too tight for comfort. Measurements index the effort involved in making bodies count. Bodies, like shoes are examined if they measure up to the claims that can be made about them and often, they are found wanting. Sometimes, as people disappear, shoes are the only things left standing. Shoes leave bodies. Bodies leave shoes. 'Lost New Shoes' looks at shoes that went astray in search of places that were considered safe to walk in. Shoes that confronted new terrain, that approached rest but didn't quite get there, that stopped where maps and walls made them stand still. We are looking at the emptiness in them that asks to be filled with a claim to just be. The images that make up this installation are only a record of an itinerary in search of somewhere to stand. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/shoes.html Please Do Not Touch The Work Of Art A textual interpretation of instructions usually designed to separate art works from their publics. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/work_of_art.html The Impostor in the Waiting Room Bose Pacia Gallery, Chelsea, New York, 11 November 2004 - 23 December 2004. Sydney Biennale, Zones of Contact, 2006 The Impostor in the Waiting Room is a consideration on what happens when modernity encounters its shadow. As a group of practitioners who navigate routes in and out of modernity, its past, present and future, on a daily basis in Delhi - the city where we live, and in the course of our travels elsewhere, we have come to realize that the world is densely encrusted with 'waiting rooms' - spaces for transients to catch their breath as they prepare for the arduous ascent to the high promontory of modernity. The image of the "waiting room" gestures towards the sense of incompleteness and elsewhereness that fills those spaces of the world about which the overriding judgment is that they are insufficiently modern - that they are merely patchy, inadequate copies of 'somewhere else'. Such waiting rooms exist in the very heart of that 'somewhere else' - in New York and Los Angeles, in London and Singapore - but it is outside these islands that they have their truest extent. Most of the world, in fact, inhabits such antechambers of modernity. We know such antechambers well; we are at home in them, everywhere. Waiting Rooms everywhere are full of Impostors waiting to be auditioned, waiting to be verified, waiting to know and to see whether or not their 'act' passes muster, and whether they can cross the threshold and arrive on to the plane where 'history is truly made'. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/impostor.html With Respect to Residue Liverpool Biennial, 2004 This work takes the form of a disposable consideration of the residual in the history of the world. Images of the detritus of a meal or snack invade the cheap paper surface of a cartography of time zones in the global working day, accompanied by a text, framed ornately in gold. The ephemeron of the tablemat asks its would-be-discarder, about to rise from the table, to think about why "there are no histories of residue, no atlases of abandonment, no memoirs of what a person was but could not be" . http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/residue.html The Network of No_Des ISEA 2004, Tallinn. First Prize, Unesco-DigiArts Award 2004. The Network of No_Des uses driftwood from web searches, messages in data bottles, fragments of Hindi and Bengali film scenes and research notes from Sarai's ongoing exploration of new media street culture in Delhi to present an array of associational possibilities. The work weaves threads that connect basements in Delhi to depots for migrants in Ellis Island, philosophers to comic book superheroes, lost and found notices to the drying up of a sea, food to forgery and death sentences to internet matrimonials. Navigation between the nodes in the Network of No_Des brings surprises, confirmations and detours that make the visitor confront the fact of his/her own foraging in the undergrowth of the information economy. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/nodes.html The Listening Room Das TAT, Frankfurt, 2004 The Listening Room is a spoken word and sound performance using documentary material and research notes on travel, migration, detention and deportation in Europe and India. The performance emerged out of a process of collaborative investigation and conversation between Raqs and andcompany&Co - a theatre and performance collective during the course of a residency at Das TAT, Franksfurt The Wherehouse Presented at: The Wherehouse is a constellation of images, objects and annotational possibilities designed to posit a speculative archaeology of/for the present moment. It constitutes an assemblage of reflections on time, memory, movement, stasis and location in a world where some people are forced to abandon home, and others can be seen as being imprisoned by their assumptions about the stability of their present location. The constellation gestures to the fragility of the moorings we have in the materiality of the world we inhabit, and to our brittle certitudes about our destinies. It essays this through a sustained interaction with abandoned objects on the streets of Brussels, and a series of annotations that engage with the experiences and reflections of immigrants to Europe, many of whom live under conditions of detention. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/wherehouse.html Five Pieces of Evidence Five Pieces of Evidence reflects on missing persons, urban myths, transitoriness, maps and global networks. The five screens are narratively organized along the lines of a 'whodunit'. Missing persons notices, street maps, demographic statistics and images of pipelines, rail tracks, harbours and city-scapes evoke a multi-layered set of speculations on the way urban spaces stage everyday 'disappearances'. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/evidence.html Utopia is a Hearing Aid Utopia is a Hearing Aid features a large image of the ear superscribed repeatedly with the statement - "Utopia is a Hearing Aid". This image-text emerges from our understanding that the possibility of another world is actually always latent within the materiality of this one. One has only to listen to the sounds of it stirring to make it manifest. This requires the cultivation of a hermeneutics of listening, of listening very carefully. Of paying attention to the things that are being said, not only aloud, but also in whispers, not only in proclamations and manifestos, but also in forms of disguised and coded speech, and not only in reasonable discursive forms but also in acts of parrhesic, fearless speech. It calls for fearless and attentive listening. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/utopia.html Architecture for a Temporary Autonomous Sarai "How Latitudes Become Forms" - Walker Art Center Minneapolis (February - May 2003) The Temporary Autonomous Sarai is an attempt to give form to an ethic of improvisation, conversation and hospitality through an impermanent structure that can contain itself as it moves from place to place. The structure, made of crates used to pack art objects in museums, snow fencing, plastic hangers, clips, A4 sized paper and post it notes, unpacks to form a refuge for people, computers, texts, signs made with pen and paper, and software that privileges itinerancy, flexibility of usage, and the possibility of role-shifts between users and producers, players and viewers, guests and hosts. In this spatial configuration - all visitors are encouraged to be playful with the presences and traces of others. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/tasarai.html A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location) Presented at: In this installation (which also doubles as a piece of text-based one-act electronic theatre), transcripts of chat sessions constitute an electronic patchwork that also includes real and simulated audio recordings of conversations between call centre workers and their clients, images of a female larynx, the text of a re-worked Upanishadic dialogue, and video recordings of a spoken English class in Delhi. The work presents the map of the world as a grid of reflecting surfaces marked by shifting inequalities, and the call centre worker as a figure in this mirrored world, demanding a new understanding of the world, of what it means to labour, in a place, and across space. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/asl.html Carte_blanche SoDa magazine, December 2002, Zurich. This essay in photos and text plays on memories of encounters with strangers and transients, and observations made in airports and other liminal spaces. The images tell a short story of being stranded in the interstices of the world. Accidental generosities and islands of hospitality within archipelagoes of anonymity become the collateral subjects of exploration in a work that looks at travel, arrival, departure, transience, cold, hunger, contact, solitude, and lost and found solidarities at odd hours in strange places. Ndl Jn. (New Delhi Junction) Presented as part of the Invisible Cities exhibition, in the Belfast Festival at Queen's, Belfast, November 2002. http://www.fallt.com/invisiblecities/delhi/index.html This work listens to the city, to its junction, as if it were an electromagnetic force field, registering Delhi as a magnetic attractor as well as a springboard for daily migrations. The city functions as a recording and editing instrument, and the patterns of movement and circulation made by human presences become a palimpsest of aural traces left on its surface. These traces, and the moments of occasional stillness between them suggest a space animated by a multitude of acts, events, stances and attitudes that make for the density of the lived experience of the city. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/newdelhi.html Location(n) Presented at the Emoção Art.ficial Exhibition, Itaú Cultural Centre, Sao Paulo, Brazil, August 2002. Location(n) configures eight clocks, seven computer terminals and a video projection to offer the visitor a meditation on simultaneity, time and emotion. Each of the clocks is labelled with a specific city's name - Sao Paulo, New York, Lisbon, Cape Town, Baghdad, Delhi, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Sydney - and each clock is set to run as per the time zones these cities are located in. The video image of a face, expressionless, but not emotionless, travels from screen to screen, as if a person were really walking or being carried between and through the terminals. Words which stand for states of feeling - EPIPHANY, ANXIETY, DUTY, GUILT, INDIFFERENCE, AWE, FATIGUE, NOSTALGIA, ECSTASY, FEAR, PANIC, REMORSE - are inscribed on the face of the clocks, in place of the numerals for the hours. The face travelling through the terminals evokes the feeling of travelling through timezones, crossing and recrossing the date line through the networked global day, and traversing a complex emotional landscape, across cities, across time, and expressive of a moment of networked global subjectivity that we all are beginning to live today. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/location_n2.html Point D'Ironie, Issue # 28 One in series of a print broadsheets commissioned by the Agnes B Galley. This work is an extension of the reflections on law and space initiated in 28.28 N / 77.15 E :: 2001/02 (Co-Ordinates, Delhi), September 2002 28.28 N / 77.15 E :: 2001/02 (Co-Ordinates, Delhi) In listing a set of latitude and longitude measurements, bracketed by two calendar years, this installation names a city called Delhi and a time that feels like the first two years of the twenty-first century. In doing so, the syntax of space-time co-ordinates also connects the city as a location to the abstractions of other spaces and times. These co-ordinates become a frame within which the work witnesses the experience of living in Delhi in terms of the constant conflict over control of space and over the different meanings that accrue to space. The installation presents each unit of space - public or residential - as being open to a variety of conflicting claims made by inhabitants, transients, users, owners, and planners. It witnesses the city as the battleground of a daily civil war between the masterplan and the moment. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/coordinates1.html OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification) Released at Documenta 11, 2002, and part of "How Latitudes Become Forms", Walker Art Center Minneapolis (February - May 2003) The OPUS project (www.opuscommons.net) is an online platform and software for the creation and sustenance of a commons of digital cultural material. It is an experiment in translating the primary freedoms of Free Software - to access, download and modify any given piece of information - into an ethic of sharing and collaboration in the realm of cultural production. Visitors to OPUS are asked to offer their work for usage by others as 'rescensions'. Global Village Health Manual (GVHM) Version 1.0 GVHM 1.0 is an eccentric assemblage of material found in web searches that suggests the fragility of the body, especially the labouring body in cyberspace. It signposts the exhilaration as well as the exhaustion that characterize early forays into virtuality. Links to cloning, repetitive strain injury, cyborgs, data bodies, virtual prostheses, idorus , anthropometry and innovative methods of torture are presented through an interface that invokes nineteenth century print culture. |