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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.