selection from a text published in
Cinema of Prayoga,
Karen Mirza and Brad Butler (eds.),
no.w.here, London, 2006
ISBN: 0-9553881-0-4

 

Shai: What do you say when people ask you what kind of art you make?

Ashok: Well, the traditional term is "media artist" but that has an increasingly diffused meaning... a lot of things are "media", from paper to print. And "new media" is mostly just incorrect in my case, since I work with many old things and analog technologies as well. Most often I just say I work with electronics and computers in physical installations, and people seem to understand. What is important is that I also work with ideas surrounding electronics and computers, that sometimes don't involve actual electronics and computers at all (although many times they do). So its a bit complicated.

Shai: GPS was your first major work when you moved to Bombay. Can you describe the experience of building this piece?

Ashok: GPS is short for "Glow Positioning System". It is one of the physically larger works I have done. It was a giant ring of lights stretched around about 1000 feet of architectural envelope, forming a kind of virtual horizon. It was "run" with a hand-crank. Turning the crank would play the lights back and forth on this panorama. Varying the speed and direction of rotation cause the lights to move accordingly, with various "persistence" effects, both actual and perceived.

This work directly referenced a particular pre-history of virtualization: the crank driven moving panorama. This is mostly a "western" history, but the idea of a virtual horizon is transmitted right through to cinema, and in the Indian city bleeds into the numerous giant light-events that are created as part of festivals such as Diwali and Dussehra.

To put these lights up, I was working with a team of "shaadi" decorators... people who usually work on wedding lights, Ganpati mandaps and so on. They had a particular sense of what the major buildings (including the General Post office) should look like. In other cases the residents and owners of the houses, offices and shops determined the "design" of the lighting. So I actually had almost no control over the way this looked visually... it was a giant and complex negotiation, involving knocking on the doors of several dozen houses, offices, restaurants, asking them what kinds of lights they would like, and so on.

But this was done quickly. The whole setup was done in about three days. The software and hardware interfaces were quite simple, so I was able to help out with the lights themselves. Of course, we had general permissions from the city and so on, but it was quite crazy nevertheless, as many temporary decorations in the city are...

In one sense this is a kind of anti-urban design, a negation of the conservationist strategy that would light up the heritage building but certainly not the shack beside it. On the other hand, it is a poke at GPS, whose "global" prefix implies an ability to travel, globally. Here too there is travel, but it is a "tourism" of a place we know, and(like in cinema) you're not actually going anywhere.

Shai: Electricity is an important character in your work.

Ashok: This has happened over time... I became very interested in a bottom-up understanding of "the digital", and of related concepts of virtuality and control. Some of the inspirations came from what is called the "archaeology" of such media, such as in the GPS example, and in a series of pieces around the Room Camera Obscura. For introducing me to this fascinating and neglected history, I have to thank one my professors at UCLA, Erkki Huhtamo, who has the coolest collection of pre-cinematic optical devices imaginable.

A the same time, I was interested in working with very simple technology, things that are legible and achievable. I am interested in magic, but its better if its low-tech. This bent, combined with an interest in so-called "embedded" systems, and in spatial concepts of the network, led to electricity. Electricity is an "open source" medium.... It has a rich history of people inventing devices for it, and many things "understand" electricity in similar ways. It is unencoded, which means that in India (and elsewhere) it is often stolen. It also means that an itinerant switch is a dangerous thing in the wired world. It can set off a bomb, or a fountain. This "universality", the presence of electrical flows and "gates" everywhere in our daily environment, seemed to invite a renewed look at electricity as a medium: of transmission, data storage and control, but also of anxiety, glamour, magic and power.

Shai: And now you are working with switches and windows...

Ashok: The switch and window projects are related in the sense that they both have to do with a kind of penetrability or porosity of the built environment... but also of systems, of the possibility of "leakage".

The switch projects are coming out of an interest in embedded technologies, using embedded electricity as a model. Over the next year, I am doing dozens of works that look at electrical power and control anew: some of the areas of exploration include itinerant electricities, mutations of "public works", collaborations with electrical street practices, and conceptual explorations of the trielectric between instruction (how humans may use a system), code (how the machine translates what the humans do) and regulation (laws that define/control this relationship). Many of these actions will take place in Indian cities, and i seek to create an alternative grammar for electrical use,that may extend to other "pervasive" technologies on the horizon.

At the other end, there have been a few window projects. The most recent one was a part of two-person show called City of Glass, in Bangalore. The other artist was Cristoph Schafer, who has been part of the well-known Park Fiction project in Hamburg. Here he did a rather interesting work about an apartment complex in the "new Bangalore" called Melrose Place, which was completely modeled- central swimming pool and all, after the once-hip Californian TV series Melrose Place.

My own work was more literally about the status of the glass in the modern building - in the IT City. The Modernist tradition in architecture celebrated a glass as a kind of democratizing interface... the more glass you had, the more empathy you supposedly had with your surroundings. But very quickly, the oppsite became true... the glass curtain wall became an ubiquitous, impenetrable surface, endlessly reflecting the indoors and outdoors unto themselves.

So in my project , I look at the glass window in the technological city as a kind of nostalgia,a "natural view" provided to workers who were otherwise immersed in other Windows, on their desktops. Often in the new campuses built by technology companies such as Intel outside Bangalore, the entire environment, the landscaping, everything you see through the window is 'scripted'(much like what is on your computer screen) to create an impression of pleasant remove from the almost rural India you are in.

The work creates a crisis or anxiety in this 'view', by making a network 'leak' visible as a part of it. Through the gallery window, in one of the mnay office windows you can see across the courtyard, is a computer (minus the operator/worker) that is scanning through everything on the desktop, in the gallery. If you open a new browser window, it follows. The view in this faraway monitor is zoomed in, so you can actually see the letters you are typing or your email blown up to an almost architectural scale, like a giant realtime "sign" that is mocking your lack of security. Glass is a sign of weakness, in the technocity.

Exhibited alongside is a gallery of 'window figures', from Vermeer's Geographer to the techno-voyeur (via window guards, protestors, exhibitionists and spies).

Shai: Do you build all the software and hardware for your pieces entirely yourself?

Ashok: I try to, whenever possible... and often I have to. But I'm not necessarily a fundmentalist about it. It's interesting for me if it is an interesting technology.. or if I am learning to 'hack' something that is usually meant to do something quite different.

For example as a part of a residency for ISEA at Sun Microsystems Labs in California (where I am a resident this year, and the work goes up in august) I am building a 'scope which optically interferes with, pokes at, an embedded wi-fi network. In other words, together with people at Sun I am building a capability that allows these nodes (Sunspots:small computers that run on Java and talk to each other over radio) to be exposed to a line-of-sight machine, essentially a souped-up infrared remote control with a very tight cone of action that is parallel to your sight vector. This mode of interaction is interesting to me, because it anticipates a way of looking at the 'Internet of Things' that is unsurprisingly close to targeting technologies in warfare. These are data-bullets that penetrate into objects and architectures, to strike at their electronic hearts.

I'm interested in working on some of this myself, because then I can get my teeth into a programming environment like Java, explore the hybrid field of 'opto-electronics', reuse lenses and electronics from other things, and all this is conceptually interesting to me. In many projects I ask for help, collaborate or hire specialized assistance.

So, I've built this (scope prototype), although I've used components and technologies which have been passed on from other people, its like any craft, you borrow, you try to give back, and you ocassionally pay people to do parts of your work. But you still understand the whole process and you try to be hands-on as much as possible.

Shai: What are the fundamental concerns that guide your experiments with architecture cinema and technology?

Ashok: The optical machine described above is also very cinematic – it's a gaze machine, a force that pushes as much as it pulls. I'm interested in cinema in a spatial, non-narrative kind of way. Actually I am more interested in pre-cinema, or experiments that preceded the standardized format of passive viewing that we now call cinema.

There is of course a large body of scholarship that deals with film and architecture, urbanism and the moving image. (A personal favorite is Guiliana Bruno's Atlas of Emotion,Verso,2002). But even beyond such 'emotional' landscapes,there is a clear sense of urgency in protecting that which is 'public' about the landscape.

There is an ongoing attempt (after many failed urban planning fantasies) by governments and others to make sense, bit-by-bit, of a world that is still largely built without architects, without designs – by massive forces of migration, globalization, and war. There is an attempt to discipline this unruly space by electronic means. With satellite imagery, GPS technologies, surveillance cameras, boundary sensors, embedded RFID systems and so on. These are technologies that can be used in the pursuit of pure and totalizing power, which must be resisted. We must fight a new electronic war, not just in cyberspace but for the space between buildings, for new forms of 'public' property, for the right to privacy and to poetry, for the right to express, transmit, and erase ourselves, if need be. In the 'real' world.
This is a space, which needs alternatives to homogeneous, centrally controlled flows. Many times we can find alternatives in older, forgotten imaginations and toools... sometimes we need to invent new ones. We need independent urban practices,just as we need independent, experimental cinema.

Shai: You consciously choose to work with both high-tech and low-tech devices. Is there a comment that you are making through this kind of practice?

Ashok: When we attempt to understand technological alternatives, the investigation needs to be at all levels. I am interested in supporting, especially here in India, an understanding of the 'digital' that goes beyond device-based, or even programming-oriented, concepts. To do this I and others are working with and around a vast range of technologies, to understand our own 'digital moment', to see how and where it is already upon us (perhaps we are even past it, in some ways), and to craft a response.

Basically, this means that a general understanding of 'low-level' digital concepts such as quantization and encoding, and their effects on all our lives, can be revealed through things that are already familiar, such as electricity, and not only for example, through hothouse debates on 'social software' and such. At the same time it is crucial not to be nostalgic or territorial. Our participation in the 'cutting edge' discourse about technology and culture is essential, with a deep understanding of multiple global contexts, and how we all got here in the first place.

Shai: You have created your artistic context in India, can you describe the struggles involved in doing so, both in terms of economics and aesthetics?

Ashok: Yes, although I am certainly not the only one... Raqs Media Collective in Delhi and non-art groups such as Radiophony Mumbai and the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore have been working with the related concerns of "media" practice in India for some time now, albeit with a different approach. My wife and collaborator Shaina Anand works independently with a whole range of interventionist and 'narrowcast' media, such as local cable TV. Many other people doing important work are not well known in the art circuit.

So I am not personally very worried if everything I do is seen as 'art'. I am very interested in art history, and media art history, and I do primarily work as an artist. But I am mostly being the kind of 'artist' I think I want to be, without real concern for the art market or particular demands of the gallery/ museum system. I have been lucky to get opportunities and commissions in in other realms, and working partly internationally and living in India helps in economic terms. Recently, I received some grant money to do research work around my artistic concerns, which is wonderful, and which more practitioners should have access to.

Similarly, the question of aesthetics, in the traditional sense is not central to my work. Yes, I'm seeking a grammar, a language, but it is not primarily a visual one, or even directly related to conceptual art or related practices. I also write about this now, and eventually the objective is to have a group of peers and friends not only in India, who are working around similar ideas... To have a little 'scene', a distributed and global consciousness – that is much more fun than selling art.

Shai Heredia
20 May 2006

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