The Last Message from Toblino. (unrealised project for Manifesta7, at the Cardano Power Plant)
The upper building of the Cardano hydroelectric power station conceals its sources: there is no visible water here. The giant pipes coming down the mountainside appear out of nowhere: no lakes or rainclouds surround them, no dams are in sight. Much like clock towers in medieval Europe, the building is empty but suggests a hidden connection to some greater power.
The lower buildings at Cardano conceal absence of a different order. We discover here that no one works at this power plant! Instead, it is managed over optic fibre by a control room in Lake Toblino, 100 km away. At the heart of this infrastructure then, there is a step aside; a distance not only between production and consumption, but at the heart of production itself. Cybernetic processes "replace" labour, or move it elsewhere – but what replaces cybernetic processes? We could see cybernetics itself as fragile, full of holes, running against time and the changing socio-economic order.
This proposal imagines the upper building as "clock tower", displaying the last message from Toblino, with its timestamp. (see Toblino message dump below). The difference between the time displayed and the present time is the duration for which the station has been "autonomous" – i.e. without any instruction from a human being. We can imagine that the remote worker can use this time to take a coffee break, call his girlfriend, or think about a new job. For people passing by on the highway, this is a proposal to think about the distance to Toblino, and to then consider what idea of the "local" holds this arrangement in place. This is not the "last" message from Toblino, not yet.
(version of text published in the Manifesta7 reader, "Rest of Now", edited by Rana Dasgupta)
From Toblino:
Traffic Jam-Cinema, Image as Wall. (unrealised project for 48degC, Delhi, with Shaina Anand)
A proposal to invite car-driving audiiences onto a new road being built (now abandoned) on the Khijrabad/ Zakir Nagar side of the Yamuna/ DND (in Delhi). An access route already exists from the DND as a kaccha road linking to the new road under construction. Fairly soon, the road is blocked by a screen across it, and by images/ films on it. Pedestrian crowds from Zakir Nagar and other "informal" settlements further ahead would also walk upto the screen from the other end. From the side, other residents from Khijrabad would join in.
A "drive-in cinema" that quickly turns into another kind of encounter, this "screening space" is proposed as a temporary use of the unbuilt road. Audio for the "cinema" is via a micro-fm transmission, where car radios and other radios may act as the sound system. Our conversations with people living on the proposed road-side revealed the potential for some tension, but also was welcomed as a "blocked" use of the future road.
(Proposal abandoned at early stage because of lack of clarity on the status of the road construction, and fear of disruption/ violence. We finally produced for this festival another project, Motornama Roshanara-link shortly).
