KAFKA’S CASTLE (2017)
How is productivity, idleness, and attention measured and quantified across the dispensable resource of contemporary digital capital? The artists insert low-resolution provocations as ‘noise’ amidst a vortex of signals generated from various working sites for a company’s CCTV monitoring system. The resulting composition is a choreography of quiet thoughts exteriorised and staged for the surveillance archive, and left for the system to decode and reassemble.
With Amitesh Grover
Medium: 65 low-resolution photography prints on sun board Produced at HCL Tech Pvt Ltd. (Sector 126, Noida, India)
Printed at Digital Image Solutions, Delhi.
Originally commissioned for the exhibition “Hangar For The Passerby”, 2016, curated by Akansha Rastogi at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi
THE ABUNDANCE
The film foregrounds the unprecedented volume of labour-intensive digital service industries. It features an Induction Day expert, one who inducts and trains hundreds of workers every month. He profiles their personalities, engages them with attention techniques and verifies their background for the company. His whirling, twisting, gambolling body is seen alongside the architecture of dreams he inhabits, one that spirals and gyrates as he swivels and turns. The building and body sometimes seem engaged in a pas de deux, at other times appear as witnesses of each other, till exhaustion interrupts and brings them to a grinding halt.
With Amitesh Grover and Shaunak Sen
Featuring Karthick Palanivel
MEDIUM: Double channel projection, 12mins.
Originally commissioned for the exhibition “Hangar For The Passerby”, 2016, curated by Akansha Rastogi at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi
Vimeo Link - https://vimeo.com/235698711
(please send me a mail for the password)
LEAKY FOLDS
Leaky Folds conflates the topographical measure of contemporary workplace with our psychological spreads, that of two artists immersed, and waged. Having sought mock-employment in one of India's biggest software firms, we appeared as workers at various locations across the company's campus - at doorways and in elevators, in fire exits and at secure access points, during night shifts and as shadows of colleagues. We encountered narratives of data secrecy, offshore sites, and recurring crises, as we learnt to perform digital service work. Often, we performed disruptions within the workplace - exercises in abstraction, uselessness, and work-lessness. We assemble our notes from this 6-months long immersion in these leaky folds. Read these perforations as our first-hand comment on the spreadability of digital capital, obsession with logistics and automation, and the messy reality of a post colonial world. We reconsider notions of value, leisure, performance, and acceleration, and seek to dither, to un-measure. Our bodies leaked. Our data leaked.
With Amitesh Grover Designed at Oh Design!
Originally commissioned for the exhibition “Hangar For The Passerby”, 2016, curated by Akansha Rastogi at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi
HOW TO OCCUPY
What is the work of art in the art of work? Do we become visitors, observers, passersby, ghosts, guests, artists as fake employees, or fake artists as employees? Must we be a bug in the system, much like a software virus, trying to ingest the sheer volume of the company, with insufficient or erroneous logic? Could we perform well? Performance is a claim - productivity’s claim, technology’s claim, or a claim measured by how and when deviations occur. To perform is to know, for knowability needs to be unmeasured, through occupying work with a soft wear - an outfit, a posture, an ID card that beeps open doors and computers. The workplace becomes not the setting for the work, but art itself.
Manifesto For How To Occupy
Collapse, become indistinct or intentionally inverted.Oscillate between visibility and invisibility. Choose your moments, timing is of essence here.Persevere with useless tasks - dig a hole, then cover it. Walk in purposeful circularity. Stare into your cubicle, into your laptop screen, indefinitely. Take the elevator up, then down, for your entire work-shift. Shift incessantly, in your chair, in a meeting, at lunch. Look nervous.Ask questions. Inquire, needlessly. Pick out a detail, obsess over it. Make duplicates when you can. As many as you can. Duplicate files, folders, parts of code, error reports, emails, texts. Encourage others around to duplicate all they can.Make speeches. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate through abstraction.
Hesitate. Always.
With Amitesh Grover
Photographs: Ishan Tankha
Originally commissioned for the exhibition “Hangar For The Passerby”, 2016, curated by Akansha Rastogi at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi
WHAT THE FROG’S EYES CANNOT TELL THE BRAIN
Error logs and crash-scripts from softwares that run global digital business are used as a fundamental resource for illumination here. This pulsating room - flickering constellations of recurring crises - reminds us of the perpetual anxiety that drives the seamless technosphere today. Much like Frogs who are excellent bug perceivers, but ones who starve to death being surrounded by food if food doesn’t move, the whole world becomes invisible here as it shifts uneasily between one crash and another. What the frog’s eyes cannot tell the brain.
With Amitesh Grover
Code Design & Manufacturing by Himanshu Bablani (Ardubotics))
Material: Neopixel LEDs, Arduinos, Code, Wood, Metal frame, Wires & Power Adapters
Originally commissioned for the exhibition “Hangar For The Passerby”, 2016, curated by Akansha Rastogi at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi
