This here is a very quick experiment where I composed a palette with 5000 particles moving around semi-randomly in 3D space with their color subtly affected by the movement in the 3D-space (the z-axis). Instead of doing anything more fancy, the aim here was merely to experiment with the possibilities of this and to prove the concept,. Even this might look a bit more complex, in fact, I actually only used rectangles and ellipses to compose these images. I let the program run for a few hours and see what comes of it.

Theory:Praxis in Emerging Digital Technologies and Cultures in India
Angad Chowdhry | Soumyadeep Paul | Matti Pohjonen

Emerging digital technologies and cultures pose many challenges for traditional research.  For one, the classical academic method is based on a reflexive and critical distance from your object of study. But how do you research something that does not allows the luxury of distance because of the sheer speed of change that is taking place? The moment you slow it down for dissection, it has already changed, moved on to become something else.  Secondly, how do you research something that does not even perhaps exist in the traditional sense but is rather always-already one step in the future: a project under construction, a vision, an idea being developed?  What methods are best suited for such an amorphous and fleeting object of research? What theories are best suited to understand the complex narratives of time, change and becoming presupposed by contemporary digital technologies and cultures?

This chapter will look at emerging digital technologies and cultures in India — mobile phones, MMS, MMORPG, social networks, hacker culture, virtual realities — and the problems, challenges and opportunities these place for research today. It will argue for practice-based research as one possible methodology for better understanding these digital technologies and cultures today. Using examples of the three authors actively involved in working digital technologies and cultures in India, the chapter will look at some of the theoretical and practical problems that get raised when the boundaries between research and practice are blurred and the roles between the academic and professional often reversed?  What might be
the benefits and risks of such an approach?  What new ways of thinking and insights might these experiments engender?

The book itself, tentatively titled “Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change” will look at the recent changes in Indian media from a various perspectives and will combine some academic biggies (Laura Mulvey, Mark Hobart, Annabelle Sreberny) and some young gun researchers.  I will be also co-writing the theoretical introduction to the book on the theoretical complexity of understanding change in media and technology as well as co-editing the book so – I guess – I get to write and edit myself and go properly schizo?  The book description goes as follows:

Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change: Concept Note – Draft 0.1.

Rhetoric about India’s rapid economic growth and burgeoning middle classes suggests something new and significant is taking place. Something is changing, we are told: India is shining, the elephant is rising and the 21st century will be Indian.

Arguably, one key loci where such re-imaginings of India’s contested future take place is in its mass media. Yet much of the analysis on contemporary India has overlooked the complex role media has in articulating India’s economic and cultural landscape. The proposed book “Indian Mass Media and Politics of Change” aims to be an intervention towards empirically-driven yet theoretically-nuanced analysis of the politics of change taking place daily across the cinema halls, TV screens, newspapers and computer monitors in India today.

But what do we mean by change? French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once remarked that research should look at two things. The first is that the abstract does not explain anything but it instead must be explained; the second is that the aim of research is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal but instead is to find the conditions under which something new is produced (ie how things change). Similarly, the aim of the book is to provide a systematic analysis of the broader issues that underlie this abstract and often muddled notion of change.  What do these articulations tell us about the broader questions of tradition and modernity played out in the media in India today? How can it help us understand the problems of history, teleology and how the future is talked about? And how are these articulations of change ultimately implicated in wider political projects of development and progress?

The different chapters of the book provide snapshots from Indian media today where the articulations of change are refracted in myriad and different ways. By doing so, it provides the opening towards a more systematic analysis of the role the mass media has today, both in India and globally, in articulating the politics of change: this elusive boundary between the past, the fleeting present and the constantly re-imagined horizon of our open futures.

In any case, this can potentially be rather interesting because quite a lot of the work we do at BCG works at the boundary, the breach between different discplines and technologies — the transversal movement between academic research, artistic experimentation, old and new media, tactical technology and commercial design and development work, I suppose, is where the goodies and candies can increasingly be found.

This image was taken in an anonymous warehouse that you had to enter through a backdoor…

The ‘loot’ comes from everywhere, each store has its own network spread across the country and outside (you would find stuff from Sri Lanka, parts of Africa…)…

Obviously, photography is not allowed. However, a few gentle words helped break into their world.

As I started digging into the history of the place, I found that the Wikipedia entry about the place itself had been hijacked! An excerpt below :-

Chor Bazaar is an area in South Mumbai famous for its second-hand goods. Although the name Chor means “thief” in Hindi. This area can be considered one of the tourist attractions of Mumbai (Bombay). It is a basically an “organized” flea market, where one has to rumage through junk and hopefully find treasures. The reason it is know as “thief’s market”, is because it assumed that goods sold there are stolen. Chor Bazaar if off the beaten path, but everyone knows about it.

In addition, the name Chor Bazaar was adopted by an Indie Indian Fused tshirt label based out of Brooklyn, NY with roots in, India. link title

Our designs are meant not just to be “cool” but to evoke memories of experiencing India, the India that our parents were raised in and the one that exists today. Both are far different but both are still very Indian.

Our mission is to expand the Indian-fusion art form to another realm. Most have experienced this, “fusion”, in music and literature but have hardly seen this transpire into urban apparel. We utilize the medium of our graphic t-shirts to assist in creating an identity that stems farther than mainstream’s portrayal of Indian culture.

Dang!

The primary problem I have with more classical animation, drawing and painting (and 3D) is that it is very time-consuming.  Being sometimes peripatetically cross-displine and cross-media, I am interested in doing things in almost every possible format that I get my hands on.  But, say, if I wanted to create a digital character with some facial expressions and mix it with some photography or video to get some idea across, doing these with the old ways would take days to complete.  A simple expressive character, in the end, is rather difficult and laborious to create properly and with style.

Now take a game engine such as Spore.  What these virtual reality and/or game engines allow one to do is quickly create a prototype of some idea or another — develop an “element” that can be used to explore an idea at its initial stages.  It is not perfect by any means; you do not get full control of what you get.  You get instead a rather rich set of parameters to play around with but this is still not the quasi-complete freedom you get with doing things analogically. However, what you do is get possibilities do things that would not have been available before unless you wanted to spend days and days creating every little element yourself from beginning.

So a part of the Uncanny Valley experiment is to develop a workflow that allows the quick production of such “mixules” and / or sketches that can be later worked with to develop more complete projects and designs.  I have played around with Spore mostly here as its the most recent of these games but will probably do my rounds around Sims, Second Life etc and whatever will be useful.  Each of these sketches have taken — on average — about 30 minutes to complete.  Most of that to try to work shadows etc (though in some pictures I have not spend enough time on this admittedly…)

The theory here could perhaps broadly be said a play around “locative media” and “ubiquituos computing” where the overlap of virtual and non-virtual reality is predicted to be the next evolution of the Internet. I am especially interested in conceptualizing the blurry notion of reality between the virtual and non-virtual as an experiment in both content and form.  Something close to evolutionary art but not quite.  I will do a series based on this eventually when the idea crystallizes but meanwhile just working out some of the techniques here — also thinking how some of these engines could be perhaps used to do short videos etc.

I will also post a tutorial up soon about how such “rapid prototyping machines” can be used …

[Tools used: Pentax K20D, Spore, Photoshop Cs3, San Miquel]

However, Olympus E520 serves my purpose for the moment – inbuilt image stabilization + four-thirds mount tremendously expands the line-up of lens that it can handle. The kit lens is one of the best in the range, and I love the controls (over my previous Nikon series of cams).

These are very first HDR experiments (literally amongst the first twenty photographs captured with the cam). Both have been shot near fountain, VT station, Mumbai. Yet to work on the style, as these are just thematic samples at the moment.

An another…

My friend / bcg partner Matti has perfected his approach (his kit: Pentax K20D) with HDR and has done an outstanding series on Mumbai, where is signature style is very visible. Check it out here.

And a detail of this:

[Tools used: Processing, CS3)

So instead of looking at the the individual as the primary means of representing the urban experience — as has been again and again — I was more interested in seeing the city as a wider assemblage of different spaces and speeds through which people have to navigate in their daily existence. Therefore, instead of taking pictures of people, I was more interested in seeing a kind of an a-anthropocentric vision of the world: not seeing frozen moments, but seeing fluctuating frame-rates, seeing different timescales of existence from cars to people to buildings to nature bubbling in-between.

What was interesting as I was showing the first “sketches” of this series around friends and other professional photographers, the most common question was: how did I do this? How was I able to achieve such a frame-rate/time-based effect? Did I use a special camera?  How did I achieve the multiple-exposure and ghosting effect?  So while this technique is still in development, I decided to start off here with a brief tutorial of how to do such time- and/or framerate-based photography and the possible techniques that can be used for further projects.

Here are the steps explained below for the first time:

1)  MULTIPLE EXPOSURES / AUTO-BRACKETING: First of all, I developed here a customized technique of photography that combines multiple exposure-photography with high-dynamic-range-imaging (HDRI) and digital painting to give the pictures a time-based feeling and movement to them. So to understand how this works, you have to understand some of the principles of HDRI photography. When you HDRI photography, you basically take multiple shots and exposures of the same scene instead of one that you do in normal photography.  So when you take a picture of a scene, instead of doing one picture, you take, for instance, the following five exposures: -4/ -2/ 0 /+2 /+4.  What we therefore get is a full dynamic range of the dark areas and highlights of the picture which is not possible through normal photograpghy.  HDRI photographic techniques are explained more carefully HERE.

2)  HDR MERGE: Once you have done the different different exposure of the scene, you need to somehow combine the images.  To do this, I then used a HDR software called Photomatix.  Photomatix allows you to take multiples pictures and it automatically merges and created a composite of the 5 different pictures with the maximum dynamic range between lights and shadows.

3)  RANDOM MOVEMENT / COMPOSITE: The thing about HDRI photography is that it does not work really well with movement — at least that is what we are supposed to believe.  The software cannot calculate the dynamic range for moving objects as they come in 5 different places.  Normally you need to use a tripod to get as static images as possible. There are certain ways to avoid this problem such as auto-aligning images but they seldom work and people and crowds are notoriously difficult to capture because of this problem of time.   However, here is also the trick!  If we do not even try to get rid of the multiple exposures when you create a HDR composite, the software calculates a value for all these different exposures. Specifically this happens when you get rid of the software’s own “auto-alignment functions” and “reduce ghosting options”. So when there is movement, this creates a ghosting effect that we see above.  This process, as far as I have experimented so far, is quite random.  You get some degree of control to the exposures of these images but the different shapes and forms that emerge are quite unpredictable. You can see some of some of the effects below from close-ups of the pictures where figures and forms break into each other and into occasional noise.

4)  DUOTONE: The rest is pretty simple. I wanted this series to be in duotone so the next thing I did was move the image to Photoshop and used a set of filters to achieve the effect I wanted.  Specifically, I did the following pretty standard Photoshop CS3 adjustments across the different images to get the desired effect:

–> duplicate layer
–> soft light, opacity 20-30%)
–> gaussian blur 20px
–> adjustments – black and white – with green filter
–> greyscale to duotone (light brown tone) to rgb color
–> adjust master saturation -30%

5) DODGING AND BURNING:  Finally, I used a Wacom graphics pad to paint over the original images to exaggerate some of the ghosting effects of the images and overall give it the surreal slightly dark atmosphere.  Specifically, what I did here was to us “Dodge – Highlights” and “Burn – Shadows” to get the specific effects that I wanted.  No major strategy here: this is building on a technique I have been developing for years of painting with light on images which can give rather interesting effects such as in this in one of my earlier series below.

Anyway, much more I could and will write here.  Things such as time of day, light conditions etc affect how this effect works.  Also we could use neutral density filters that also would allow you to further control light and exposure times with more precision.  There are multiple variables here that can still be experimented with and I am probably going to do the part II of this experiment in London when the weather gets dreary and colors grey.  Meanwhile, hoping to get this series exhibited soon — either solo or together with my crazy photographer friend from Northeast India in a joint exhibition about people caught up in spaces not of their own making.  He works with tribal borderlands and fragile border spaces; this series is about urban spatiality — somehow the contrast and the overlaps, we feel, would be a great mix.

This, I believe, is a good example of how classical photography, creatiuve use of software and a little bit of randomness can create effects that were perhaps not possible before through classical methods and can be rather effective to achive the artistic effect you are after.

[Tools used: Pentax k20d, Photomatix, Photoshop CS3 and a fair amount of Old Monk]

The idea is simple: I create a set of microprograms (I fondly call them ‘brats’!), each of which have their own selfish agendas, decision processes, survival rules, and their own I/O probes that constantly monitor the surroundings for resources they need (and perish soon if they don’t find them)… and then I spawn each variety of agent multiple times and see an overall behavior emerge.

The first set of such agents are already sweating their necks, making highly stupid decisions… and yet surviving, but my goal is to now take it a step further.

I now I want to go in two directions:

- train a GA or reinforcement learning based system to figure out the initial configurations.

- spread the agents across multiple computers on the web, thus creating a virtual cluster, an ecosystem that would be very interesting to study.

You may ask, why is this any different than Cellular Automata, the system that Stephen Wolfram brought back into fad through his book ‘New Kind of Science’? The fact is, though similarities may exist on the surface, a deeper inspection would reveal that my agents are far more inspired by ant colony / multi-agent based emergent behavior systems than CA — the only difference being, I am trying to far more flexible about the toolkit, instead of sticking with just pheromones!. Also, at the end of the day, I am just trying to learn my tools!

[Tools used: Ruby, RubyGems, MySQL, a lot of caffeine, and box dvd set of The Wire]

If you love to use Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr etc. and would love to create similarly exciting social networking and Web 2.0 products for the web then here is your chance to be a part of action. Google.com came out of an initiative by two students to create a university wide search. We believe in such initiatives, where there is a compulsion to use the web for something useful.

The deal you get:

We get:

What are we looking for :-

Who should apply :-

From essentially zero, we’ve passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history — faster even than the polio vaccine.

“We knew this was going to happen a few years ago. And we know how it will end,” says Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Google. “It will end with 5 billion out of the 6″ with cellphones. “A reasonable prediction is 4 billion in the next few years — the current proposal is 4 billion by 2010. And then the final billion or so within a few years thereafter.
(LINK)

Wherever you look and read, it seems mobiles are emerging as one of the key technologies that we need to reckon with. But when my friends ask me, what do you really do? I tell them that – when in my research mode – I am interested in cutting-edge technology, future media and emerging digital cultures in the broad sense of the term. And then I pull out my own mobile – an old Nokia that has no additional functions excect shock protection and the ever-so-important flashlight. So I suppose I need to soon stop being the quentessential abstract academic who only talks about things and actually now get me one of these multi-function sleek sexy phones that I always predict that will probably have the most significant impact on how people communicate in the future. Just to have a look what the future feels like.