projects

–>THE UNCANNY VALLEY: This ongoing art-research-theory project combines virtual reality and game engine-created characters with scenes from everyday life in London as a technical and conceptual experiment with for photography, graphic novel/animation and film. Call it a modification of machinina but with the scenes machinina mixing with non-computer-generated images. Call it the magical realism of the 21st century with the theory and ongoing research here being around “locative media” and “ubiquituos computing” and “ambient media“ where the overlap of virtual and non-virtual reality is predicted to be the next evolution of the Internet. I am especially interested here in conceptualizing the blurry notion of reality between virtual and non-virtual realities as an experiment in both content and form. Think of the following image: Londoners having a pint with monsters that I will breed just to fit the particular photography / graphic novel / video I want to create and shoot in the city — my own private zoo of characters created in, for instance, the evolutionary game Spore mixing with everyday scenes from London. Eventually the project will also encompass other medium to see if a truly hybrid machinima-reality interface can be achieved for better design and creativity.

–>THE -DIVIDUAL CITY: This experiment evolved from an idea to create a portrait of a global city by looking at what I call ‘dividualism’ — that which precedes the individuals We know the images of especially exotic places in Asia and Africa. Too many pictures of smiling teeth and/or, more specifically, plenty of photography of teeth. Individuals and teeth. National Geography imaginary of the world and cultures we grew up on. But for anybody who visits one of the booming global metropolis such as Bombay (or any other, for that matter), will never experience people as individuals. Rather, it is through the non-linear force of collective movement, flows, moorings, accelerations, trans- and inter-actions that we get a grasp of what these places are. This is what I call here the “-dividual city.” So, instead of picture of faces, I was more interested here 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…

These pictures taken over three weeks in August-September 2008 are the outcome of a year-long anthropological research and a love and hate relationship with the chaos of the city. They also build up on themes already explored in the experimental short film, “The Philosophy of Dogs”, about the street dogs of Bombay finished in 2005. For this particular projects, I developed a customized technique of photography that combined multiple exposure-photography with high-dynamic-range-imaging (HDR) and digital painting to give the pictures the time-based feeling and movement to them. These shall be exhibited hopefully soon accompanied by a more research-theory based narrative.

–>HDR PHOTOGRAPHY: I just spent 3 weeks in Corsica doing experiment in high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) photography and the possibilites this offers for artistic expression. Some of the experiments done mostly focusing on nature photography and the simple aesthetics of the black and white image can be seen HERE.

–>SACREDMEDIACOW POSTERATIONS: Some examples from no-budget posters I did for the series of talks and seminars with film makers and speakers for the research collective SACREDMEDIACOW at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. The aim of these posters was to make them as simple as possible as they had to be photocopied black and white — a sort of guerilla postering to promote interesting speakers from Indian filmmakers to Tariq Ali. So no conscious Bauhaus functionalism and minimalism here. See them HERE.

–>JANTAR MANTAR PROJEKT: Some illustration sketches I was doing for one of the most interesting experimental fiction book / book-performance that I have seen in a long time combining astrology, technology, folklore, magic - and who knows what else - by our collaborator DJ Fadereu. Many things happened in between and the book never saw the light of day but I quite enjoyed these sketches and the process along the way. This was a combination of analog ink drawings (yes, by hand!) mixed in graphics work in Photoshop. See more HERE.