Raqs Media Collective

launch interview with Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta

launch conversation with Raqs Media Collective and Steve Dietz

Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1991 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta as a way to pursue their interests in documentary filmmaking after completing graduate school in New Delhi. Over the ensuing decade, their practice has become increasingly hybridized, incorporating aspects of media history and research, criticism and curation, archives and databases, the building of open and public spaces for cultural practice, new media and digital art, still photography and graphic design, the Internet and cyberculture.

In 2001 Raqs cofounded, with Ravi Vasudevan and Ravi Sundaram, the Sarai New Media Initiative, a program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies at the University of New Delhi (www.sarai.net). The word sarai, or caravansarai, has its roots in Mughal India and refers to an enclosed space in a city or beside a highway--a destination and a point of departure--where travelers from all walks of life could find shelter, sustenance, and companionship. For Raqs, Sarai is a space where they have the freedom to pursue interdisciplinary and hybrid contexts for creative work and to develop a sustained engagement with the city and with different forms of media practice.

The Temporary Autonomous Sarai (TAS), Raqs' project for How Latitudes Become Forms, takes its cue from Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone. TAS is both a physical space, resulting from a collaboration with the Japanese architectural practice Atelier Bow-Wow and University of Minnesota graduate students, and a departure point for visitors to explore cyberart in the parallel online exhibition Translocations, which presents the network-based art of artists from seven countries, including Raqs' own work OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification). OPUS is an open resource of images, sounds, and texts that can be sampled and reconstituted by anyone. It articulates a doctrine of rescension--Raqs' nonhierarchical theory of the copy--in which there is no derivative, and hence no master original, only new variations or, one might say, only local versions. OPUS is conceived as a digital "laboratory where cultures or artworks are grown," and the interface playfully maps genealogies of users' samplings. Underlying the project is a deeply political commitment to the power of open-source creativity and collaboration.

Installations by Raqs have been exhibited at Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002), and included in the exhibitions Kingdom of Piracy at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria (2002), and Emoção Art.ficial at Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil (2002).

--Steve Dietz

Opus
Raqs Media Collective

2002
http://opus.walkerart.org

"We want to create a digital commons, and try to find out if people are willing to share work in this area."--Monica Narula, Raqs Media Collective

Opus, or Open Platform for Unlimited Signification, is an online environment for presenting content and a work space that allows for collaboration, modification and republishing of others' content. According to Raqs, "The idea for the project is taken from the Free Software principle. In Free Software anyone can download something, modify, customize it, whatever you want, and again distribute and share it. And we were wondering if it will work as a methodology also for cultural production."

There are two fundamental aspects to OPUS. The first is simply to allows a member-user to download and upload work. The second is that What distinguishes OPUS from any number of other file sharing projects is a powerful concept that Raqs calls "recension."

"Normally," especially in intellectual property law, but generally in at least Western culture, there is the idea of the original and anything based on it is derisively deemed "derivative." In OPUS, Raqs deploys the notion of "recension."

"A re-telling, a word taken to signify the simultaneous existence of different versions of a narrative within oral, and from now onwards, digital cultures. . . . The concept of rescension is contraindicative of the notion of hierarchy. [emphasis added] A rescension cannot be an improvement, nor can it connote a diminishing of value. A rescension is that version which does not act as a replacement for any other configuration of its constitutive materials. The existence of multiple rescensions is a guarantor of an idea or a work's ubiquity."

OPUS, then, becomes a digial commons for cultural production by acting as a platform for self-motivated communities of users to freely share their creative work--and build upon the work of others, with specific acknowledgement but no hierarchy of value implied. For Translocations Walker Art Center has taken the open source OPUS kernel--the software code--and created some modifications that are specific to its presentation in an exhibition context. Users of this recension of OPUS, for instance, can modify images online, without having to download them. More critically, all of the texts contained in the exhibition catalog are available directly from the website for downloading, modificiation, and reuploading, to create a channel for alternative and points of view--recensions--of the official institutional voice.

Finally, students from the Minnesota Arts High School have participated in creating a model project using OPUS for viewing during the exhibition of How Latitudes Become Forms.

Architecture for Temporary Autonomous Sarai
Raqs Media Collective

2003
mixed media
variable dimensions
Courtesy the artists
Commissioned by the Walker Art Center

". . . for us, the creation of a sarai was to create a 'home for nomads' and a resting place for practices of new media nomadism. Traditionally, sarais were also nodes in the communications system (horse-mail!) and spaces where theatrical entertainments, music, dervish dancing, and philosophical disputes could all be staged. They were hospitable to a wide variety of journeys--physical, cultural, and intellectual. In medieval Central and South Asia, sarais were the typical spaces for a concrete translocality, with their own culture of custodial care, conviviality, and refuge. They also contributed to syncretic languages and ways of being. We would do well to emulate even in part aspects of this tradition in the new media culture of today. . . . This might create oases of locatedness along the global trade routes of new media culture."--Raqs Media Collective

This is precisely the intention of Architecture for Temporary Autonomous Sarai in How Latitudes Become Forms--a place for social intercourse, both onsite and translocally; a place for the investigation of both artists' work and the exhibition context.

The Tokyo-based architectural practice Atelier Bow-Wow, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima, are proponents of what they have named da-me or no-good architecture. Multilayered structures with varied uses (underpass + cinema + bar + barbershop + store, for example), these buildings epitomize, for them, a new creative, adaptive aesthetic.

Walker commissioned Raqs and Bow-Wow to collaborate on a Temporary Autonomous Sarai--something that was physically modest, intended to be temporary, and programmatically could function as a sarai for the exhibition.

In September 2002 they came to Minneapolis for a week-long residency.

Raqs' idea for the TAS is not dissimilar to Dan Graham's video viewing booths--as a platform for multiple projects. This idea of a platform is crucial and nicely stated by Manthos Santorineos regarding the Medi@terra Festival:

"If 'the medium was the message', the platform is the message of the message and the weakening of the medium. 'Platform' is the combination of technology, a new way of thinking about meeting needs, and the vision of a group of people who are preparing a 'space' in which to invite interested persons to develop their own ideas. If the late 20th century was characterized by McLuhan's maxim 'the medium is the message,' the beginning of the next one can be characterized as follows: 'We are preparing new platforms for new messages.'"

The cross-disciplinary collaboration and the physical, social space for presenting net art and its context is an exciting experiment, which will inform future practice at the Walker.

Anita Dube

launch interview with Anita Dube

Initially trained as an art historian and critic, Anita Dube creates works with a conceptual language that valorizes the sculptural fragment as a bearer of personal and social memory, history, mythology, and phenomeno-logical experience. Employing a variety of found objects drawn from the realms of the industrial (foam, plastic, wire), craft (thread, beads, velvet), the body (dentures, bone), and the readymade (ceramic eyes), Dube investigates a very human concern with both personal and societal loss and regeneration. Dube came to her sculptural practice through her involvement with the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, a group of young artists formed in the 1980s in Baroda whose self-styled critical social and political consciousness contrasted with the more established, self-conscious narrative painting of the so-called Baroda School.

In 1997, Dube began working with a new material, the industrially manufactured ceramic eyes that are affixed to Hindu religious statues commonly found in Indian temples. She initially used these variably sized eyes in site-specific ways, attaching them to the spot in a room where the ceiling meets two walls to form a corner, as in Intimations of Mortality (1997). In works such as Disease (River) (1999), the ceramic eyes began to move, branching out across the wall like a virus or a flooding river. Although her work evokes a number of meanings, one can think about these wall pieces in terms of the various modes of human migration in the contemporary world. As Dube suggests, "The eyes are like people for me and this could speak of large migrations in history." In this light, the eyes take on less of a horror-film quality and instead stand in metonymically for the mass of humanity that has been forced to relocate due to political persecution, economic deprivation, or the relentless effects of global development that push people from the countryside into the city. This use of the sculptural fragment to subtly invoke a humanist critical agenda speaks to her uncompromising desire to tangentially address the social through metaphorical means.

Dube's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Nature Morte in New Delhi (2000), and Sakshi Gallery in Mumbai, India (1999). Her work has appeared in a number of group exhibitions, including Alchemy at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, England (2002); ARS 01 at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland (2001); the Yokohama Triennale, Japan (2001); and the VII Bienal de La Habana, Havana, Cuba (2000-2001).

--Douglas Fogle

Architecture for Temporary Autonomous Sarai

2003
mixed media
variable dimensions
Courtesy the artists
Commissioned by the Walker Art Center

". . . for us, the creation of a sarai was to create a 'home for nomads' and a resting place for practices of new media nomadism. Traditionally, sarais were also nodes in the communications system (horse-mail!) and spaces where theatrical entertainments, music, dervish dancing, and philosophical disputes could all be staged. They were hospitable to a wide variety of journeys--physical, cultural, and intellectual. In medieval Central and South Asia, sarais were the typical spaces for a concrete translocality, with their own culture of custodial care, conviviality, and refuge. They also contributed to syncretic languages and ways of being. We would do well to emulate even in part aspects of this tradition in the new media culture of today. . . . This might create oases of locatedness along the global trade routes of new media culture."--Raqs Media Collective

This is precisely the intention of Architecture for Temporary Autonomous Sarai in How Latitudes Become Forms--a place for social intercourse, both onsite and translocally; a place for the investigation of both artists' work and the exhibition context.

The Tokyo-based architectural practice Atelier Bow-Wow, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima, are proponents of what they have named da-me or no-good architecture. Multilayered structures with varied uses (underpass + cinema + bar + barbershop + store, for example), these buildings epitomize, for them, a new creative, adaptive aesthetic.

Walker commissioned Raqs and Bow-Wow to collaborate on a Temporary Autonomous Sarai--something that was physically modest, intended to be temporary, and programmatically could function as a sarai for the exhibition.

In September 2002 they came to Minneapolis for a week-long residency.

Raqs' idea for the TAS is not dissimilar to Dan Graham's video viewing booths--as a platform for multiple projects. This idea of a platform is crucial and nicely stated by Manthos Santorineos regarding the Medi@terra Festival:

"If 'the medium was the message', the platform is the message of the message and the weakening of the medium. 'Platform' is the combination of technology, a new way of thinking about meeting needs, and the vision of a group of people who are preparing a 'space' in which to invite interested persons to develop their own ideas. If the late 20th century was characterized by McLuhan's maxim 'the medium is the message,' the beginning of the next one can be characterized as follows: 'We are preparing new platforms for new messages.'"

The cross-disciplinary collaboration and the physical, social space for presenting net art and its context is an exciting experiment, which will inform future practice at the Walker.