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28/3/2015

CAMP and Pad.ma.

Clark House Initiative, Bombay

What if television is sculpture? Do we expect a static object? Disassembled, destroyed, gathered together, placed on each other and driven through when they were in vogue and were expensive? Today the old square Cathode Ray Tube TVs are made redundant by wide flat led/lcd television screens, but still can be easily sourced - available for rent, second sale and repair; the television is a medium to play-back moving content, with relative ease, one that is accessible. Yet, these are not the only concerns of CAMP in 'AS IF - tV' - a fifth surprise solo in their As If series. As If - tV comprises particularly early works that were created for television, using existing infrastructure of cable networks, televisions in homes and the workplace, through low-tech solutions, created and distributed in a manner where the medium of television was the fulcrum of these possibilities. Across Clark House, varied, borrowed and assembled televisions are placed by CAMP. Here they play out a chronology of their experiments with programming where the content itself dwells in an aesthetic of accessibility and re-imagination of quotidian technology and distribution infrastructure. An initially un-announced solo in Clark House is not an after-thought, rather a planned surprise where CAMP returns to state the possibility of the alternative where 'If' in 'As If' becomes an existent option of artistic concern and action. Here demonstrated by Television.

Taxation and Television are synonymous as measures to contain the dependence on advertisements to afford the distribution and production of visual content across the world particularly in Scandinavia, France and the United Kingdom. Broadcasting Corporations across these states are to fund programming from the money collected from licences required to own a television set. The fiscal aspects of this form of funding is now archaic and advertisements have crept into government owned networks as state funding of television programming has decreased. But these laws prove the interest of the state to regulate the programming and distribution of television even at a time where it recedes space to private media corporations.

Distribution can often decide the content available to people and their relationship to the state. In the 1960s-70s when the Government of India began broadcasting television programmes the distribution was limited initially to Delhi and later to seven cities. The Asian Games of 1982 in Delhi saw the introduction of colour television to India, and the reforms of 1991 led to the opening up of the Indian audio-visual market to foreign broadcasters and media corporations in limited phases. But the switch from the Analogue to the Digital seen as a move to empower consumer choice is an anathema to its acclaimed motive.

India continuously launches low burden satellites for many nations to support their broadcasting needs, in fact India actively lobbies to bring business from private media corporations and their need for satellites to Indian satellite launch pads. Thus 'Direct to Home' programming from set-top boxes that stream in 'High Definition' television into the homes of Indians should be able to tap into content from a wide range of providers across the world. But according to a less than a decade old law that requires digital conversions from analogue providers of satellite televisions, digital set-top boxes become necessary to access content. India has about five such providers of digital home entertainment, they are five big corporations who are indigenous but have foreign programming partners.

The Indian government censors all content that reaches audiences in India, it might seem as an audacious practically impossible act but it can be carried out with ease, apart from watchers who scan through channels, 'DTH' services and set-boxes can digitally regulate what we see. Radio & Telegraph services in India are highly regulated, the act arose out of a British concern for revolutionary use of the radio for Indian independence. The act has been strengthened since independence and quasi-privatisation of radio has been engineered by selling expensively bandwidths to Radio Stations that largely stream in popular Bollywood music. Thus India has no instance of community radio or community programming, rather it is a top to down effort where the audience receives what is decided for them from available content and consumer market surveys, that don't actually reflect choice.

When satellite television became popular in India, it was largely distributed through a network of cable operators. These operators would directly link into satellite content using a satellite dish and decide what was adequate for their audience and distribute for a nominal fee. The number of channels was a bundle of freely available content the operator was able to tap into. More the number of channels was directly proportional to the popularity of the operator. This meant streaming much awaited Pakistani Dramas on PTV, Bundesliga Football matches on Deutsche Welle or French Movies on TV 5 Monde. a large population had just emerged from socialistic control of the state - television became a window to the new world. This was a short lived utopian phase that was soon replaced by Multi-Service Operators floated by Real-Estate Concerns who would buy a bouquet of content internationally and then re-distribute it among a subscribing network of neighbourhood cable operators. This was a contested space controlled by local regional parties and mafia concerns often leading to violent conflicts. Their future though was short-lived by 2005 laws where in place to convert all such services to 'Direct to Home' connections provided by large media corporations.

Events such as 9/11 brought the world into our homes, the television brought in opinions and views and how we were going to re-negotiate out political understanding of the world around us, but were our opinions going to be heard? These local channels began a process of voicing the grass-roots contention of people that was un-intellectual or studied rather spontaneous and genuine. The networks of the political 'left' had shrunk, they were left in idealistic burrows where the changing political expectations of the people were being misread by them. Fear and a certain anxiety had led people to cocoon themselves in their homes informed by their televisions, retreating from the city's physical and political networks, this withdrawal was to influence their future political choices.

In Tellavision Mumbai, a patchwork of images of a city, and of broadcast media, immediately after the attacks of 9/11, a camera travels through the city by local commuter train, attending one of the first public demonstrations in the city in Currey Road, recording the skyline of the city's central district Parel, one that does not exist today as its mills have been replaced by mass office spaces. The camera travels home from public spaces of 'dissent' to the private space of 'consent', that of global media on the television set. In this contrapuntal way, 'Tellavision Mumbai Part - I' looks for a public culture in the post 911 landscape in the run up to the war in Afghanistan. In another screen, a group of Muslim hotel owners are watching themselves on TV as they discuss a boycott of American goods such as Coco Cola, Wrangler Jeans, Courier Services, Mobile Phones,among others, they are protesting the American invasion of Afghanistan post 9/11.

Creating local content was an activity most cable operators indulged in, this helped their revenues by advertising for local small businesses. Local Cable operators ran local channels that created content for a microcosm community. This ranged from community news channels to screening the latest Bollywood release illegally alongside advertisements for local opticians or tuition classes. Small artisanal film production units sprung up in neighbourhoods that would then create content for local micro-channels. In 2004, ChitrakarKhana - a predecessor of CAMP which described itself as a small scale independent unit for experimental media, led a pedagogic exercise for the students of Shristi School of Art & Design where they collaborated with a local cable operator Lokesh to create a channel that would be run by the students with content decided by the stakeholders of Russell Market, Bangalore - a colonial market that sold fresh produce such as meat and vegetables. Rustle TV had an appeal: the people of Russell Market would be service providers get to hear themselves on a television created for them by the students who would act as service providers. The students were to create content irrespective of their aesthetic choices and reservations; this included negotiations between different Market Unions, a quiz show on the lines of similar ones on television and other interactive group projects. The resultant collaborative efforts were screened through televisions existent within various shops in the market connected by a cable network available to view by those who had actually featured in it. By squatting certain available infrastructures, Shaina Anand had changed the relationship people had with technology where they were always on the receiving end in an unequal relationship and while pedagogically she had led a certain abandonment of class related hierarchies and teaching methodologies among the students in a participatory creative act.

These collaborations with Lokesh the cable operator who helped them run Rustle TV extended the following year to a project 'World Information City TV' in 2005, where local content was generated and broadcast around the theme of 'information'. By then the change to 'DTH' format was looming near and cable operators like Lokesh were also being harassed by Multi-Service Operators who charged arbitrary rates for content fees or to include local micro-chhannels. Lokesh introduced Anand to Kashif and Safina who ran an independent television channel called Suroor TV from their home in Bangalore's Cox Town that serviced a large Deccani Urdu speaking population of Bangalore's Shivaji Nagar Township. Suroor TV had been paying unviable fees to MSOs for them to be distributed alongside satellite channels. In "Now talking TV", we get a tour of Suroor TV's home studio, which then co-hosts a talk show featuring Alternate Law Forum lawyers Lawrence Liang and Jawahar Raja, artist Shuddhabrata Sengupta and four blurred-out local cable operators who discussed harassment at the hands of MSOs, while the rest provided their views on the eventuality of DTH and local programming in an 80 minute unedited talkshow that was broadcast to 3000 homes in Shivaji Nagar, along with other programming.

'Khirkeeyaan' (Khirkee- window/ yaan - vehicle)2006, was a closed-circuit television system that would create micro-distribution programme in the Khirkee extension neighbourhood of Delhi. A set of four existing televisions sets, coupled with cctv cameras, mikes and an RF modulator formed the system for several 'episodes' of neighbourhood conversations. "In 2006, when Khirkeeyaan took place, the predominant landscape of images was still (as had been for the past couple of decades) television. The security-camera quad produces a set of four “holes” in the surface of television.The fact that people who face the camera also face each other, while also facing their familiar TV sets, produces a tension in the TV image: a redistribution of the gaze, a grid of speaking and listening, and a sense of liveness that is also physically nearby." The experience was intimate, a group of immigrant Nepalese women discussed their private concerns to each other between their chores, men from Uttar Pradesh recited couplets as they gathered at the local barber and as an audience they were allowed to see and hear themselves as a community. The network of windows created was not just an experiential act rather one that allowed a view into the lives of neighbours in a neighbourhood that is now synonymous for xenophobia against immigrants most notably people from the North East of India and Africa.

In the last decade local cable channels would run old classical cinema, sans advertisements, all day long, as the distribution was limited, they never faced prosecution for royalty evasion. 'DTH' services are provided by large corporations that cannot risk such generosity for their customers. The internet has become the venue returning our right to view movies or content commercially unviable for television. But alternatives to Youtube and its commercial exploitation of users activity also need to be found.

http://Pad.ma is one such sustained joint effort by CAMP, Alternative Law Forum and 0x2620.org among others. It is an easily accessible archive of visual content that is annotated and available to view and download for free, containing primarily video material, and not finished films. Its use is at once public and also private and explores the possibilities of the video as a disseminator and vehicle of curiosity, memory and knowledge. For As If - tV a specially created Pad.ma TV is streamed live both online and in Clark House, where efforts at accessibility to the production and distribution of media is discussed and demonstrated, resulting in an artistic intervention whose aesthetic lies in the manner in which it challenges our view of the new everyday televisuality that television brought to us, not so long ago.

Sumesh Sharma, Bombay 2015

CAMP is a collaborative studio founded in Bombay in 2007. It has been producing provocative new work in video and film, electronic media, and public art forms, in a practice characterised by a hand-dirtying, non-alienated relation to technology. CAMP's projects have entered modern social and technical assemblies: energy, communication and surveillance systems, neighbourhoods, ships, archives – things much larger than itself. These are shown as not having a fixed function or destiny, making them both a medium and stage for artistic activity.

CAMP’s work has been shown in venues such as Khoj, Sarai, Lalit Kala Akademi and NGMA New Delhi; MoMA and New Museum New York; Serpentine Galleries and Gasworks London; Ars Electronica Linz, HKW Berlin, MoMA Warsaw, Askhal Alwan Beirut, Experimenter Kolkata and Documenta 13 Kassel; in the streets and markets of Bangalore, San Jose, Dakar, Mexico City, East Jerusalem, Delhi and Bombay; in the biennials of Shanghai, Sharjah, Gwangju, Taipei, Singapore, Liverpool and Kochi-Muziris; at film venues such as the AV Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Viennale, Flaherty Seminar, Anthology Film Archives, and CAMP’s own rooftop cinema. From their home base in Chuim village, Bombay they co-host the online archives Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, among other longue-duree activities. They are currently showing As If - III County of the Sea, and As If - IV Night for Day at Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum and Chemould Prescott Road in their home city of Bombay.

Preview 29 March 7.00 - 9.00 pm

Clark House Bombay
Clark House building, ground floor, 8 Nathalal Parekh Marg, Colaba, Bombay 400039.
Open All Days except Monday 11 AM - 7 PM

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