A new interactive digital art show will help people navigate the city better
A photo depicting Mumbai that’s part of David De Menezes’s project
With technology getting smarter by the day, are we as human beings becoming smarter too, or is it dumbing us down? That was the premise of an artists’ residency that was held recently across four cities — Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai and Dhaka — with the theme of Smarter Digital Realities. The participants explored what it means to constantly have access to GPS on your phone, for instance. Does it make you feel safer and more in control? Is Facebook a place to meet likeminded people or a cesspool of existential crises? Those are the sorts of issues they addressed in a mixed media format, through video, audio and art.
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Map of Loneliness, an artwork by Kanika Agarwal
The four names who represented Mumbai are David De Menezes, Illesha Kandelwal, Kanika Agarwal and Simran Ankolkar. Michaela Talwar, co-founder of Harkat Studio who has curated the city chapter of the residency, tells us that she intentionally chose people who have not been exposed to the mainstream system as yet. The quartet re-imagined the city as a geographical territory and thought of ways to navigate it given our new digital reality. “They started off with mapping Mumbai in different ways. Simran’s piece is about loitering in the city, for instance, while David’s is about just wandering around,” Talwar explains.
Michaela Talwar
She adds that the exhibition this weekend where their works will be showcased will be held in an immersive, online manner. It will also feature Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, who created an interactive digital map of Mumbai as part of his 7 Islands Project, and Chirodeep Chaudhuri, who did a project called Seeing Time where he photographed different clocks that, Talwar reminds us, represented the heights of technology at one point in time. The central premise of the project remains this — how has technology changed the way in which we navigate Mumbai? And you can catch the launch event if you are curious to find out.
On December 4, 3 pm onwards
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