This online exhibition is the result of a six-month interaction between a group of artists, mostly based in Delhi, and CAMP. It began as a 3-day workshop on contemporary media questions, but has evolved into a larger project of making and discussing. The resulting assembly has some quite rare features:
Curatorially, it was initiated by participants, who selected themselves and invited people in their artist networks into the initial workshop on media/mediation questions, rampant in art today (at Sarai, April 2024).
Temporally, there were proposals and feedback in three physical gatherings, and remote rounds of three-ing (via annotations) and one-on-one-ing. The last and the first rounds of which, are published here.
Structurally, this is an exhibition with a frontend (this site) and backend (Pad.ma). The relation between the two is specific (via an API) but also modifiable, non-exclusive, and suggests linkages between thought, raw materials, people, memory of meetings and doings, and art works.
Formally, the exhibition appears as a "list" in a browser. This list can be re-ordered, folded to show or hide information, its nested parts can be linked to from inside or outside itself. The list is made of time-based artworks, usually with extensive time-based textual commentaries. These works have switchable modes and degrees of display, distribution and storage, including of original-resolution media. They can appear in the world in different shapes and sizes, at unforseen times.
Conceptually, this collection is about movements "in the midst", of an environmental, encompassing, lived sense of “the medium”. This turns the desire to wrangle "media", into a project of trans-formation, whether digital or not. We use media techniques in a more general way, to create context and methods. Proposals include: if we lose a direct bodily sense, how to carefully assemble it again, how to re-myth, where myth history and technology have combined, how to stage the sensing of a venom that is not seen, how to render a medical procedure, how to listen to childhood pictures, how to extend drawings beyond their edges, how to annotate for each other, and many more. These are messages/massages, by a group of artists who are, broadly speaking, trying to modify their own environment. This is what is at stake. New kinds of gatherings, publications and artworks are being born through their efforts.
After more than a century of exhibitions as a certain kind of spatio-temporal and social practice, and more than a decade of swiping habits on corporate digital platforms, there are many other futures to be explored for the art exhibition. Ours was a way to create, out of turn, out of almost nothing and modifying what already exists - a zone of material and intellectual hospitality that could also provoke new work.