Shelter, Visibility, Love : on the design of insulations and openings

What Will Participants work on during the Workshop?

The workshop will look at the field of design thus: as a way of connecting us to some things, while insulating us from others. Despite the best intentions of designers and their clients, these systems (houses, products, networks, etc.) leak, or are trespassed... which generates an encounter with "the public", that we are interested in. We will develop this through a series of quick design projects and prototypes, that are "extensions" of the participants existing work.

Shelter, Visibility, Love : on the design of insulations and openings

New fissures are appearing in the categories of the personal, the private and the public. Some of these are related to electronic forms of self or exposure while others are reconfigured by new pressures within old beliefs, structures and spaces.
Electronic spaces are often seen as "flows" across the concrete, enclosed physical world. Here you can have friends and conversations remotely and yet in secret. Or have personal relations at the same time as being physically in "public" or "private", behind your mother's back, or in front of a camera. The segmentation of life into such "virtual" parts and layers then carries the dreams and anxieties of new community formations, undiscovered and "partial" forms of intimacy, and new forms of social encounter.
At the same time, and increasingly, these technologies are embedded into existing relations, boundaries of access, ownership, morality or law. It is also clear that acts of "communication" alone may not be enough to dissolve pre-existing, deeper boundaries. Much of our ongoing work enters into this conceptual space, stretches and expands it, proposes that we think of leaks as productive, publicness as an often necessary condition, but so also refusal, being able to say no.
So "design". In its broadest sense, design aspires to making technology "sociable", massaging the interface of machines and people, commodities and experiences. But also design may about keeping things and people at a certain precise distance, so that the relationship may sit within a safe, acceptable range on the slider between the personal and the public. From the point of view that both communications and surveillance are both in some sense ubiquitous, we could then ask if the role of contemporary materials, interfaces and design strategies could be seen primarily as insulating: from the effects of unwanted attentions, or to shelter us from power. Is this the future we want? Who is being sheltered, and who is newly visible? What encounters may be crafted through the domain of "design"? To question these terms and to take them beyond the diagrammatic, we would like to in the workshop think of specific and everyday ways, in which the problem of design can be seen as a problem of how to insulate the room, while keeping the doors and windows open, to encounters with the outside.
We feel the usual concepts around this question, such as "interface", filtering, exhibitionism, publicity, camouflage, "openness", or even insulation itself, may not fully describe the possibilities that could be found here.
By Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran, CAMP.

CAMP is a new artist-run platform for trans-disciplinary practice including the arts, based in Mumbai, India. Ashok and Shaina live in Mumbai, India. They recently co-initiated an artistic collaboration called CAMP, a way of critically responding to the regional art and technology context.

BIOS

Ashok Sukumaran
Ashok Sukumaran has degrees in architecture and media art. His recent work has dealt with the intersection of human habitats and technologies being embedded within them. These projects use simple hardware and software combinations towards a broad investigation of "infrastructure", individual agency, and relations between "private" and "public" spheres. The work draws from computer-based art, conceptual practices, early and pre-cinema, and architecture. Ashok's work has been shown widely in recent years, and has received several honors, including the Golden Nica (for Interactive art) at the Prix Ars Electronica 2007, and the first prize of the UNESCO Digital Arts Award, 2005. His ongoing work is supported by grants from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, and the India Foundation for the Arts Grant for Extending Arts Practice.

Shaina Anand
Shaina Anand trained as a filmmaker, and now does various projects with "expanded video": television, cable TV, CCTV and so on, in ways that challenge the
traditional methods and usual consequences of image capture and distribution. Recent interventionist projects such as RustleTV (2004), WICity TV (2005) and Khirkeeyaan (2006) have made use of such present and accessible technologies to create temporary autonomous communication zones, and other provocative media
landscapes. In 2001, she founded the independent media platform chitrakarkhana.net, and is now also co-director of CAMP, a new arts initiative in collaboration with Khoj.