TNM: CCTV Landscape from Lower Parel (Discussion)
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Summary: Discussion following the live CCTV Landscape event:
https://pad.ma/JYE/infoThe word kamra and camera have the same root. A camera is just a room with a hole in it. Small people inside this room can see an image of the great outdoors, without themselves being seen. This experience, of watching without being watched, is at the very heart of cinema.
These days, it is more difficult to achieve, since there are reportedly more cameras than people in the world. Yet, we can stage such an experience, from inside a dark cinema hall in the heart of the city.
In around 1880, a series of hot-air balloon ascents took place in Parel. For the first time, Bombay could be seen from above, by a creature that was not a bird. Through the long 20th century, the chimneys of the Bombay mills tried to expel the fumes of wood and coal, labour and land-based struggles, into the faraway atmosphere. Today, we find ourselves floating above the chimneys in the overloaded vertical matrix that is Parel, surrounded by remnants and restaurants, swimming pools and waterlogged streets, memories and birds, songs and construction sites, dreams and fears.
Maybe the true destiny of CCTV is to make us secretly intimate with each other and our surroundings.
Q1: I guess what I am its very interesting but how does this fall under art and contemporary art?
SA: That's for you to figure.
Q1: So there's just no... has anyone ever said anything about it or commented on that? I guess just for me trying to understand contemporary art and understand the contemporary art scene, I can seen where this is interesting, there is something there, but how does it fit in that.
SA: Its really for you to figure, its not something we can answer.
AS: There's usually lot of sort of anxiety when new things appears, and I think its our job to drive that anxiety into strength places in your head or in our head. And the feeling of doing this is more important than the concept, let's say. We didn't start out wanting to make a contemporary artwork, we were following in the feeling of doing this on our roof, doing this in different places you know 7 years ago and so on. So, there was a sort of memory of an experience which we were following and we put this version of it together very very quickly. Its like a group of us sitting for a few days and trollling out. So... we are not so worried about whether it looks like art or doesn't because its a lot of... when things are new or when you have a new kind of experience we don't know even I don't know what to make of it until we try it.
Lower Parel
Phoenix Mills
phoenix Mills, Lower Parel, Mumbai
Q1: I think the question is do you find this more archival or do you find this more as art? What do you guys feel?
SA: I'll just give you a few I guess pegs to hold on to and then perhaps like Ashok said. So, site specific art, interventions, live performances, these are things you know of in the contemporary art world, right? So this is perhaps one route we'er from coming from. Expanded cinema - that's may be another place we'er coming from. Critical media practices - they also happen within the art world. So, if you are looking for like historical pegs as to
Yeh Kya Tha? - what on earth was it we did? I mean I don't want to force feed it in that sense but there are I guess historic precedents and the fertile ground we walk on which also makes us things and tickles us - a critique of that tickles us perhaps also, and pushes us to do something. We belong to the city and there is a history of the city that also stays within us and from which emerges works of art. Ashok mentioned 7 years ago - I think its more than 7 years ago, its 2009 - that's 8 years ago, we made a feature length film in East Jerusalem and it was filmed by 8 Palestinian families with a 3 hundred dollar Pan-tilt-zoom camera on their roof tops. And you could see it as an independent film that was made without asking the Israeli authorities for permission to put a tripod and camera in the street. You could see it as a sort of community engagement and a transformative experience for the Palestinian residents who a camera wasn't turned on to their faces and said 'okay, now tell me your story of occupation', but, they suddenly had this joystick in their hand and could tell you the window in which they were born to the separation wall. Again, I could say its a documentary, I could say its a certain kind of public engagement. So there are ways to read these things and they're within what you can call contemporary art or expanded cinema or I will be real purist - documentary film. So, you could find your places within all these things.
AS: I was trying to make art w.... Sorry! Go on.
AS: No no, just fooling around. Sorry.
AS: We were not being funny tonight, normally we are more funny.
Q2: I'd just like to say the piece gave me enormous pleasure for reasons that I can't entirely pin down. I think my favourite moment was when the guy drops the cup or something at the window and you follow it slowly down and eventually you see that pile of garbage at the bottom. I don't know why that's so satisfying, but it is to me. And I loved the birds and when you follow the butterfly. I guess I'm one of the people who came in late because I was stuck in traffic. So I don't have... maybe you'll explained this at the start, but I don't have all the background about what exactly it was that I was watching and how much work was preset and how much work was sort of being determined in the moment about what exactly we were going to see. So if you don't mind could you just talk a little about that?
AS: So, about... I don't know how many but let's say more than half the material is literally live. I am running it from here, like this... on the screen. So, its also a bit tentative because of that, like we don't know what we could find necessarily. But.. and its a cheap commercial CCTV system that costs in Indian rupees 35,000 rupees or so. There are 6 of them outside - when you walk out of Palladium mall you will see about 5-6 dome cameras, standard airport stuff, there's 24 of them on the Bandra Worli sea-link. So the... and what we did was for 3 or 4 days before the first event we just came and recorded stuff. We set up the camera on the roof and then sort of sat around and played with it, and we found some things like the butterfly shot and we tried to say that that's in the past. Its not always clear which part is live, obviously.
AS: So, we have these 2 banks of material - this is a live screen if you look at the image. This thing is a live screen and this is the recorded one here. I don't know if this is very interesting but... okay, that's the recorded material here. So things like the mouse, things like our recording... and we just switch between them. So the idea is that almost anyone can do this. I can just go... and you could sit in your house and put a camera up and watch the world. Especially if you have the privilege of being in a high elevation, or if you have other things interesting around you that were high enough. And at the moment this is completely legal and its completely, at that level kosher too. Its just that the technology is so different from what it used to be 5 years ago that you can zoom into peoples' nose-hairs and... its fine. I can keep zoom this till you feel really uncomfortable about what's in my lap, no? I can then focus it... So... were just playing with that and its part of a studio practice where we do these things - this is not a very formal finished product of that. But we were... we also make films and do other things, but its a kind of practice where Simpreet's work and our interests and all of this can be put together as a sort of form of social activity even. Like you put a camera up, 3 of you talk about stuff and other 15 people listen, and it can be fun.
SA: I just want to add to that that spatially we were here, we were stuck, pivoted on one point. But of course we have this mobility of the PTZ, the pan tilt and zoom. But in a temporal sense we wanted to go through this history which is perhaps what anchored the whole 75 minute performance, and that for us has been overwhelming and rich and we just didn't have enough time, right? We're sitting there identifying buildings in the sort of run up to this, in our so-called rehearsals of being up on the roof and mounting the camera and sitting in that projection room on this monitor. And we had our research, we were identifying buildings and then you know how both... all this works together - this image and the script. Its been quite overwhelming because the city, the particular history... We were like are we going to bore people by showing them like chrome and glass towers, after towers after towers and say but this was that mill, this was that mill and before that this was the Opium trader and before that he was a stock... you know. But that's the capitalist history of 150 years of crazy transformation - the mills strike that happened here in '82 was the longest longest lockout in the world. And what happened after that is... it happens too fast as well. So, we also had quite a challenging and personally overwhelming time even trying to grapple and perhaps craft this story out.
Q3: First of all I would like to congratulate you for putting the new thing together. I hope it is the original idea and even if it is not, you know it is something which really engaged me and I was not bored even a for a second. And I being born in Bombay not even 2 kilometres away from where we are now, I always wondered about Lower Parel and the history of Bombay, but never had the liberty to know the things which you all have showed today. So, it is something I am sure a lot of schools would also be interested to bring in their students and... because for us I think I am more a Bombay
wala today than I was 2 hours back. Because I know about my city better now. And I think what you all are doing, it this just a beginning because... like cinema is endless and every director does what he feels like. This is also I think it will... if people would really... if it catches on with the young I think there are a lot of stories to be told. And the excitement of things happening live - I think there were a couple of times when there was a thing where all the modern things were shown and then finally the gas
wala is pushing. So, that is the reality of the world today and when it happens like this live it is much more interesting and relate-able. So, I would just like to say thank you to you guys. bye bye.
SA: Enjoy walking the streets once you leave the cinema hall.
Q3: Ya, sure. I... I...
AS: ...to the extent that, any...
AS: The originality question is that, yes, original in the sense that I don't know anybody who has done exactly something like this, but otherwise its from the 17th century. So...
Q3: And you know another point which I really missed out was what he said, that 4 people putting up the cameras and 15 people watching it. And discussing about that. Since our lives are so busy in Bombay that we rarely do such things. So, I think this might open up a box of Pandora, like they say and a lot of good things might happen out of it. So, I don't have any questions because the answers are to be found ourselves. thank you.
Q4: Hi, I wanted to know if the question of privacy of the those being filmed came up and how you all dealt with that?
SS: The answer can be yes and no. In the sense that as Shaina in the beginning said that there are like by the state authorities there are 5,000 such cameras, and there would be like 100 thousands of other cameras which are also around. So, that way when this is the reality we are living in. So, how do you raise this question of whether it is public or private? In the sense when you go out from here as he has said that there will be like similar 6 cameras which would have filmed you. So... But at the same time yes, this is a question of privacy. But also one such experiment... I think the question can be inverted, the question of privacy can be inverted. That if everyone has a camera like this then where is the question itself, or how the question will be framed.
SA: And I mean... for... in CAMP's sort of line of practice and work, in 2006, after being iris scanned and finger printed and waited in long lines to get a visa for the U.K., like 10th visa for the U.K., we managed to enter CCTV control rooms there, And in turn we opened them up to members of the general public. And its not because we wanted them all to be voyeurs and become security guards and go and probe into people, but it was... it was important to open the window of these black boxes. There are control systems hidden everywhere and that control room in a... I mean (as) Simpreet said you walk out of here by the time you reach your taxi or bus you've been under 8-9 cameras, and we don't have a data projection act here. And in the big brother country where you are a queen subject, you're not even a citizen, you could be under 60 cameras in 60 seconds. So, at that point our own like... sort of old notions - yes, of course we have an ethics of privacy and stuff but all of this collapses. Look what you're staring at. Look at the structures of control and power that are around you. So, at that point you have to let down your guard and enter it. Because if we don't understand that - and you... don't grapple it and if you don't turn it around and understand it - you can't just have a long distance critique. We do that in parallel, we're working - we're trying to research the data protection act, we have colleagues working on it, the something's happening with Aadhar and the right to privacy bill...
SA: When the Radia phone taps leaked, we were the first to archive them. Now not because we to wanted to hear Radia and Ratan Tata chat, but because the leak is a cogent form - some powers was disrupted. We didn't ask for it to be tapped, we didn't ask for it to be leaked. But now that it exists, its a material object of our time. And if you study them you will understand how big media, big oligarchy and big politics works. So, its been let out there. Now yes, when I am listening to those audio tapes of course I am feel cringey, I am like 'Yeinoo...' The government was really taping her phone like that and I wonder who set the enforcement directorate up to do that. But that being said, what now? Its part of your landscape. Look at what news media does and stuff. So, in that when there's care, there is ethics, there is critical inquiry. We didn't really... we kept our limits. We didn't like go into your nostril even we could or anybody else's. And we have to... in order to understand this you have to get into its nuts and bolts and skin and teeth and control black space as well.
AS: I think its very easy for us to go into a window of a neighbour, but we didn't exactly do that. And things like that. So there are certain ethical or whatever decisions we made which you can see, but we're also showing you that that's just the standard zoom on this thing. You're looking at the grill 200 meters away where the rat went in on Saturday night. Its also time - its not just the physical space. I am recording everything all the time. And that's even more scary in some ways, which is why its interesting.
Q5: You know, another thing which happened was - while you are going on the parking lot I didn't see my bike so, I though my bike was stolen...
AS: Stolen... Ya.... You can look for it now.
Q6 (Mamta): That actually brings me to my response. First of all I want to say this is seriously the most radical subversive action of art i have it seen in a long time. Many congratulations to you for that. It just sort of brought forth in me a response really - is... the city as a crime scene and as a site of potential crime and there is a potentiality which is deeply ingrained and its sort of being expressed through I think the numerous ways in which hyper-recordings that we're doing - at various levels, in terms of state and personal whereever you want to place it. So, that's something that really struck me all through, and even as you were zooming in - you say you didn't zoom in to but that was too close in a lot of points and if I were there and if it was my house, it was too close. So there is already crime. You know what I mean? It was just something that was running all through and I don't think that just happened, I know you guys are too cleaver to... So, its just something that... like chill in your spine kind of a thing, you know all through. And this gentlemen missing his bike on the... this is just insane, the potentialities of this form of cinema that you've come up with. Honestly its quite mind blowing. And your sort of... the voice over kind of legacy documentary film that you've taken on here - and you keep it so factual and so... and a little drab and like a lot of facts if I may say so... And past and present in time - its just all come together really wonderfully. I wish I had got the previous one so I could come again. Are you having any more? I would love to come again.
SA: We said we'd leave the building and never come back.
AS: We are never coming back.
Q6 (Mamta): Ya, I just love the trajectories. It doesn't just remain a fun experience, the trajectory of accumulation of capital...
SA: Biggest crime.
Q6 (Mamta): ...and how we are here, how that came about in a very concerted kind of a structural way. Its not something you don't know perhaps maybe actually you don't perhaps, but to sort of really have it graphed out like that spatially, temporally, physically in terms of layers or structures of archaeology - I mean they're so pathological and forensic that just... many congratulations. It just works on so many levels as an action of art that I am surprised (that) that's the question posed to you first.
AS: Thank you that's a very generous brief.
SA: I just want to add a small comment to Mamta - one of the first films to... documentary film to be made exclusively of CCTV footage played just before this as part of The New Medium at 2.30 here and its called The Giant by Michael Klier, he's a German filmmaker, batchmate of Harun Farocki actually, little older than him. And drove around in '82 between Hamburg, Berlin and Dusseldorf - just when this controlled society CCTV is new in Germany, trying to
hadpao (grab hold of) and seize this footage. And then he sets it perversely to Wagner and Rachmaninoff and all this kind of Nazi kind of operatic kind of music. And he said even a pigeon looks like a potential criminal, right, through this medium. And today when we were rehearsing I think Simpreet was a bit tired and he was telling a story, I am like 'This is the crim... you know, the story of the crime of that capital accumulation', and he was rehearsing the Opium bit - we were trying to practise and find the right building to turn down at. I actually thought right then of the crime and then the fact that how CCTV potentially makes everything look like something bad is going happen or crime is... you look like a terrorist. Basically the pigeon looks like a terrorist, is what Michael Klier said.
AS: But it also says the opposite, that the world is very big. I mean that its not just your ideas about... So we all have ideas about Lower Parel and we've read the books and... Then you come here and there are pigeons and there are motor cycles and there are rats and there are other things which populate that world as well. Which you can't just ignore, or you can't throw away that fact that they don't necessary fit into your historical understanding of Lower Parel, or into the mills story. So, both are there. And the funny thing about this is that you have to struggle with the fact that what you are saying sometimes doesn't match at all what you are looking at. And this is sort of our risk as well that it may not work, it may look like a joke, or it may look like... a defeat or it may look like many other things.
SS: And what you are looking at you might not be sure what to say about.
SA: I grew up here, they didn't.
AS: She's from Bombay background.
Q7: Hello.
AS: Hello.
Q7: So, at what point do permissions come in? Like if I wanted to install a camera either on my building or in my office, how does that work?
SA: Ask your building secretary if you want to even.
AS: There is no law against putting a camera especially on your own house, property, whatever. So, you can put a camera...
Q7: ...In your balcony...
AS: In your balcony, you can put one... then there is the ethical question of what you want to do with that?
Q7: Want to do this only.
AS: Yes. So, This is an old question in cinema too, of the (neighbour) window opposite... there are these voyeur films.
Q7: Ya, ya.
AS: So, what happens when you get a camera which is a long lens is that you start looking into peoples'... and part of the sort of urban... let's say, its a very different thing, this vertical you know this is more. But part of the history of cinema has that moment - you have a long lens and you are looking into the window opposite you. So, there is Hitchcock, there is Read Window, you know there's a moment of urban cinema, where you literally can look into... of course there is no need of zoom lens in Bombay, as in you can look anyway. But it opens up all these strange feelings and social and cultural sort of....
Q7: So, I was saying that the last time I caught this at your office, I had mixed feelings about voyeurism and all that. But today I really enjoyed it. I mean, did not think about that... I think those are things that surface the first... in the first few moments of watching, or the first few days of reflecting on this. But today I felt like if there are permissions allowed and until what time - until when do you think the laws will pop up because maybe everybody might be interested in installing a 360...
SA:But they do. I trained my kid when he was 2 to identify CCTV cameras, and he would be like 'Mama that thing you don't like' and then we got tired of hearing it because he would only... he's 7 now. He's 7 now, he's mapped the Carter Road things...
AS: There are many. Maybe 13 - 14, and half of them are dome cameras. That's there.
SA: Even while doing the research for what you saw for my studio...
AS: Her question is when will the law be put in place.
SA: Yes...
AS: So, there is something called the data projection act in Europe, in the U.K., where you're not allowed to broadcast or re-use peoples' material without their consent. But this is continuation of documentary questions and so on. So, we weren't so interested in telling you where the line is, we were just going for the... sort of feeling of what it means. And this could be much more sort of problematic than today. But the law is more like, was designed to project people against the state, against state surveillance, and from just people like spying on each other.
SS: We don't have that.
AS: And we don't have that problem here, we are looking at environment. And there are a lot of things other than just spying at individual people that you are interested in.
SA: And really image surveillance done by image is really the most benign of them all. Right now via your phone, sitting here you're being surveilled in quite way more pervasive ways. Its just that because that its a visual medium, if we zoomed into you face now it feels way more invasive than what's happening via your phones. So, there are these things as well that, when we come out of here we will feel all of this, trust me you'll walk down the mall and you'll start. But you'll also I think start seeing the city... like last night we finished and they're like should we go for a walk in Parel, at 2 in the morning! I was like 'no, let's go home!' when we finished setting up here. But this desire now to...
AS: And it looks very different from the ground. If your walk behind into the SRA that Simpreet was talking about, its a completely different world from what you see on the screen. This is just the surface... you know, in that the this is... but that's... you can't show everything, and its not an all-seeing eye, its just one out of millions. And that was the point, that we wouldn't move it. If we move it in... like okay, we put another one inside just for the...
SA: To darken it as well.
AS: ...just to make you to part of it
SA: And make you stop enjoying it for a minute as well.
Q7: What does it look like at night, can we see?
SA: See
AS: This is live
SA: But now the lights are on here, so what we are seeing here is very different from what you are seeing.
Q7: Ya.
AS: Its live.
SA: It depends on the day also, today is extremely hazy, but it will settle.
SA: We'll have to have the lights off to see.
AS: But I mean you can go... where you want...
SA: On a clear day you can see Navashiva, you can see Bandra. Its quite...
Q7: You were also talking about Lodha Venezia...
SA: This is it, there it is.
Q7: So, what its occupied or what are these lights?
AS: No... its not. This is an ad for Lodha Venezia...
SA: Those flashing lights are ads
AS: stuck on Lodha Venezia.
Q7: What do you mean? These are..
SS: These are empty...
AS: These are not real people, that's not a real person...
A: It just lighting.
Q7: These are all flats with lighting?
SA: Ad for the building.
AS: These are.. like coloured lights, put to show that there might be some people some day who can afford to live in Lodha Venezia.
SA: That is lights on different floors.
SS: As such they are empty.
AS: And some of them are flashing. But its completely empty, absolutely empty. And they turn - all turn off at midnight. Together.
SA: You just see that now and you see that when the sky was very clear and that was much later I think.
AS: And that's also completely empty.
SA: Just show one sec, switch. That was a clear day. That was a really really clear day. It was one all of last week where the haze had lifted.
AS: But you know... its nice...
SA: Even the other building has show lights
AS: Haan but we can keep doing this whole night so lets...
SA: Last questions. Please do pick up the New Medium booklet if you haven't got one already and try to catch the rest of the films - mainly, specially in Andheri PVR, Juhu and City Mall and Icon - that's where most of them are playing. Tomorrow at 6.30 we have DADA, which is Kamal Swaroop and his collaborators on an extraordinary and inter-generational and generative journey, excavating through missing archives, and fake archives, the life of Dadasaheb Phalke. So, do come for that. And there are more films to catch which you can see - Gulf to Gulf to Gulf is a film we made that's also playing tomorrow at 2.30 and on the 18th. So. do try to come for that as well.
SA: Any more questions? That camera is coming down in 5 minutes so...
AS: Ya Let's... you can come up here and play with it if you want. That's how we'll end. Thank you very much.
SA: Thank you.
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