CAMP Study Day at MoMA

Duration: 03:17:20; Aspect Ratio: 1.778:1; Hue: 115.591; Saturation: 0.022; Lightness: 0.227; Volume: 0.082; Cuts per Minute: 1.110; Words per Minute: 131.354

CAMP Study Day, brings together leading scholars of media, law, cinema, and visual art on the occasion CAMP's exhibition Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP.

Speaker Abstracts:

Lawrence Liang
Using the three works in Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP as milestones, I will trace a narrative arc through CAMP’s practice over the past two decades, focusing on the evolution of their ethos. Drawing on key conceptual categories central to their practices—privilege escalation, deepening access, and parasitism—I will examine how CAMP’s artistic and political interventions expand our understanding of the ‘poetics and politics' of infrastructure and the re-distribution of the sensible.

Erika Balsom
Parasite, Pirate, Plumber
“We like to work within...systems as a parasite, pirate, or plumber, all of whom produce new fictions,” said Shaina Anand in a 2014 interview. Parasite, pirate, plumber: what do these alliterative entities share, and what different avenues do they open for thinking about the concerns that continue to inform CAMP's practice more than a decade later? This talk will explore this trio of marginal figures, primarily, but not exclusively, in relation to From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (2013).

Debashree Mukherjee
In this short presentation, I think with Bombay Tilts Down (2022) to revisit some familiar tropes in film and media studies: the relation of cinema and the city, the politics of aerial photography, and the techno-forensic imagination. CAMP’s latest work intervenes in these debates with gestures towards monsoonal time, citational intimacies, and the recursive dance between power and the people.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha
TILTING DOWN, WITH CAMP
To understand a work like Bombay Tilts Down requires a wide canvas. This presentation uses previous work by CAMP to sketch out a history of the city that saw the practice of cinema, poetry and performance move alongside political movements often involving foundational rights to speech, shelter and livelihood. Both kinds of practice came together in the way they addressed questions of how to occupy, to reclaim the right to describe, to stake a right to the city.

Laura U. Marks
CAMP’s practice shows the richness and intimacy of the low-resolution image, as images are dense with implicit information about where they come from and where they are going. Low-res images model the light, sustainable infrastructure that will survive when more bloated infrastructure fails.

Speaker Bios:

Erika Balsom is a reader in film and media studies at King’s College London who specializes in the study of artists’ moving-image practices. She is the author of four books, including TEN SKIES (2021) and After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video in Circulation (2017). Her writing has appeared in publications such as e-flux journal, Grey Room, and New Left Review, as well as many exhibition catalogues. With Hila Peleg, she was the co-curator of No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, which began at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) in 2022 and will travel to Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, next year.

Lawrence Liang is a professor of law and the dean of the School of Legal and Socio-Political Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi. His work lies at the intersection of law, culture, and technology. A winner of the Infosys award for the social sciences (2017), Liang has been a visiting scholar at Yale, Columbia, and the University of Michigan, among other universities. He has written extensively on the politics of intellectual property, free speech, and media cultures. He has also been a collaborator and interlocutor of CAMP since 2005, and is one of the cofounders of pad.ma and indiancine.ma. His forthcoming book looks at the relationship between law and justice in popular Indian cinema.

Laura U. Marks works on media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus and an emphasis on appropriate technologies. Her fifth book, The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos (2024) proposes a practical philosophy of living in a folded cosmos. With Azadeh Emadi, Marks cofounded the Substantial Motion Research Network of artists and scholars interested in non-Western approaches to media. She programs experimental media art for venues around the world. In 2020 she founded the Small File Media Festival, which celebrates movies that stream at extremely low bitrate. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Marks teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Debashree Mukherjee is associate professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University, and co-director of the Center for Comparative Media. She is the author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (2020) and editor of Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema (2024). Her current book project, Tropical Machines, develops a media history of South Asian indentured migration and plantation modernity from the 1830s onward, and has been awarded an ACLS fellowship for the year 2025–26. Debashree edits the peer-reviewed journals BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and Screen, and has published in journals such as Film History, Film Quarterly*, Feminist Media Histories, Representations, MUBI’s Notebook, and Modern Asian Studies.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film historian and occasional art curator. He is the author of Ritwik Ghatak: A Return the Epic (1982), Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009), and The Last Cultural Mile: An Inquiry into Technology and Governance in India (2011). He is the editor of Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (with Paul Willemen) (1994/1999), In the Wake of Aadhaar: The Digital Ecosystem of Governance in India (2013), and a book of Kumar Shahani’s writings, The Shock of Desire and Other Essays (2015). Among his curated projects is the “Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001” section (with Geeta Kapur) of Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at Tate Modern, London (2002); You Don’t Belong festival of film and video, Beijing, Shanghai, Guanghzhou, and Kunming (2011); Memories of Cinema at the IVth Guangzhou Triennial (2011); Make-Belong: Films in Kochi from China and Hong Kong, Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2015); and the exhibition Tah-Satah: A Very Deep Surface: Mani Kaul & Ranbir Singh Kaleka: Between Film and Video at the Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur (2017).

Good afternoon.

Welcome to those of you here on 53rd Street and also to those of you joining us online internationally. I'm Stuart Comer. I'm the Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance here at the Museum of Modern Art and it's my great pleasure to welcome you all to the CAMP Study Day today.
Introduction
Stuart Comer

Where to look when considering answers to the question, what is Video After Video? Today for Midtown Manhattan we consider propositions formed on a rooftop in Mumbai, part of a studio gathering artists, technologists, activists, archivists, lawyers, and other thinkers and kindred spirits under the name CAMP.

Four letters that reflect many thousands of possible acronyms, each an open equation and an opportunity to rethink everyday life and the infrastructures built to define it. CAMP's studio has become one of the most urgent and exciting crucibles internationally for the exploration and examination of public images, what they tell us about the world and our capacity to act within it.

Here, in this exhibition, video is posed as a live technology, one that is integrated closely with human life in real time through telecommunications, transport, trade, and the internet. But also a technology made up of its quickly proliferating afterlives, an expanded field of image streams that CAMP transforms into a living archive, whose phantoms have real-world consequences.

And so here on the left you see some of the permutations of the many thousands of acronyms I mentioned. A huge shout out to MoMA's graphic design team for working closely with the artists to, yes, and the introduction of wrong font into our graphic design lexicon.

So hopefully most of you have seen the exhibition, but for those of you who have not, this is the entrance to the show.

And I just wanted to quickly show this image, which our C-MAP, former C-MAP colleague and fellow, and now the assistant director of our international program, Christina Noel, dug up from the archive a week or two ago.

This was our first C-MAP trip to India in 2015, and we met Shaina and Ashok at that time.

I had been following their work for some time when I was still at Tate in London, but it was really thrilling to finally meet them and have the opportunity to see their exhibition at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai and to really get a deep dive into the work.

It sparked a dialogue that continued and has to some extent manifested in the exhibition that you will see upstairs and today's Study Day.

The work on view comprises three individual works or installations, first From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, an assemblage of cell phone videos collected from sailors working in Dhow boats across the Gulfs from Sharjah to Somalia, produced on the occasion of the Sharjah Biennial (Documenta 13). An incredibly important shift in the documentary form, one that is truly collectively produced, that really charts the role that cell phone cameras have taken in our lives and really charts that path from very pixelated digitized images to the more high definition cameras we have today.

We've tried to evoke the plazas in Sharjah where the work was first shown and also sort of a nautical language that evokes the boats themselves.

Khirkeeyaan, the earliest work in the show, which long before Zoom created a network inside of Delhi in the inner city neighborhood of Khirkee, using very rudimentary CCTV webcam technology and cable television technology to literally cut a slice through the hierarchies and structures of class, caste, gender, and beyond that had traditionally defined that neighborhood and created new dialogues between recent migrants, established housewives, factory workers, and many more, creating a really open-ended communication system that's really thrilling to watch and I hope you do dedicate some time.

And finally, Bombay Tilts Down, really an incredibly magisterial work premiered at the Kochi Biennial a couple of years ago. We were very thrilled to be able to acquire this work for MoMA's collection recently and it is a key anchor in the exhibition that takes the expansive view of From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf and even the microscopic view that you see in Khirkeeyaan, folds that into this incredible accordion fold panorama in which many vectors of the camera map out or really create a counter mapping of Bombay.

And it was shot during the pandemic, you'll hear much more about this work in the various presentations today, but really I think a significant contribution to the field and we're thrilled to have it on view here at the museum.

So marking the occasion of this exhibition, today's Study Day, and the exhibition is on through July 20th by the way, today's study day helps build on the exhibition's mission to help CAMP realize one of the group's stated goals: to develop new or reconfigured distribution platforms, cinemas, libraries, exhibitions, books, websites, performances, with both new concepts and materials, sensibility and sensuality, to take opportunities to change, to be hospitable to ideas and to people.

And on the note of hospitality, I would like to join MoMA and my co-curator Rattan in warmly welcoming Kiran Nadar Museum, Mrs. Kiran Nadar, Roobina Kurode, the director, Deepanjana Klein, Radha Mahendru, Pallaavi Surana, and Premjish Achari.

We are so delighted to have you here. This is a really exciting collaboration between MoMA and KNMA.

I'm particularly pleased to welcome them to New York, all the way from Delhi, to really support the vital intellectual exchange that we've had in the preparation of this event and the incredible support they've offered to make it happen.

For those of you unfamiliar with KNMA, it's the first private museum of art exhibiting modern and contemporary works from India and the subcontinent, open to the public in January of 2010. Located in the heart of New Delhi, it is a non-commercial, not-for-profit organization that exemplifies the dynamic relationship between art and culture through its exhibitions, publications, educational and public programs.

The ever-growing collection of KNMA is largely focused on significant trajectories. Its core collection highlights a magnificent generation of 20th century Indian painters from the post-independent decades and equally engages the different art practices of the younger contemporaries.

This latter commitment, of course, has led to the important collaboration that allows us to gather here today.

KNMA, too, acquired Bombay Tilts Down, and their commitment to CAMP's work has been very important, of course, in the conversations that we've had. And before I welcome Mrs. Kiran Nadar to the stage, I just first wanted to thank the speakers who have gathered here today alongside the artists Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran from CAMP.

We're so delighted to have you here.

Erika Balsom, Laurence Liang, Dabashree Mukherjee, and Ashish Rajadhyaksha. We're thrilled to have you from many corners of the world to join us in celebrating and thinking about CAMP's work today.

I would also like to deeply thank many colleagues at MoMA for bringing us all together as well. First of all, our director, Glenn Lowry, who's been very supportive of the region in general and certainly of this partnership with Kiran Nadar Museum.

So Sarah Suzuki and also Jay Levinson, the director of our international program, whose C-MAP initiative allowed us to travel to India in the first place. And also to bring in my co-curator, Rattan Singh Johal, as our first C-MAP fellow dedicated to South Asia, who has since gone on to many other major achievements, now based at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

But crucially, more than just a collaborator, but really a crucial voice in authoring this exhibition and today's study day. So Rattan, thank you. Also...

Also Lilia Taboada, the curatorial assistant who supported this exhibition. Huge thanks to Lilia.

And Ananya Sikand, the current C-MAP fellow.

And what had been the C-MAP Asia group has now morphed into C-MAP Bombay, which is the first time that we've focused one of the groups on a city rather than a region or a territory. So it's particularly exciting to have that research underway at MoMA as the CAMP exhibition is currently on view.

This event absolutely could not have happened with our completely incredible and dedicated colleagues and learning and engagement led by Nisa Mackey. Huge thanks to Leonardo Bravo, Adelia Gregory, Cam Thompkins, Jose Camacho, and Eddie Amante.

We're thrilled to be working with you and really grateful for the huge effort you've put into bringing this event to life today. Thank you.

And finally, to our colleague Keva, who has been instrumental in engineering the performance that hopefully many of you will see tonight in the gallery, and our incredible AV team, Aaron, Travis, Paul, Mark, and Charlie.

We couldn't do it without you. Huge thanks.

And without further ado, I would like to warmly welcome Mrs. Kiran Nadar to make some introductory remarks. Thank you all for being here.

Thank you, Stuart.

I'd like to welcome everybody here for this really important day where we're going to see the study group, study of the work of CAMP, which we have put together as partners of MoMA.

It's a great honour for KNMA to have this association with MoMA.

Glenn has been a real mentor for us, and so have other people at MoMA. We have had a lot of support from them for KNMA, and it's been a learning process for us.

So I'd like to thank MoMA for all their assistance to us.

I'd also like to say that this particular work was acquired.

We acquired the first edition.

So I just thought I should mention it. We acquired it at Kochi, and it is one of the most phenomenal works that you'll get to see, for those of you who haven't seen it. And it will also hopefully be shown at our launch of the new KNMA space in 2027.

So here's keeping fingers crossed that we are able to do it, as well as it's being done at MoMA today. And that it will be a memorable time for us as well.

I'm not going to take out too much more time. Oh, just to say that our museum will be opening in 2027 in India, and I hope a lot of you will visit us then.

Now I'm going to ask Rubina, the director of KNMA, and our chief curator, to come and say a few words. Rubina.

Thank you, Kiran.

Hello, everyone.

It feels great to be here once again in New York and at MoMA.

Amidst all of you, some familiar faces and friends I made when I was here some years ago, invited by Jay Levinson to be part of the International Curatorial Program at MoMA. That's when I met Stuart Comer, Sara Suzuki, Rattan Mol Singh, and other team members at MoMA.

And I'm proud that this association is growing stronger as we move forward.

It is indeed a momentous occasion to witness CAMP's incisive and critical practice at MoMA through the ongoing exhibition, Video after Video, Critical Media of CAMP.

This is the first major museum show in the United States of CAMP, and I congratulate Shaina and Ashok for the extraordinary journey of CAMP, and the organizers of the show, Stuart Comer, Rattan Mol Singh, and Lilia Rocyo for the exhibition.

And I have just got some glimpses today, and I have to tell you, and I have to congratulate you for this, for the amazing display of the exhibition. It was really beautifully installed, and I also came to know that Stuart, of course, has been following CAMP's practice for very long years.

I mean, almost 14, 15 years, and I think such a practice as complex and as interesting as Shaina's and Ashok's requires that kind of engagement with it.

Curatorially, the exhibition traces the nucleus of CAMP's practiced through decades, the everyday lives of video, its global journeys, and the pervasive extent of its unending networks.

This show also underscores MoMA's significant commitment to global media, to global media histories, and showcasing transformative artistic practices from around the world.

The Kiran Nader Museum of Art is immensely delighted to be associated with the exhibition and partnering with MoMA on this CAMP study day. This collaboration, and I believe strongly has brought together diverse perspectives and insights to think together of CAMP's transdisciplinary practice.

I look forward to the speakers this evening.

It also reflects our deep commitment at KNMA to nurture critical artistic dialogues.

Just to share briefly about KNMA, we are a pioneering museum in India dedicated primarily to collecting and exhibiting modern and contemporary artistic practices of India and South Asia.

Located in the heart of Delhi, the capital city, and under the dynamic vision of Kiran Nader, our founder and chairperson, It is our mission to have and welcome, create a museum that welcomes all, it is for all, and through our collection, exhibitions, programs, and collaborations, connect arts, artists, and audiences.

While doing so in India, we have also marked our presence, through our exhibition and programs at the Venice Biennale, at the Met Breuer, Raina Sofia, Santa Pompidou, Musee Nguime, Tate Modern, at the Barbican in London, and at ACA in Australia, and now at MoMA.

Our focus has been to build one of the most seminal collections on India and South Asia, support artistic ideas and practices, and through meaningful collaborations, bring visibility and relevance to the rich and varied art and cultural expressions from our part of the world.

Our rigorous programs of exhibition making, through research, experience, our educational and cultural programs, are all geared towards the enrichment and dissemination of the arts.

I have some of our team members sitting here, from the leadership and the curatorial team, Dipanjana Klein, Radhika Chopra, Radha Mendru, Prem J. Sachari, all of them are here, some of them are here, I would say.

Currently, we are filled with anticipation at the launching of our independent museum building, which is in fact, it has expanded into an art and cultural center, covering an area of one million square feet.

Sounds interesting, engaging, and also overwhelming.

I would have, it would have multiple galleries dedicated to the collection and to temporary exhibitions, auditoriums, performing arts center, education block, cafes and restaurants, and so on.

This colossal project is designed by Sir David Ajay and Ajay Associates, along with S. Ghosh Associates, the Indian partner, and is under construction and just spoke about it. It's already creating a huge buzz and enthusiasm in our, in India and the subcontinent.

I'm especially excited to announce that this new home for art will, in its inaugural year, feature a made, amongst multiple showings, CAMP.

And it may be a significant commission or they may turn, as they may turn their distinctive sharp lens to the city of Delhi itself, offering profound insights into another complex urban landscape.

I wish to acknowledge how critically important it is to us, this relationship, our relationship with MoMA, our sharing, learning, and mentoring, and being inspired constantly by Glenn Lowry, Director MoMA, and the team, as we grow and evolve into an institution with meaning and purpose, and one that believes that art holds the promise for a better world, and a world without boundaries.

I'm pleased to call Rattanmol Singh, one of the organizers of CAMP Exhibition, a friend I've known for long.

He's the guest curator and former assistant director of the international program. Rattan.

Thank you very much.

Thank you so much, Robina. It's a pleasure to be back here and welcome you all.

And in the interest of time, I will quickly move to this slide to just give everyone an opportunity to scan the QR code and bring up the program for this afternoon and evening on your phones.

From 2.30 to 4.30, the slot we're in now, we will hear from four exceptional scholars, and that will be followed by a discussion with Stuart and myself.

We will have a quick break for informal exchanges outside the theater, and at 5.30, we'll reconvene for a keynote lecture by Laura Marks, following which at 7pm, CAMP will perform in the Bombay Tilts Down installation for those who read the copy on the website carefully and got their tickets in time because we are now sold out.

And so with that quick overview, I will introduce our first speaker for this afternoon, Lawrence Liang. Lawrence's work lies at the intersection of law, culture, and technology. He has written extensively on the politics of intellectual property, free speech, and media cultures.

A recipient of the prestigious Infosys Award for the Social Sciences, Lawrence is currently Professor of Law and Dean of the School of Legal and Sociopolitical Studies at Ambedkar University in Delhi.

Most importantly, of course, in today's context, Lawrence has been a collaborator and interlocutor of CAMP since its inception, and is one of the co-founders of pad.ma, and indiancine.ma, the extensive digital video archives of footage and finished films.

In today's presentation, Lawrence will use the three works in the MoMA exhibition upstairs to trace a narrative arc through CAMP's practice over the last two decades, examining how their artistic and political interventions expand our understanding of the poetics and politics of infrastructure and the redistribution.

Without any further ado, please join me in welcoming Lawrence Liang.

Lawrence Liang

Thank you. I want to begin by thanking CAMP of course, Stuart, Rattan, KNMA, and MoMA. Thank you for having me here, and I have Ananya positioned in a very kind of, you know, strategic position with the timer there, so without wasting any time, I'm going to go ahead.

It's very difficult to speak about CAMP's rich and layered body of work in the short time that I have, but I want to begin with an acknowledgment of the curatorial logic, you know, that underlies the show, because in many ways the three works that are on display here serve as critical milestones through which we can trace a narrative arc over the last two decades of CAMP's work.

And I want to focus really on what I think is, what we can describe as CAMP's philosophy and method. And as the first speaker, I thought it would be useful for me to set a little context for viewers who may have seen the show, but not necessarily know CAMP's oeuvre.

From the perspective of a collaborator and interlocutor, the three works on offer offer us a vantage point to trace a through line that runs through their body of work and practice, because all three are visual experiments, even as they are spatial and political interventions that offer us an alternative - a cartography of control, movement, freedom and subversion.

They also mark three moments of "Video After Video". From low end CCTV, handheld digital cameras and mobile phones, and finally high res portable surveillance cameras. This is a story of CAMP, even as it is a story of technology.

CAMP's work operates simultaneously on a dual timeline. The rapidly shifting landscape of surveillance and media technology, nationally and globally on the one hand, and the evolving aesthetics and methods of their own practice.

And each of the three featured works manifest this kind of dual awareness, from hacked cable networks to high definition and CCTV. CAMP's artistic trajectory shadows the infrastructure of seeing itself, reframing it from the perspective of the artist-hacker.

One way for me to begin this is by returning in a way to the initial moment, both of friendship and collaboration with Shaina and Ashok, an origin that also coincides with the emergence of CAMP. So two early projects that I just want to turn your attention to.

The first one is a project from 2005 that was done by Ashok, called Glow Positioning System, or GPS.

GPS mounted a hand crank on a pavement in Bombay to tap into the city's electrical systems. It allowed the audience to illuminate a panoramic ring of light circling an important intersection in the city, revealing the city's hidden infrastructures, its façades, electrical circuits and architectural traces.

By lighting up façades and casting moving shadows, the crank operated almost like a magic wand, revealing a kind of wonderment latent in the everyday urban form, making visible what is usually overlooked.

Situated between the weight of colonial Indo-Gothic architecture and the constraints of archaic electricity laws, it produced an experience of cinematic lightness, of illumination and obscurity.

Simultaneously functioning as public art and infrastructural revelation, GPS established the foundation, in many ways, of CAMP' subsequent work. As a proto CAMP intervention, GPS anticipated many of the collective's later concerns, from infrastructural hacking to aesthetic interventions that laid the groundwork for what we see in Bombay Tilts Down, where questions of access, spectatorship and urban perception become even more layered and expansive.

Even as GPS was taking place, there were two simultaneous works by Shaina.

Rustle TV in 2004 created a local TV channel within a bustling bazaar in Bangalore, and WICTV in 2005, which is when we started our collaboration, parasited a local minor language cable television channel to insert a parallel stream of commentary and coverage during an event called the World Information City Conference.

Transforming a traditionally one-way broadcast medium into a two-way channel, these interventions challenged dominant media structures and created a space for localized real-time responses within a global event.

The terrace of a local NGO became a makeshift studio from which CAMP produced its television shows, and it involved collaborating with a local cable operator to transmit content directly to the community.

Marked by the immediacy of interaction between producers and viewers enabled by video, these interventions disrupted conventional media hierarchies and demonstrated the possibilities of a more participatory media environment.

And from this foundation, you see CAMP's politics of access converging around a set of core animating principles that have shaped in many ways their artistic engagement.

The first kind of propositional form of their practice is the idea of how do you use your privilege as an artist to access spaces and infrastructures that would otherwise be unavailable, what they describe as "privilege escalation".

The second is how do you leverage that privileged access to parasite closed networks and infrastructure, surveillance feeds, port data, satellite channels, and turn the tools of control into platforms of counter-visibility, shared knowledge, or public engagement.

And finally, how do you use artistic interventions to create work and infrastructures that then redistribute and deepen access to those media infrastructures? My focus is really going to be on these two elements, infrastructure and parasitism.

Because what emerges in CAMP's practice is what I would term as a dramaturgy of urban infrastructure that intersects with media systems. Rooftops transform into studios, mobile phones document affective, and social histories of shipping. Cable networks serve as conduits of counter-visuality, and surveillance systems metamorphose into cinematic devices.

The infrastructural becomes dramaturgical, staging new relationships between space, technology, and public life.

And in most of CAMP's work, the spectator is not positioned in a classical sense. There is no fixed spectatorial addressee as in cinema, nor is there a privileged contemplative viewer, typical of the white cube gallery space.

And CAMP's spectator stands very often as a participant inside the very infrastructure that it's being tinkered with. The CCTV, the mobile camera, the cable, the window, are not external to the spectator's worlds, but embedded in them.

And the image that emerges, emerges through participation, disruption, and infrastructural appropriation. So the classical grammar of cinema gives way to an expanded cinematic vocabulary of immediacy, where the distance between the image and the spectator is collapsed.

In Khirkeeyaan, for instance, this takes the form of a live feed. In From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, through a performative self-representation. And in Bombay Tilts Down, through the unfolding choreography of the camera's descent along the vertical surfaces of the city.

By hacking into the infrastructures of image making, and inventing new possibilities for visual expression, CAMP repositions video as the realm of an emancipated, entangled spectatorship, while simultaneously redefining the power dynamics of social relations across the city, the high seas, and built-up environments.

While we often speak of CAMP as a singular coherent entity, their practice is actually composed of diverse impulses, sensibilities, and energies. And two prominent instincts stand out for me.

The cinematic on the one hand, and the infrastructural on the other.

The cinematic leans towards an aesthetics and politics of the image, while the infrastructural emphasizes tactical hands-on intervention, approaching hacking as a cultural and artistic mode of engagement.

What does it mean for individual artist practitioners to hack into systems? Into codes, cables, networks, and cameras? Is there a tension between engaging with the very infrastructure of power and surveillance that CAMP seeks to critique? And how does one produce an artistic practice from within the infrastructural belly of the information beast? This might seem like a tension destined to collapse into contradiction, but I would argue that for CAMP, this very tension becomes a productive force, a generative fiction that defines their work.

Their dual stance, operating within systems to expose or reconfigure them, creates a friction between complicity and resistance, control and subversion, aesthetics and improvisation.

CAMP's practice navigates and transforms these tensions into a generative method rather than a contradiction. And it is within this tension that their radical edge emerges. Their critical engagement with media foregrounds, media not merely as tools, but as environments to be hacked, inhabited and redistributed.

This is also perhaps what is significant about the title of the show, because this is indeed video after video.

The cinematic in this register is deeply intertwined with infrastructure because it's invested not only in the creation of images, but also in the complex systems that enable their production, distribution and reception.

If CAMP's infrastructure, if cinema's infrastructure organizes the flow of images in a controlled and often hierarchical manner, where production, circulation and reception are distinct, CAMP collapses these bifurcations.

Their artistic practice transforms this collapse into a methodological ethos. Films are created not with traditional film cameras, but through repurposed infrastructural channels producing parasitic images.

Media structures are often designed to remain invisible. Their effectiveness in many ways hinges on a seamless integration with urban infrastructure.

In a city like Delhi, for instance, there are estimated now to be over half a million CCTV cameras or 20 cameras per thousand people. This creates a politics of concealment where power functions through what remains hidden or unnoticed.

Keller Easterling's concept of Extrastatecraft highlights how infrastructure is not a neutral ground for politics, but a dynamic terrain where power is actively deployed, shaped and contested.

And an extreme version of this might be found in the totalizing account of surveillance infrastructures by thinkers like Shoshana Zuboff, who emphasized the pervasive and coercive reach of infrastructural power.

In contrast, CAMP refuses to succumb to the unidimensional narratives of infrastructure as functional and oppressive and instead asks how we might expand their expressive affordances and capacities.

In this regard, they echo an open source ethos best illustrated by the statement by Gilberto Gil, jazz musician and former minister of culture in Brazil, who when asked how a radical musician could become a minister of culture, he answered that as a free software activist, he'd been taught that everything is porous and could be hacked, even the government.

In 2008, for instance, CAMP entered the CCTV systems of a shopping mall in Manchester to open it out to the public. They also used the Freedom of Information Act, allowing people to requisition CCTV footage of themselves, which were then brought into the public domain and became the basis of a film.

Using their privileged access, CAMP turned passive surveillance into active shared visibility, disrupting the usual flow of power and control over these images. They followed this up in 2009 in a work called The Neighbor Before the House, in which CAMP took a surveillance camera to Jerusalem, which was then set up to enable Palestinian families to zoom in and look at their former houses from which they had been displaced.

In a very moving sequence in the film, a spectator comments that a lemon tree that existed in his garden had now died since the ground had been filled with concrete.

In the tactical art of CAMP, surveillance cameras are transformed into annotation devices that allow displaced people to visually access spaces that they don't have physical access to. To make claims on land where the zoom function of the camera flips from being a technology of control into a technology of witnessing violence and injustice.

The Neighbour Before the House advances a politics of hospitality, articulated as an infrastructural challenge that interrogates who is granted entry, visibility, and access.

And how parasitism may be a mode of inhabiting and challenging how the host-guest relationship is politically skewed in the context of Jerusalem.

Laura Marks, who we will hear shortly, suggests that in a world of hypermedia, there's always a danger of the image becoming flattened to information. And nothing illustrates this better than CCTV cameras that record millions and millions of hours of footage only to be activated as legal evidence or as controlled technology.

Images, however, retain an enigmatic quality that resists full decoding or subsumption to the regime of information.

While information unfolds truthfully and transparently, Laura Marks suggests that images unfold enigmatically. They open up spaces of interpretation, affect, and multiple meanings. And in many of CAMP's work, images emerge from information infrastructures like CCTV systems and surveillance networks.

And yet, through their creative interventions in works such as The Neighbor Before the House or Bombay Tilts Down, these images refuse to be confined to cold instrumental functions and instead unfold as complex layers of human experience beneath the surface of technological mediation.

The modernist writer Guy Davenport once famously asserted, "every force evolves a form".

If technology is the dominant force of our time, developing a form adequate to confronting the force of technological control becomes one of the urgent imperatives of artistic practice. And CAMP's subversive grammar of media embodies this by continuously experimenting with forms that expand the expressive vocabulary of politics and aesthetics, using sensory extensions and interventions to probe and challenge the infrastructures of surveillance capitalism, thus opening out new possibilities of visibility, agency and resistance.

And in this context, Jordan Schonig's argument that the study of film has to be supplanted by the study of moving images gain salience. As technological apparatus become, which are responsible for cinematic motion, become more and more diverse and mechanically illegible, the task of accounting for the area of experiences afforded by cinematic motion takes on a new kind of urgency.

Surveillance cameras, for instance, parasite cinematic functions such as the zoom, tilt, pan, operationalizing them for regimes of monitoring and control. Cinema, in turn, needs to parasite back to appropriate the technological potential of surveillance optics in order to reconfigure the aesthetic, affective and political valence.

Schonig's examples of cinematic motion include an array of movements that can be found in surveillance cameras. Contingent motion - that captures unpredictable movements such as the fluttering leaves, swirling dust and rippling water.

Durational metamorphosis - shows slow, gradual transformations such as shifting clouds or changing light.

Five.

Spatial unfurling - uses camera techniques to emphasize changing space over physical movement. CAMP's practice and politics takes up this challenge, demonstrating how the politics of the image is inseparable from infrastructural politics.

From the negotiation of control to the creation of channels of escape, in parasiting the technological operations of surveillance optics, CAMP reworks cinematic motion as a technique of counter aesthetics where infrastructural capture is both exposed and strategically rerouted.

CAMP in many ways explores the expressive affordances of this networked world, experimenting with how the aesthetics of contingent motion, durational metamorphosis, gesture and spatial unfolding in the context of surveillance can be differently deployed.

Following Jacques Ranciere's proposition of politics as a distribution of the sensible, we can understand infrastructure as an emissary of politics insofar as it is a system that structures the distribution of the sensible.

A way of organizing who can sense what, how and when. Ranciere argues that politics is tied up with reorienting people's perceptual spaces and sensory experience.

As he writes, politics is first and foremost a way of framing among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience.

In that sense, the parasite then is the mode that produces a dissonance between visibility as political configuration and disruption as transformation. It reorganizes these distributions to make visible what infrastructure tries to keep invisible.

It renders sayable what infrastructure tries to render mute.

It reframes not just the scene but the sensorium of infrastructure. CAMP's infrastructural poetics returns in a way us to Ranciere's insights but through rooftop cinemas, pirated databases, tangled wires, hacked systems and the slow tilts of their media.

I had a section where I was going to try to connect between Michel Serres' idea of the parasite and Ranciere's idea of the distribution of the sensible. But in the interest of time, what I will do instead is to go to my conclusion.

The context of doing public art interventions in India and elsewhere is shaped by two persistent obstacles, access and infrastructure.

These constraints often result in a way in a paralysis of critical thinking and imagination, limiting the possibilities of engagement and transformation.

And to appreciate in many ways the aesthetic stakes of CAMP's practice within such a context, I turn to one of my favorite readings of a myth.

This is Italo Calvino's reading of the Perseus myth in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Where one of the virtues that he advocates for the next millennium is Lightness. And the myth that he reads or rereads is Perseus.

Perseus has to slay the Medusa.

And the curse of the Medusa is that if you look at the Medusa directly, you'll be turned to stone.

A petrification in a way by an overbearing reality, a condition that we all live under at the moment. So what does Perseus do? Perseus slays the Medusa through the lightest of things.

Winged shoes, a shield that becomes a mirror in which you look at the image not directly, but indirectly.

And from that debris of the slain Medusa, you also have from the form the birth of Pegasus, the winged horse, another form of lightness. The heavy infrastructure of media, its vast scale opacity and entanglement with power, risks petrifying us, immobilizing perception and agency through its sheer immensity.

To confront this without being turned to stone, we require tools of lightness, an agile politics and a playful irreverence ever attuned to the hidden currents beneath our wired world. And this is what will allow us to navigate, reflect and reimagine these systems without being subsumed by them.

CAMP confronts the Medusa of media, not through didacticism, but by donning the winged shoes of technical appropriation, the mirror shields of poetic transformation.

Their tools, whether a crank, a hacked TV feed or a CCTV camera, slips through the heavy petrification of infrastructure, using the lightest of things, wire, image, signal, to engage the weightiest of structures.

The entanglement of infrastructure and media becomes the condition of possibility for artistic appropriation that generates a certain lightness, one that we might call freedom, beauty or truth.

These, I would suggest, are the gifts that CAMP's work offers to us.

And as a return gift of gratitude, I offer you an image.

And this is an image from Jia Zhangke's film, Still Life, which is set in the context of the demolition brought about by the Three Gorges Dam. And the film is a starkly realist representation of images of buildings earmarked for demolition.

One after the other, after the other, after the other. But in the middle of the film, in the middle of this kind of realist nightmare, there is a magical moment. It's a magic realist moment where one of the buildings at night transforms itself into some kind of a UFO, refusing to be demolished and just flies away through an ascending lightness.

It's been extremely inspiring, as a friend, interlocutor, and as a fan, to follow CAMP's journey across two decades.

And as we dive deeper into an era shadowed by greater uncertainty, where artificial intelligence merges into the structures of surveillance, I can only await with excitement the next iteration of CAMP's innovative parasitic practice.

Thank you.

Thank you, Lawrence, for that stirring presentation and your discussion of CAMP's infrastructural interventions and politics of access. I promise we will return to the parasitic.

Our next speaker is Erika Balsom, who specializes in the study of artist's moving image practices. A subject on which she has authored numerous essays and four books, including After Uniqueness, A History of Film and Video in Circulation.

She is a reader in film and media studies at King's College London.

And with Hella Peleg, she co-curated the landmark exhibition, "No Master Territories, Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image", which began at the HKW in Berlin and will travel to Oslo next year.

Erika's alliteratively titled presentation, Parasite Pirate Plumber will explore this trio of marginal figures in relation to CAMP's film From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf and other aspects of that.

Erika Balsom

Thank you, Rattan.

It's wonderful to be here today.

When I was first starting to think about preparing these remarks, I looked back at an interview that I did with Shaina Anand in 2014 on the occasion of CAMP's participant in the Berlin Documentary Forum 3. And in this interview, I came across a statement that immediately I knew it was the way to organize my ideas for today.

Shaina said, we like to work within systems as a parasite, pirate or plumber, all of whom produce new fictions.

So, parasite, pirate, plumber. What do these entities share? What different avenues do they open? I think we often hear about the artist as ethnographer, the artist as historian, maybe the artist as director, but these are all relatively elite professions.

And Shaina's comment, I would say, evokes a different imaginary or maybe different imaginaries in the plural.

All of them are bound to a kind of marginality.

We have three vivid figures, each with its own world. The parasite, to my mind at least, I first think of a kind of non-human realm of icky microorganisms, an ecosystem of creatures who are living off of or from others possibly, but not necessarily causing harm in doing so.

The pirate pulls us in at least two directions, both associated with a kind of theft. We have highly mythologized, adventuresome bandits on the high seas.

And we have internet users who promiscuously circulate files in defiance of intellectual property law.

And then there is the plumber, a kind of unglamorous labor who is called in to fix problems and who toils amidst water and waste.

So parasite, pirate, plumber. What I would like to do today is work through these figures to see what they might tell us primarily about From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, but also about CAMP's practice more generally.

So I will start with the figure that Shaina mentioned last, the plumber. In the interview, I asked her to elaborate on what she meant by this, because it struck me that this term wasn't quite as readily associated with artistic practice as the other two.

And she explained, He didn't engineer the building, so he is not the main player, but someone who has a key and who often comes in when there is a crisis.

So the plumber knows how the system works. He understands, or he or she or they understand the back end. The plumber is an expert in hydraulics, dealing in flows, blockages and leaks.

In order to work effectively, the plumber has to think in terms of the hole, including the least visible parts of that hole, and has to understand what happens when that system is put in motion.

And so I started to think about if this could offer us a way into thinking about what Video After Video might mean.

I would say in the early years of theorizing video, we find claims for its liveness, for its narcissism, for how it can create a closed circuit loop, and of course for its affiliation from television.

But what happens when smaller and smaller cameras become more and more widely available? What happens when what is not at stake is a single camera, but in fact many linked together in flows of electronic communication? What happens when these networks are used both in the surveillance, administration and management of populations, and by those very same populations in acts of surveillance, sociality and self-documentation? Well, when all of this occurs, we might be in the age of "Video After Video", a time when democratizing control or dystopian control and democratizing access stand side by side.

In this moment, video might be narcissistic, but it's perhaps more likely that it will involve a kind of relation to alterity.

It might seem extremely normal to talk about video in this way here at MoMA because it was such an important part of Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo's exhibition Signal.

And they open their catalog essay like this video is everywhere and nowhere at once. It's around us as signals and waves and data flows, but it remains ephemeral, shape-shifting, endlessly dispersed and dislocated.

So we should not think of video then as a single material or object or a single technological device.

We should not think about it only in terms of its representational capacities, but as something diffuse and something that is inherently bound to circulation.

That potentiality is there from video's earliest days, but I think the idea of Video After Video asks us to think about whether there has been more recently a kind of rupture that has to do with video becoming ubiquitous and quotidian.

It suggests that video is subject to mutation and also might lack self-identity.

And I would just as a side note say that in this regard, we see an echo of the way that the very name CAMP also is lacking in self-identity and is something that mutates as the letters are taken to stand for lots of different words.

So these transformations in video's technical character and its widespread uses mean that the possibilities for artistic intervention are transformed.

Rather than the looping back of Nancy Holt's boomerang, we might instead think about a different diagram, an intricate arrangement of pipes, pumps, reservoirs and valves that are regulating the flow, storage and disposal of moving images across space and time.

So a complex infrastructure.

The plumber thinks in terms of this system. The plumber knows that the age of video after video demands thinking about the moving image in relation to two different kinds of reproducibility.

There's the matter of how the image reproduces the profilmic real, but also the matter of how that image is then able to circulate across networks.

And this is an idea of the double reproducibility of the moving image that I think we see immediately at the beginning of From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf when we are told that it is "a film based on actual events".

So the image is somehow documenting reality.

But then a second later, there's an addition of a second line of text, "a film based on actual events - and videos of actual events".

So there we are in a different realm, a question of the replication of images via technical devices, dispersion, dislocation and multiple perspectives reign in this film shot by 13 different named cinematographers, as well as we are told in the credits, a further unspecified number of anonymous creators of music videos across many boats and many years.

So unlike Bombay Tilts Down, and Khirkeeyaan, From From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf is not explicitly bound to CCTV technologies.

And yet in this genesis from so many different cameras in its radically distributed visuality, it too depends on an idea of the proliferation of electronic eyes and on an employment of the moving image happening very far from the culture industry.

So part two, pirate.

The sailors who appear in From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf are navigating seas in which piracy occurs.

But that's maybe not the most productive way to think about this work in relation to piracy.

Through this double figure, the maritime circulation depicted in the film meets ways with the world of image circulation that makes possible its production.

Both are understood in their materiality and also in their challenge to authority.

This is a film of obstinate materiality of water and fire, of cars and boxes and sacks, of wood and paint and rope, of dirt and humans and animals, but also of pixels and glitches and sensors and storage memory.

More than 90% of the world's trade occurs on water.

And yet I would say when we most often think about global circulation, we think about dematerialized flows of finance, capital, of information, or of images.

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf pulls the viewer down into the world of obdurate matter. And importantly, through its varied image textures, it insists that images too are things in this world.

The pirate is a disruptor. One who through this disruption reveals and contests the logic of the system.

So for both the maritime robber and for the one who traffics in images or information in defiance of copyright, nothing less than the regime of private property, that foundation of the capitalist system, is under attack.

And if, as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously said, property is theft, then pirates are thieves stealing from thieves. And this maybe begins to account for the kind of romantic appeal and the romantic aura that surrounds them.

Piracy is ancient, but in its informatic form, it's an especially contemporary phenomenon.

So Adrian Johns has said, ours is supposed to be an age of information, even an information revolution. Yet it suddenly seems as though the enemies of intellectual property are swarming everywhere.

I would say to some extent, CAMP align themselves with these enemies in the spirit of radical access.

There is very much a belief in an image commons that animates their practice in their work building online archives like Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, and in making their unedited footage available there.

I would say this is especially notable given the development of their practice within a period that has seen immense control over the circulation of images, both in mass culture and by artists.

Images have never been as free as they are today. They have also never been as controlled as they are today.

And in this period, the circulation of artists moving image work has been very significantly restricted, often out of concerns that the integrity of the work will suffer if it is seen in less than ideal circumstances, but sometimes also for market driven reasons.

So while most artists have taken the path of control, CAMP have really held fast to the radical possibilities of democratization that reside in the reproducibility of the moving image, which is something I think that connects their work to a long and very vital history of radical forms of practice that challenge the values of authenticity and uniqueness that prevail within the art system.

This is an attitude that is very present in From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf in that the film is predicated on the collection and recirculation of images made largely by the cinematographer sailors and then organized by the artists in dialogue with their own footage.

Ownership here becomes scrambled, authorship becomes complicated.

Declining the label of found footage, that long-standing genre of avant-garde filmmaking, Ashok Sukumaran has noted that these images are not found, but in fact sought out.

And yet the film really decisively abandons any attempt at specifying the provenance of individual shots, such that a range of perspectives are woven together in a patchwork of different locations, experiences and image resolutions.

And so in this regard we might say that the film takes the sea not only as subject matter, but also as method. There's a kind of liquid flow that transgresses boundaries that are typically enforced, such as who is the author or who is not the author of a given image.

And so in a very loose sense we might say that these are pirated images of locations in which pirates operate.

The film was begun in 2009. This is the year of the publication of Hito Steyerl's "In Defense of the Poor Image".

Online piracy plays a very important role in this essay, one that has an essay that has been rehearsed so many times that I probably don't need to do it again here.

Furthermore, Ashok has expressed his lack of agreement with the term of the poor image, seeing it as re-inscribing a problematic class hierarchy of images at the top of which would sit the high resolution spectacle of dominant cinema.

So you have to forgive me Ashok for mentioning it again right now.

But I did want to bring it up because I would say that in 2025 the value of this text perhaps has changed from the moment of its initial publication.

For me at least today the value of this text is primarily in its description of a precise historical moment, one that is no longer our own.

But one that is the moment in which From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf was first begun.

And this was the time when an intensely compressed pixelated image figured as the visual sign of a novel mode of image production, the cell phone camera.

And so what flexibility of capture and ease of copying these devices possessed as affordances, they had the limitation of image resolution.

In 1979, in a radically different context, Rosalind Krauss talked about the grid in painting as anti-natural, anti-mimetic, anti-real.

She said it's what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.

So when we see the pixel grid assert itself so strongly in these gorgeous painterly low definition images of From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, carving the fluidity of the sea into all of these jagged blocks, we might say the same thing occurs.

An anti-real grid in which art turns its back on nature and toward the affordances and limitations of new forms of image capture.

But if we accept that idea, we also have to accept that a kind of tension arises because the low definition image in this period is also very closely associated with authenticity and contingency with a kind of claim on reality.

So the low definition images of From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf for me hover in this interesting space of uncertainty and very much speak to how digital imaging technologies in this period are associated on the one hand with new forms of capture that produce intense reality effects.

And on the other hand with a kind of attenuation of referentiality that puts pressure on photorealism and pushes toward abstraction.

Last part, the parasite sort of picking up a little bit from the last talk.

So the parasite is a relational figure.

Michel Serres writes that it brings the system's balance or the distribution of energy into fluctuation.

It irritates it, it infects it.

The parasite knows that there is no outside. It's characterized by enmeshment, dependence, or what Anna Watkins Fisher has called an intimate cohabitation with the host.

We hear a lot today, I think, about Audre Lorde's ideas that it's impossible to dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.

I think this is a really excellent idea in many contexts. It helps me think, for instance, what's wrong with a film like Barbie, a film that is like From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf - a musical, but is different from it in basically every other way.

But the parasite offers a way of thinking that is very different from Lorde's idea. It offers us a way of thinking about what it might mean to chip away from the interior of a system that can seem totalizing but maybe isn't.

The moving image in all of its forms is a profoundly non-innocent medium. It's intimately complicit with colonialism, racism, extractivism, various other forms of domination and degradation.

It's a key vehicle of algorithmic governmentality. It's a master's tool.

But the parasite knows that the way out is the way through. And so this might be, for instance, why CAMP looks so often to CCTV technologies, but it might help us to think more generally about why the moving image is their preferred format of choice.

We could also deem parasitical those forms of artistic practice that appropriate or repurpose existing materials.

Before it was used as a term in biology, the parasite was a social phenomenon. It referred to a guest invited to sit at a table next to a host of a higher social position.

So the parasite in this context doesn't cause harm, but it draws on the resources of the host by existing in relation or by staying nearby.

And by choosing the word nearby, I'm sort of purposely invoking a guiding principle of Trinh T. Min-ha's counter ethnographic practice.

We might say that From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf stays nearby or sits alongside the cinematographer sailors.

It's a work of participatory documentary. That's an ethnographic form with a long history and also a very contested one.

It's often associated with attempts to overcome the power asymmetry between filmmaker and subject. The idea there is that handing over the camera will give the subject the opportunity to represent themselves.

And we see this in From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf with the sailors filming as they like, commenting on how they want to shoot and what they want to do. But participatory documentary has also been very contested.

Pooja Rangan has noted, for instance, that it's often associated with an attempt to give voice to the voiceless that we should be skeptical of.

I would say that From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf participates in this lineage of participatory documentary while dodging the problem that Rangan identifies. It does not give voice to the sailors. It does not speak about them.

It stays alongside them. It stays nearby, re-presenting their images, crucially without much explanation or commentary. And I see that modesty really there as a sort of ethical gesture.

I've already noted that the film's interest in materiality evokes the materiality of bodies and the materiality of media.

And I think we can say that the idea of the boat and the image as twin mediums of transport is something that puts the entire artwork in a reflexive light. Notably, its first two sequences raise the question of representation itself.

We see two men mugging for the camera, lip syncing to songs and re-enacting gestures from genre films. And we see them assembling, other people assembling a model boat, a kind of mise-en-abyme of the floating workplace.

So we have here two opening sequences that are depictions of creative acts that highlight from the beginning, artifice and authorship.

The work, I think, really overcome this false binary of realism and reflexivity that has historically marked the boundary between documentary and the avant-garde. But it is a boundary, I would say, that is increasingly wonderfully blurred in practices such as CAMP's.

Thank you, Erika.

Our next presenter is Debashree Mukherjee, who is the author of "Bombay Hustle, Making Movies in a Colonial City", and the editor of "Bombay Talkies, An Unseen History of Indian Cinema".

She is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, where she also co-directs the Center for Comparative Media.

Debashree is currently working on a media history of South Asian indentured migration and plantation modernity from the 1830s onward.

In today's presentation, Debashree will think with Bombay Tilts Down from 2022 to examine how CAMP's latest work gestures towards what she terms monsoonal time, citational intimacies, and the recursive dance between power and people.

Please join me in welcoming Debashree.

Debashree Mukherjee. Okay, so very bright lights.

Thank you, mainly I mean, first of all to Stuart, and Rattan, and everyone at MoMA, for inviting me to think with CAMP, artists, friends that I've known and collaborated with in very minuscule capacities over the years, years, but a real joy to see the latest work here.

So I'll be talking a bit today about Bombay Tilts Down.

Debashree Mukherjee

So we'll get at some point to this idea of Tilt Down Post-humanism.

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sunset. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation never quite fits the sight.

Now these words are the opening lines of John Berger's classic text, "Ways of Seeing" from 1972.

He continues, "soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen."

So it is within this dialectic of seeing and being seen that I want to place my remarks today.

Last week I re-entered the United States after a month of panic over the deportations of academics.

I breezed through immigration at JFK simply by having my face scanned at Global Entry. No passport was handed over. No questions were asked. I had chosen this route as an added layer of security for myself.

I don't advise it for everyone, but it worked for me. Now even three months ago, I would have considered any biometric capture of my face an absolute endangerment to self. Things have changed.

It is no longer possible to imagine an outside to a world of digital surveillance, be it optical or sonic. Most of humanity does not have the privilege of refusing video capture. The watchful camera is everywhere, and to be seen by the camera is quite frankly the price of admission.

When we think about the conditions of our existence today, how to survive in this world, we must ask how we might rethink, reuse, appropriate, and reorient the camera. This is one of the central questions confronted by CAMP over their many long years of collaborative practice, and today I'm going to focus on their most recent work, Bombay Tilts Down

Bombay Tilts Down is an ode to Bombay City, written in a form that the city knows most intuitively through a self-reflexive camera.

Mumbai has a long history of cultural representation. It has been romanticized and berated, disavowed, and embraced again and again in poetry, prose, painting, and most iconically, I think, in cinema.

This is a city that loves the camera, and the camera is irresistibly drawn to it.

Bombay's popular cinema of the long 20th century was hopelessly entangled with the city in a turbulent affair that was quite melodramatic, yes, but also often postmodern, in what I want to call its citational intimacies, it's obsession with it's own archive of images.

And this is just for the fans in the room.

If cinema is an archive of the city, the city too is an archive of cinema.

Bombay Tilts Down illustrates this perfectly as the camera looks out at places that are overlaid with cultural memory.

Consider one of the opening sites in the installation, the Haji Ali Dargah, shrine of a 15th century Sufi traveler.

One could view this opening as a cliché of filmic Bombay, laid out in a panoramic view, and yet there is a difference between cliché and citational intimacy.

Soon, a dramatic voice on the soundtrack declares that the city is dead. Another voice calls out, "hartaal", strike. Many of us who have been schooled in Bombay cinema instantly recognize this voice and the citation.

It is Amitabh Bachchan in Coolie. This is when he's saying "hartaal!". There are many playful densities in Bombay Tilts Down. And you may or may not recall that the film Coolie ends with a climactic, highly overwrought scene shot at the Haji Ali shrine.

So cliché turns into a citational intimacy, a very playful familiarity with the city that is learned through images.

The caption and the credit text in Bombay Tilts Down tells us that the video was shot from a single point over the duration of two months. What does it mean to shoot from a single point? Does the camera stare fixedly straight ahead, come rain or shine? Far from it.

Camp positions a China-made generic CCTV camera on top of a 35-story building in South Mumbai and tilts it down. What this means is that the body of the camera doesn't physically move, but it swivels up and down and often even pans left and right, but from a single point.

Now the aerial view or the view from the sky has a very long genealogy and many over-determined meanings.

The God's eye view of Judeo-Christian iconography, the all-possessing eye of an anthropocentric Renaissance vision, the panoptic gaze of a carceral modern state, the reconnaissance eye of military intelligence.

So we understand that the view from the sky is one that can see more than humanly possible, and this view grants us perhaps superhuman omniscience, where total seeing is total knowing.

This is a kind of epistemic arrogance, and it is satirized, and I'm going back to another Bombay film from 1983, satirized in the film Jaane Bhee do Yaro . And these are the annotated versions of the film from CAMP's Indiancine.ma.

Two oily capitalists view Bombay from a construction elevator. They are strategizing about how to clear slums and raise skyscrapers. These slums are located on prime real estate, but they are not visible from the ground.

But from the air, they announce themselves as pure cash.

Main achi hun ghabrao nako. (How do I go back? Okay, so there was an error).

At the same time, the filmmaker's camera, also positioned in the sky, becomes a tool to expose this greed, an investigative apparatus that can unravel the will to mastery.

The camera is trained on a scene of crime, and it is intent on exposure.
[as WB points out, the crime scene is always deserted. That is, by the time a place turns into a crime scene and is examined, photographed, turned into a forensic laboratory, the crime has been committed, the criminals have vanished, and the investigators clear the space of bystanders to get on with their search for clues.]

Appropriating all that and counter this imagination of exposure, with a counter forensic imagination. Consider Beram, an intrepid detective in a novel written in Bombay in 1927. He is bent on locating the photographer who captured a blasphemous image of the sacred Parsi Tower of Silence from an airplane. Based on a real photographic event, the novel stages the quest for photographic justice as a detective cat and mouse game.

Recursively, Bombay's best self-representations play on this edge of this dialectics between transparency and exposure. The city as a crime scene invites a forensic imagination, one in which we can only reconstruct the crime in its wake, in its aftermath.

For Walter Benjamin, certain photographs expose the city as a scene of crime, initiating a phenomenology of urban space framed as a historical trial. I'm just going to try this again.

So photographs such as this, - this is the famous Atget photograph - that Benjamin talks about, where the city is uncannily empty of people and faces and announces itself as a scene of crime.

The city seen in Bombay Tilts Down is a crime scene too, but the crime is ongoing and the scene is rather crowded.

The mills are shut and the capitalists are exercising in their terrace gardens.

The tallest building will remain unfinished because it is mired in illegality.

The shrine of the learned Haji can no longer be seen from the road. It is covered over by construction scaffolding. And this is during the pandemic. This is a city that was reclaimed from the ocean by technocrats and bankers, and that hubris might never really lose its grip on Bombay.

The forensic imagination is appropriate for this urban palimpsest. Layers and layers of history and geology. The epic ongoing struggle between land and sea. The waves of migrants and other itinerants.

The unhoused and the underemployed. There is a deep time coded into the spatial landscape and it is much more than human.

CAMP's use of the CCTV camera, however, is not forensic, I'd say, nor is it exactly counter-forensic. Both these concepts and methods have been pushed to their limit in the last two years as we have watched a live stream genocide on our screens.

How much more evidence do we need? What else will the camera uncover? Forensics has a deep faith in the techno-modern, a futurist conviction in the ability of the kino eye to see a verifiable truth. Its genealogy of use has notoriously been in scaffolding carceral regimes, where identification and tagging must precede criminalization and incarceration.

The camera apparatus, the computer software, these are privileged as scientific and objective tools. Is it possible to grab this forensic faith in technology and reverse its case? Can a counter-forensic method avoid the cold clinical investigation of the crime scene that reduces all experience into data? In a recent issue of the journal World Records, Laliv Melamed and Pooja Rangan interview the Al-Haq Forensic Architecture Investigative Unit and Rachel Nelson to discuss the tensions between forensics and memory, evidence and testimony.

For Rachel Nelson, technology cannot be accorded primacy over memory. Testimony can never be abandoned. But the problem is not just the tools in themselves, but rather the hierarchization of evidentiary sites and methods.

Bombay is not Gaza, but CAMP has been thinking with Palestine for a very long time. And you got a glimpse of that in Lawrence Liang's presentation. More than a decade ago, Shaina Anand's film, The Neighbour Before the House, reoriented the CCTV camera to watch the watchers.

Eight Palestinian families in East Jerusalem train a CCTV camera on tourists, on the IDF, on homes that were once theirs.

They speak over the footage, remembering material spaces as palimpsests of memory, now invisible to the camera. And the edited film is at once testimony and evidence, or shall we say annotation and evidence.

Bombay Tilts Down does something similar in form. It mixes CCTV vision with decades of revolutionary poetry, popular film references, and romantic song.

The sensorium that emerges is neither forensic nor counter-forensic, but something else. Rachel Nelson suggests that, “art makes it possible to engage the evidence from a position of immersion rather than evaluation.”

Immersion is only possible when an intense sensory environment is produced, and its main address is aesthetic. By aesthetic, I do not mean the pleasurable of the beautiful. I refer instead to the aesthetic as experience, a sensory encounter with a work or object that calls out to you on the basis of formal properties, such as shape and color, sound and scale, as well as the object's history of representation, which conditions what many might suppose would be an immediate sensory response, but it is always already mediated.

Bombay Tilts Down is massive as a work and loud. Your body throbs with the beats of the dubstep soundtrack. To stay in that space is to be thrilled and overwhelmed by the sensorial surround. It is immersive, it is embodied, and it is saturated with testimony and all the citation intimacies that are gestured towards.

And that's where I think the artwork escapes the genealogies of the forensic imagination.

Yes, this is a landscape of crime, but listen, there are people here who sing their stories in loud voices. Main achhi hoon, ghabrao nako

I am well, don't worry.

So I was meant to play that very powerful moment, but it's not.

You will, you will watch it tonight.

Now, I just don't want to eat into time ...

Yeah, but it's not...

(Video plays)

Main achhi hoon, ghabrao nako

achhi hoon, ghabrao nako

Okay.

Thank you for this collective effort here.

Okay. Now, CAMP describes this work as a city symphony, and the invocation of this genealogy is quite striking. The city symphony film of the 1920s emerged at a high moment of avant-garde artistic experimentation, when the lure of the city was still felt as a palpable promise.

The city was technology, and what better way to theorize this than through the camera? If Dziga Vertov took the keener eye into the realm of futurist cyborg vision, Walter Ruttmann invoked the rhythm of factory time and the tempo of modern technological life.

Bombay Tilts Down is also edited to the rhythm of the industrial city, where the city awakes to the sound of the siren that calls workers to the mill.

But it carries many other rhythms and temporalities. There is the workday, but also the seasonal. We see time-lapse shots of clouds passing and erupting in rain as ships enter and leave the commercial waters along routes that are as old as the monsoon and the dhow.

There is a callback to From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, CAMP's previous feature that you heard about in Erika's presentation, a film that travels through the Western Indian Ocean with dhow workers, sailors in the monsoonal world of maritime labour.

But Bombay Tilts Down is also marked by the rains that streak the lens and drench the architecture. There is no escaping the wetness of this coastal place and the rain clouds. In its recursivity, the monsoon offers another model for thinking the flow of time and history, as cyclical, as tidal in its ebbs and flows, as perhaps a looping video.

Crucially, the monsoon also offers an alternative to the western genealogy of aerial vision that I outlined. Allow me to explain.

In the fifth century AD CE, a Sanskrit poem, Meghdutam, written by the poet Kalidas, inaugurated a new genre known as the messenger poem. An imaginative, indeed audacious flight of aesthetic fancy, Meghdutam,is a long message of yearning delivered to an unlikely messenger, a monsoon cloud.

The protagonist is an exiled yaksha, a magical creature who serves the god of wealth, King Kuber. He has been banished from his homeland and he yearns for his wife. One day he sees a monsoon cloud and decides to enlist it to carry a message back home.

The cloud seems the perfect carrier to the yaksha. With its freedom of mobility, the cloud can bridge the distance between lovers. The yaksha anticipates this aerial journey and the aerial vision of the monsoon cloud.

And he describes his whole journey in anticipation. Floating over mountains and farmland, watching children swim in streams, pilgrims take dips in holy rivers.

The gaze here is of the lover, distant but longing, his vision aided by a cloud. The cloud doesn't record any of its sights, nor does it report what it sees to some punitive authority. The cloud merely delivers a message to the beloved.

Connected to this cultural genealogy of the all-seeing monsoon cloud messenger is the way in which the monsoon has been an aesthetic carrier of erotic meaning for centuries in South Asia. There are hundreds of songs and paintings that construct the monsoon as a time for lovers.

In this erotic artistic repertoire, desire is often predicated on the fact of separation.

Let us not forget that the lover in Meghdutam is in exile. He longs for return, but his movement is curtailed.

The dream of mobility is strongest for those rendered immobile. In a city of migrants and workers, there is both movement and stuckness. To escape the surveillance of family and the state. To love freely beyond religion or caste.

To build a home of one's own. To simply have a room of one's own. These are aspirations of mobility that swirl in the space between the sky and the land.

There is a lot of movement in Bombay Tilts Down. Not just the camera swivelling and tilting, but also the clouds, traffic, the sun, construction cranes. Most exciting of all movements is a very simple technical conceit of this video work.

The camera tilts down. The vertical city breaks free from the sky and is pulled down to earth. There is a gravitational pull here that resists the God's eye view.

Individual onlookers stare back at the camera. Some look annoyed. Some smile. Some even raise their fists in a gesture of mutual recognition.

These gestures are not merely acts of a choreographed wishful thinking. Many of these people are interlocutors and participants in the project. Those who watched the camera for weeks on end. That understood its rhythms.

Who befriended the crew and saw them as allies. Those who actively sent commands to the camera via cell phones and computers. And I'm almost done.

At the heart of CAMP's CCTV work is the understanding that the camera is not ontologically fixed in its meanings, but socially and elementally alive. CAMP's practice refuses the colonial carceral genealogies of cameras to plot new imaginaries and futures.

Recall my Berger quote from the beginning. "Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen". But Berger doesn't stop with an eerie suggestion of surveillance. He goes on.

"The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of a visible world." This is a powerful statement. Existence, presence, survivance. How to prove this to ourselves.

How to prove to you that I am still here. Well, you can look back at me, your eye combining with mine. Between the camera, the city, the people, the crew, CAMP has modeled a practice, now we get to it, that one might call Tilt=Down post-humanism.

I am drawing here on Paul Gilroy's work on off-shore humanism where he goes back to a history of shipwrecks as spectacles of disaster to ask if there are other ways of witnessing a crime, of watching a crisis, of looking at the other.

Gilroy maintains that it is up to us as spectators to “choose [how] we perceive the vital, vulnerable cargo of this or other wrecked boats.” Gilroy finds an opportunity here for “reciprocal humanity,” an “off-shore humanism” that is possible when we, the spectators, find our own selves adrift from the solid certainties of land.

In Bombay Tilts Down, I wager that we see a tilt down post-humanism. In the assemblage of camera and human, architecture and air, there is a yearning to descend to the ground, to stand with the people, to rove into the sunset, to hitch a ride on a ship, to become a monsoon cloud, showing us that the camera is not just out there in the distance, but here with us, something that we can drag down, we can smash, or some device through which we can proclaim to the world that: I am.

I'll end with that. Thank you.

To round out this afternoon's session, we have our final presenter who will speak back from the ground of Bombay, as well I know. Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film historian and occasional art curator, in his words. Among his many books, essays, and exhibitions are the landmark "Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema:, which he co-edited with Paul Willemen in 1994, and the Bombay-Mumbai section of the Century City Exhibition at the opening of Tate Modern in 2001, which he co-curated with Geeta Kapoor.

In today's talk, titled Tilting Down with CAMP, Ashish will also use Bombay Tilts Down to sketch out a history of the city that saw the practice of cinema, poetry, and performance move alongside political movements, often involving foundational rights to speech, shelter, and livelihood.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha

So thank you to various people who made it happen, and who also sort of made it possible for me to be here with you. As Rattan points out, I am a film historian, and I do describe myself as such. That is very much on my CV.

But I'm actually here for a rather different reason. It has been as a film historian primarily that I've been associated with CAMP for the past decade, and you know, as along with Lawrence and others, as part of the Indiancine.ma project that we all have put together.

But I'm here for a rather different reason with somewhat different qualification, which is that I grew up at a particularly fervid moment in Bombay's history, the 1970s and the 1980s. I was a journalist at that time, and doing a lot of other things.

And as a result, I think I actually was an eyewitness participant, something like a frontline observer, to a foundational transformation that took place in that particular city's history at that particular moment in time.

And I say moment, it's not a moment, it's more like two decades or so, which I think forms a really important and significant sort of framework within which Bombay Tilts Down in particular needs to be understood.

I'm going to be presenting this in three parts. In the first part, I'm going to be talking about a very specific Bombay phenomenon at that point of time, when there was a convergence, I want to suggest, of aesthetics, in particular film aesthetics, but not only film, with that of law and political history.

It's a very unique kind of moment when this thing happened. And in my view, specific to that particular city, a practice of art making in the broadest sense that occurred amidst massive political transformations and had an impact on those political transformations.

It's not often that art can make that sort of claim.

Having made that first formulation, the second, I'm going to actually define some of the aesthetic interventions that occurred at that time, which become important as a form, as a kind of visual vocabulary within which you can understand what CAMP is doing and others in current, particularly documentary film practices are doing.

Where aesthetics really comes together within a framework of rights.

This connection is one that I want to make. And in this, we will actually trace very briefly, apologies for those of you who were here ...who were there yesterday when CAMP spoke, because it's some of what I'm going to say that overlaps with theirs.

A very short history of something like 50 years in which the rights of equality, the right to public space, to speech, and to livelihood, the foundational concepts in the history of, you know, within the fundamental rights structure of the Indian Constitution came to have a very Bombay significance.

This will be history as traced by CAMP itself through two previous works. One is the one that you saw yesterday, those of you were there, called Ghar Mein Sheher Hona translated in English as "if the city were to be in the home".

And the second is the CCTV Landscape from Lower Parel - 2017 performance inside the Phoenix Mills. We will talk a little bit about the Phoenix Mills phenomenon at that time - the multiplex during the Mami Film Festival in Bombay.

Some years ago, around 2007, I actually theorized on something that I described as territorial realism.

It is a concept. Territorial realism was a concept that I was trying to look at with, you know, specific to Bombay. And I had actually dedicated that concept of territorial realism to three people. The poet Namdeo Dhasal, the filmmaker Saeed Mirza, and the visual artist, you probably know Sudhir Patwardhan.

I had... this was the kind of art that I grew up with in late 70s, early 80s, mid 80s Bombay. This was actually crucial to it. Dalit poetry and the Dalit Panther movement, very much inspired by the Black Panther movement in the United States.

And a specific connection between a form of symbolic descriptive realism and specific movements in the areas of human rights, especially in the way several founding rights were at that time being formed, when it seemed to me that the aesthetic right to describe was something that was taken away from the state.

And a lot of what I have done over the, over my career, has been to actually theorize on realism as a form of state aesthetic, as actually a regulatory mechanism, the aesthetic counterpart, if you like, of the reasonable restrictions to free speech right. And an aesthetic structure behind which lay the censor board, behind which lay the courts and the police.

So we actually have a situation where the legality of, of what a text might mean, you know, is something that aesthetics is defined aesthetically within realism. And here you have a certain kind of, shall we say, counter realism, a battle over space that realism would directly reproduce.

On the left hand side is a poem called Kamatipura. Kamatipura is a place in Bombay, and the famous poetry that he did was called Golpitha" (गोलपिठा) . On the right hand side top is actually the, the, the photographer Sudharak Olwe, who did these photographs in, in some kind of a tribute to Namdev Dhasal.

Kamatipura is, you might say, the bourgeois interpretation is the red light district, that would be how it's talked about, but it's a very complicated neighborhood.

I'm describing this form of realism as a certain way in which artists, you know, took away from the state, the structure of authentication and into a strategy of survival through description. It sharply drew attention to the fact that illegitimate realism, subaltern realism, let's say realism from the streets, realism not endorsed by the state, often stood for the illegitimacy of citizenship.

Where the symbolic gesture moving alongside myriad forms of visibilization included official reports, journalistic reports, photography, documentary, and of course fiction film, which was the kind of realism with which people were, were being described.

This kind of political symbolic gesture derives its formal energy not from conventional forms of radical art with which we are probably familiar across the planet, but rather from a somewhat specific history of spectatorial imbalance and anxiety arising from a legitimation crisis as I'm talking about it.

This is Dhasal again. The section is called "Illegitimacy and How to Own the City."

I mean own the city, I mean the ability to occupy the city in a certain kind of way. I mean this is a famous poem in which Dhasal actually described Bombay as his whore. It's my beloved whore. Now Dhasal has been accused very very legitimately perhaps of various languages of misogyny, but this is one way in which he does talk about occupation.

Another way of doing it would have been this lovely phrase by Raj Kapoor in Mr. 420, the film that I think we will speak a lot about in which I think CAMP references a lot where he says, I'll just quote this line in Hindi, that is "the key to the loot is now in my hands".

"Now watch everybody. Soon the whole city will be mine". I will own this particular city.

Hyper visible political action and numerous texts in the cinema and the visual arts functioning in direct tension with realist textuality encroaching upon the template of the state's own production of symbolic action.

And I mean encroach upon literally here of course, since the political underpinnings of encroachment often had to do with space. Bombay's political articulation of territory and the bounded realism policing that territory through various kinds of documents have been strident in drawing attention to the ambitions of realism also as a form of reclaiming space.

And when I say reclaiming space, I literally mean reclaiming space in the constitutional sense, in the sense in which article 15 of the constitution of India actually speaks of shops, public restaurants, hotels, places of public entertainment, wells, tanks, bathing huts, roads and places of public resort dedicated to the use of the general public.

If the ambitions of such territorial realism were any indication, it would appear that political realism would also test out every step of the way the rights that such territory embodied for the post-colonial denizen of that city.

A primary right that this particular variant of Bombay realism underpinned then was the concrete and cognizable right to shelter. Okay now shelter now becomes a very big issue.

To me personally, growing up at that time in Bombay, I think the two political events that are incredibly important, one was, and this is something we'll talk about, the slum evictions that took place in Mankhurdd and the move to Cheetah Camp in 1976.

Cheetah Camp was in a sense the rallying political slogan of 1976 in Bombay. And the second, more importantly, was the 1982 textile strike. The textile strike of the city went on for very long and it was seen to be, has been seen to be historically as a failure.

This is a little bit of an autobiography. I was actually working for an organization at that time called the Center for Education and Documentation, again also referred to in Ghar Mein Sheher Hona. And this is something that we had brought out, this is the 10th month fact sheet as we called it that we brought out at that time, also available in Pad.ma.

This was the time when a shift that takes place, you know, it was always the case that the whole textile industry that the city was part of and the kind of history of labor action that was associated with the city was always to do with land, land reclamation, construction, banking, insurance, shipping and finance.

But it has often been seen, and this is a very important shift I think that we see in CAMP's work, it has often been seen that the 1982 strike saw the end of working class agitations in their conventional sense, right? And a replacement of that kind of labor action with another kind of politics associated with shelter.

So this was a little bit of an autobiography and then there is another autobiographical thing I want to say which is there is a journalist, I used to work in Anand Bazar Patrika, where Olga Tellis was my immediate boss.

Olga Tellis, now incredibly famous for what comes to be known as the Pavement Dwellers Movement. This is Olga as she currently is in Ghar Mein Sheher Hona. This is Olga, also from Ghar Mein Sheher Hona- but as how I remembered her.

In 1985, when the right to shelter was equated with the fundamental right to life and livelihood, and this was associated with pavement dwellers, you know, the right of pavement dwellers to shelter was actually defended by the constitution of India.

These are the famous judgments that Justice Chandrachur at that time gave. It was an extreme position, it was not a position that many people could validly take which is the right of people to occupy pavements as a constitutional right.

It was contentious even at that point of time when many friends were on one side or the other side of this kind of debate. But I do think that whatever your position was, it was a Bombay argument. You know, I don't know that the right to shelter could be made as a constitutional right when it came to pavement dwellers anywhere else except Bombay.

And I think there was a certain history that arises when you shift away from the labor actions you're talking about pre the 1982 strike and into this kind of new political space.

Tilting down and tilting up.

On this, we have two images from Saeed Mirza's. On the left is Mohan Joshi Hazar Ho. Mohan Joshi is summoned. Mohan Joshi, please come to court. And Salim Langane Pe Mat Ro, Please Don't Cry for Salim the Lame.

On the left hand side are these two lovers who find their only place of intimacy on a rooftop where you actually get the chawls and you get some of the chimneys that you might associate very much with late 19th, early 20th, mid 20th century Bombay.

On the right hand side is Salim the Lumpen and behind him you're getting all these posters of dharnas and morchas and political action that's present.

It's important to note, I mean, I think this has been mentioned both in Debasree's presentation as well as earlier ones about about this idea of looking up and looking down. I think, as I was growing up at that time, that looking up the high buildings that you get, which is there in KA Abbas's Sheher aur Sapna, for example, is really what the imagination of the city was when you looked up.

This is, everybody recognizes this? Well, what's happened here is that Amitabh Bachchan, who was the son of this family of pavement dwellers, really speaking, arrives. Now he's a millionaire and he has bought a building in which his mother worked as a laborer and he is now going to give this building to her as a gift.

And he says, you know, this is where I come from. So this is the tilt up, you might say, that is very much associated with, I think, the politics of that time. The tilt down is something that is, in my view, more recent.

Now I know that there are long histories of looking down from on high. I mean, it goes back to the late 19th century when I think you talked about how there are hot air balloons that have images from the top and the 50s photographs of from taken from an aircraft.

But it's kind of interesting for me on the left hand side is is actually a very famous film called "Parel Lalbaug" in which this guy who lived in a chawl is now brought his girlfriend into one of the high rises and is looking down into the chawl and reminiscing about how he grew up as a child in that particular chawl.

On the right is a very interesting image. This is from Rahul Mehrotra and, okay, Rahul Mehrotra and Sharada Dvivedi's book "Bombay, the Cities Within" which is actually talking about the textile industry and talks about chawl.

What is of course not self-evident because by this time becomes normative is the fact that such an image could only have been taken from on high. You know, it was actually an image from above that was there below.

What I'll do now in this very brief time I already have exhausted my time is to really kind of quickly walk you through three moments in Bombay's history where I think that the nostalgia associated with the then and now that the textile strike creates but then when the kind of glorious history of the labor movement and now the not so glorious history if you like of working class of not working class really squatter agitations the three moments that are there in Ghar Mein Sheher Hona.

The three moments that that are there are there in Ghar Mein Sheher Hona are one is the emerge at the 50s. Okay, here's another image this is from Raghubir Singh again from top and bottom.

This is very important to I think a certain aesthetic structure that emerges associated with the with the with the high rise.

Raj Kapoor's Mr. 420 is something that those of you who were here yesterday will will know - this other extraordinary interpretation of the end of Mr. 420 as actually signalling the birth of what came to be known as the Janata colony which has a remarkable political history.

This is to do with movements that took place in the in the 1950s when when when you know there was an occupation that took place in - the Haji Ali place that was mentioned by by Debashree but a little bit close to that - in Samudra Mahal and opposite that the race course and that leads to the first evictions and also the first imagination of a poor people's colony as it were.

This I found really interesting but this is very much it's there inside the Ghar Mein Sheher Hona in fact if I'm not mistaken this is something that CAMP has actually reissued: a dissent note from the mid 50's about the problems of creating slums in the suburbs. I mean what what happens if you create slums. the nature of the annotations that are there it's a man called Mr. Barfiwala. Moving uh through to the 70s what what you get is a certain kind of political documentary as created by the state is which is trying to create a language for the the slum the you know what comes to be known as the slum people but they don't call them slum they actually try and speak of them as a certain category of the urban poor for whom certain kinds of housing have to be have to be created. Housing for the people in 1972 and the Burning Sun by Shastri in 73 are from the Films Division which are state documentaries. Then comes the emergency uh it's a big moment of time for me autobiographically and the Cheetah Camp eviction that that now takes place because and this is a very interesting story about how apparently I mean Simpreet Singh who was mentioned earlier, or rather mentioned yesterday I think a key collaborator of CAMP talks about a time when back in the early 50s I think three people Homi Bhabha J.R.D. Tata

and Raj Kapoor uh apparently met with the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and asked for land - and he gave all of them land in that same area adjacent to what would be Mankhurd - one came the RK studios one came the Bhabha atomic research center and of course the Tata institute of Social Sciences and now you have in the mid 70s actually an effort by the atomic energy commission to evict the the Janta Ghar uh the Janta colony in the name of modern science and modern technology. So that then leads to the Cheetah Camp (Janta Colony) eviction it also leads to actually the first arrival of independent documentary in the form of Anand Patwardhan's work which you get here "Waves of a Revolution" also mentioned in CAMP.

I'd mentioned Mr. 420 and you have a certain return of Mr. 420 once again in the character of K.A. Abbas, extensively referenced in CAMP's work as the man who wrote the Last Page in this tabloid weekly called Blitz. And here he's talking about a situation which is increasingly arising at that time in the post-emergency period that more or less suggests that Bombay is not a place for everybody. That you needed special rights and privileges to live in Bombay. A 'green card' was actually suggested to live in Bombay and and uh this is when... Abbas is taking on Antulay. Antulay would have to soon step down - here would be the the the one example of someone who actually had to leave on this.

Yet other kind of connections that are there - this is Justice Lentin who becomes a very important political figure - I mean some of the judgments that he had - and he in fact at that point of time had made a personal visit to a place that was back in Vile Parle which was going to be evicted and in Saeed Mirza's 'Mohan Joshi...' that visit by the judge - you see what's going on is actually re-enacted in the film. You get a certain set of how cinema then is talking to this kind of urban reality.

'Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron' already mentioned earlier but you have inside 'Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron' not only the first example of the tilt down but you have specific example references to the Kelkar committee which was one of the important committees that would be leading to separating out Bombay and the rights of people who wanted to live in Bombay, away from the rest of the country as it were. This was a very important incident in in CAMP's history as well because Simpreet Singh who was one of the key figures in what came to be known as the Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan - Save Your Home, Make Your Home agitation - where they used the Right to Information as a certain kind of political tool that led to an extremely controversial political development. The Adarsh Society case, about which more in just a moment and then I'm done... ...Which had led to the chief minister of India of Maharashtra having to step down.

In conclusion I want to mention what is probably the most important political development in the city's history in this time which has actually comes to be known as the SRA scam or the Slum Rehousing Scam. This is a scam in which I think again quoting CAMP, I think 22 crore rupees or I think two and a half billion dollars by current American standards of exchange were appropriated by a certain kind of a new builder lobby using the Floor Space Index (FSI) that would lead to the commercialization of what was slum property into commercial high-rise housing.

It's an extremely important political moment in the city's history and the country's history when social and economic rights are now reintroduced into the public domain. It's just that the rights that are associated with the poor are now being used by the rich, or the super rich. It's a kind of a transformation in which social and economic rights become something quite different from what you think they are supposed to be.

In 1996 actually there was an effort to try and... you know the Charles Correa Committee had tried to split the use of what was formerly mill land into three categories. One was public use, one was government use and one third for commercial use. But this actually subsequently led to what came to be known as the Transferable Development Rights (TDR) when in fact some of the the biggest high rise projects in the city are actually using Floor Space Index that is taken from slum dwellers who in turn are meant to be rehoused in slum rehouse... SRA's. And the Floor Space Index has actually become commercial value. So slumland is now being literally appropriated to create a new kind of high rise. On the right hand side up there is actually a judge's colony which is in fact available even now on Airbnb, I think. This whole thing is built on slumland, what is formerly slum. It is not actually slumland, it is slum land elsewhere which is being used to generate FSI that's become transferable.

To conclude then, I want to just mention two quotations. One from Shaina, and she says in Ghar Mein Shehar Hona, "So how do we read the city?"

"How do we read the city when what we see is never what it is and what it is is not what it was planned to be? The surface of an image elides it's history it's materiality." And Simpreet Singh who says, "One of the age-old arguments against slum dwellers has been that they are encroachers squatting on someone else's property. This time around they were a roadblock to the rapid transformation of a city as in Shanghai. If the legality of a structure was to be the test then it could be applied to everyone. Legality could apply to everyone. Illegality was the exclusive domain of slum dwellers."

My last image, and this is actually what also sort of sees the kind of shift that takes place between the relationship between cinema and the realities. Talking about the Hiranandani Complex, one of the most scandalous or controversial bits of housing that you get in a place called Powai in Bombay. Extensively again, referenced in Ghar Mein Shehar Hona and on the top is actually the same Hiranandani Complex in 'Slumdog Millionaire'.

My last image. It takes something to go back to that time when as you might remember the the supposed millionaire is inside and the squatters are outside, and they say that this particular pavement is particularly privileged because you can smell the aroma of the food that's cooked in the rich man's house. And you have to pay extra to be able to live in this in this piece of pavement.

So thank you very much

I invite all of our speakers up for some abbreviated discussion but nonetheless we want to save some time for conversation. Please join us.

Panel discussion: Lawrence Liang, Erika Balsom, Debashree Mukherjee, Ashish Rajadhyaksha

moderated by
Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, MoMA
Rattanamol Singh Johal, art historian and curator and former Assistant Director, International Program, MoMA

SC: Thank you all so much for these fantastic presentations. I think it's just an indication that this is not an event in which people are speaking about CAMP, but they're speaking with CAMP. I think you've all- many of you have been in dialogue with them in some cases for over a decade and it's extremely exciting to hear all of your presentations, thank you. Maybe because we are very limited on time so I just wanted to kind of cut to the chase with one question about reconciling this question of the parasitic with the insistence on being seen as Debashree sort of mentioned.

SC: And also one of the tactics that certainly came up in Signals which was some artists choosing to make work in which they disappear they remove themselves from the surveillance system, which is not in fact what's going on in CAMP's work. But I am very interested in particular in that image of the group of people raising their fists to the camera in Bombay Tilts Down and it happens in Khirkeeyaan too in which the artist Anita Dube actually appears as a sort of intervention within what is otherwise not you know not produced by actors at all but you know there are these figures who intervene in the system and it goes back to what Lawrence said at the very beginning that we were thinking about video as an environment to be hacked, which I thought was a really powerful phrase.

SC: So if we think of all three of the projects in this show as environments to be hacked, if each of you could maybe talk a little bit about what is at stake in that hacking and what kind of visibility is it producing? And how is that answering the question of what it means, you know, what is the role of the camera in this work as opposed to say the kino eye of Vertov, or the city as seen in Ruttmann? Because this is obviously a very different moment, a different kind of technology, and our cities are very different. But it would be great if you could each be very precise and thinking about you know what these optics are producing in this work.

LL: Age before beauty. There's a wonderful story that Wendy Doniger, the mythologist, tells. This is of James Thurber in school, where James Thurber is asked to look through a microscope, and he's supposed to look for a spider. And for whatever reason, he's just unable to. So he keeps turning the device and keeps turning, turning it, turning, to the point that he suddenly sees it. And he says 'now I see the spider'. But the teacher comes to him and says 'what you've done is turn it so much that you actually see your own eye', So that the microscope or the lens becomes a camera.

LL: There's something really beautiful about that in the way that we think about this question of what it means to be able to hack into systems. Because there is an incessant kind of a play involved, and a play that is built on a certain stubbornness. And if there is something that defines both Ashok and Shaina that would be stubbornness. There is a manner in which that incessant chipping away through acts of tinkering in ways that then allows for this flipping over. And I think that there is a riyaz involved in that. It's not something that is... that's light. It aims for lightness but it's something that actually involves in a manner, a kind of a discipline. And I think that what is it aiming for in terms of this idea of the relationship between you know the ontological aspect that Debashree has brought up on on the question of selfhood. Again going back to the Thurber story - all of these technologies have implicit within them the technology- the the possibilities on the one hand of subjectivation in which you're completely overwhelmed, but equally of exploring subjectivity. And I think it's that delicate balance between the two that a lot of the question of what the ethics of hacking into systems might consist of really becomes apparent, and also has artistic practice.

yeah i'll stop there...one could go on but...

EB: I mean I think to compare the moment of Vertov or the historical avant-garde to now I think there there's really a real utopian hope that cinema will open up realms of visibility that are not accessible to the human eye alone. In a way that is still absolutely present in CAMP's practice but I think that there's a reckoning with also the fact that these very same apparatuses are apparatuses of domination, the management of life and populations that is not there in that earlier moment. So this sort of very profound ambivalence about the role of moving image technologies I think is for me what makes CAMP's practice so rich. It's not about saying 'is this complicit?' or 'is this resistance?' It's about knowing that sometimes there is no way of even telling the difference between the two.

EB: And I think that this act of pointing back at the camera in Bombay Tilts Down is a good example of that, because as you say like these people do not escape capture. You know, there's a sort of inevitability that one will appear on CCTV apparatuses, one is caught up in the apparatus. The idea of pointing back has this long history of kind of returning the gaze as a resistant gesture, but in fact, if you return the gaze, you're still caught by the apparatus. You're still pictured. And so I think it's sort of moving outside of binaries that actually are not helpful for understanding our relationship to media today, and thinking always from a starting point of contamination and ambivalence.

SC: Just to quickly follow up also on the point you made earlier about the history of participatory documentary. I think particularly in something like Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, it's a completely different question, because again it's not found footage to your point, it is sought after. But the participation happens through footage that already existed. And so that participation becomes really complicated in a really interesting way. But then to participate in this image regime can actually be an act of resistance as much as enacting a sort of disappearance from it.

RSJ: I was just going to jump in and maybe direct this to Ashish and Debashree specifically, but as historians of Bombay, historians of cinema, to think a little bit about the interface and the exhibition. We have read these images you've brilliantly, in all of your papers, and I think one of the ways in which CAMP's work creates a situation for all of us to engage with these histories is through interfaces like pad.ma and indiancine.ma, but also through the format of the exhibition. Just to say a little bit about that kind of aesthetic experience that Debashree pointed to as well. And the possibilities for kind of counter forensic readings, I think perhaps we can reorient the episteme of the forensis here to perhaps the episteme of the annotational, if we might call it in CAMP's work, which both of you have kind of- all of you have engaged brilliantly. So maybe to to even step back from the specific images to the kind of principle of engagement, or principles of engagement with the practice.

DM: A very big question. So I'll try to bring some of these things together. What's really striking for me in getting to Bombay Tilts Down, which is the newest work for me that I hadn't really seen, is that it really brings to the fore so many of the practices of CAMP over the decades, but with this very for me exhilarating new kind of potential. And it really forced me to think about the aesthetic project. So the question of the space, the installation, being in that room as we will all be hopefully together tonight, it's part of that entire formal question. CAMP's practice to me is a very learned practice. Like there's multiple, multiple citations, not only to archive in history of cinema, the city, it's struggles with land and housing, but a whole lot of intellectual theorizing about debates, ethics, of cameras, politics of image and so on.

DM: But they do it with the lightness of touch, you'll see it in the in the work. So I think for me part of what I thought my mandate was, was to just tease out a little bit of this learned project and to show that this is really... because for me, what's different between the 1920s and today is - no longer does anyone I think who thinks seriously about media, think about media as the extensions of man, whether it's kino eye or whether it's a McLuhan kind of a thing. And for me the post-human move was also visible and important because we don't have that kind of a utopian faith I think any longer. And what happens in the coupling of human with machine, what is possible to do.

DM: I'm also increasingly finding it difficult to continue with vocabularies of resistance in the way we have. For me I think, recognition, mutuality, these are very very powerful things and I see them in... I see these things in their work. And I think being in that space, and not just watch a movie but watch an installation and sit there. There's something there. It's more than a triangulation of screen, viewer and subject. But there's a lot else going on.

AR: Yeah i'm still struggling with what to say. No I... you know.. I suppose maybe I'm being a little bit resistant to the idea that when you come and look at an artist or an art collective body of work that we all go to sit and now heap praise on them. I think that the point isn't really CAMP alone. I think that what's important about what they do is that they bring along with them a legacy, and that is what makes it really interesting for me. You're looking at, at least 50 years of work that precedes what they do which they claim as a legacy for where they are now. This is the important development, that you're there. And I would want then to heap praise on that legacy as much as on this specific practice.

AR: Here... you mentioned Century City, this was an exhibition that as as you said in the introduction, I was involved in with Geeta Kapur. This was interesting, but actually, it's 2001 was it 02? You should know. 01! When we actually had done something on Bombay. But it was still, I think in hindsight a certain kind of essentially post-colonial imagination contending with the '92 - '93 textile... the demolition... the whatever... what happened after Ayodhya demolition, and the riots that took place in Bombay at that point of time. It was at that time basically suggesting that the conversion of Bombay into Mumbai - the city was renamed just a little after that - that Mumbai was a very different place than Bombay had been, and that another kind of history and another kind of economy had arisen. For me what was very specific was that it actually saw the death of celluloid film as we knew it, because it coincides more or less with the onset of new media technologies that were there. So there was I think a very strong, at that point of time, then and now, kind of moment, which I think we don't speak like that anymore. For me that's a very important development that I'm very interested in wanting to take forward. And I'm also interested in that context then to, how do I put it? It sounds like it's a very simple phrase but actually I mean something more - the radicalizing of the aesthetic. You know, the capacity of what we thought of as aesthetic practice, to take on responsibilities that aren't conventionally those of art making.

AR: That is for me the really big deal that we have. And I think that the point that we have here is that this kind of an approach was available with the poets, the writers and some of the filmmakers of that time and which I think CAMP is inheriting and taking forward. That's the connection I want to really emphasize.

RSJ: And instead of heaping praise maybe we should invite the artists to speak back as well since we have some of them in the room. And they've been the silent witnesses to this. So I know there is a mic somewhere around you, but if not, I'm gonna hand you mine.

AS: Hello. Well we are grateful for the heaps of praise and non-praise and connections that are being made. We have been thinking and also speaking about this problem that we perceive as 'media people', which is sort of a Mcluhan-esque problem of every generation sort of becoming the content for the new medium that, in the way that folk songs became the content of Bollywood (film) songs, and novels became the content of television which became the content of Netflix. So one of our things that we have been thinking about is how our art is not merely... sort of a content of institutions. And that's still an open question here for us. And one of the ways we want to think about that is to I think go outside and talk about all the things that were missed out of these... to have a longer conversation perhaps about Lawrence's parasite and Ashish's Phoenix Mills which he didn't get to talk about, and all the things that didn't fit into the 20 minutes that our friends were generously allocated. So how could we move beyond this content infrastructure relationship is one of our concerns. And there are ways to solve that with friendship and time that we steal from each other, but they may be there are other ways to think about this.

AS: But thank you very much it's been lovely and i'll pass to shaina.

SA: Firstly, Stuart and Rattan, thank you. The show was put together in I think 6 months. It's just been an incredible journey with the two of you and I'll be sad when the show comes to an end. Thank you panelists, there's so much to be discussed and I really do think this is just a start. But I just want to race through some of the things, the distribution of the sensible, and the parasite. And I really want Serres and Ranciere to talk to each other via Lawrence and CAMP. That needs to be done. Debashree, thank you for citational intimacies, as well as tilt down post humanisms. Erika, for bringing Trinh Minh-ha which is foundational. 'Speak alongside' has been I think the question I asked while assisting Saeed Mirza and that in its very neighbourly sense by removing myself out of the frame completely, and out of the lens, was articulated in Khirkeeyan which for me was sort of my own foundational stepping stone, dealing with all those demons of documentary gaze, authorship, triangulation, and so on.

SA: Ashish, that legacy we owe to people like you who's amazing encyclopedia and -- drive to be able to constantly excavate and relate it to our immediate past, our contemporary moment, and the future. And we really owe that to to you. That commitment to articulate the legacies, as you said, is really foundational to us. We do stand shoulder to shoulder and on top of the shoulders of others and it's really important to build those infrastructures autonomously, so that as Ashok says, they can't be consumed or captured immediately, by not just capital, but you know larger art institutions and so on.

SA: so yeah thank you and we hope this is just a start

SC: So while you're standing on the shoulders we hope you'll continue to tilt down. So we will wrap up now but please come back at 5:30 for a keynote by Laura Marks who I know is going to pick up on a lot of the interesting proposals made so far today. We'll see you shortly thank you.

SC: Good evening. Welcome back everybody again I'm Stuart Comer, Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance. If CAMP's project is something that over the past decade or so has constantly intersected with the way I've been thinking about media and it's trajectory, Laura Marks has also been providing a sort of real-time diagram. Every time I think I've come up with some kind of new observation, she's already been there and produced an incredible meditation on it. But certainly around the time in the early 2000s that I was really grappling with the ways in which artists were dealing with a very virtual, or increasingly virtual world and trying to find- carve out some sort of physical sensibility within this very intangible sphere. And Laura was already writing brilliantly about the haptics of media.

SC: More recently she's been writing about Small File Media and the environmental impact of machine learning, and how we can use media in more radical ways to sort of counter some of those developments. But I wanted to just read one quick excerpt from her newest book The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos as maybe one point in which her recent research is intersecting with CAMP's project. She says training our senses is the human end of a chain of indexical witnessing. Witnessing combines sensing with memory and we extend these human capacities with non-human sensory capacities, techniques of measurement and attestation, aligning our sensory capacities with those of non-humans, natural and technological, we gain an inner understanding of chains of causality. Plants, minerals, seas, winds, solar radiation and other cosmic powers bear casual witness.

SC: so I think that points in some of the directions but I know that Laura will also be discussing some points that will build importantly on some of the points made certainly by Lawrence and Debrashree earlier today. Laura is a researcher on media ecology, non-western, media histories, experimental cinema, islamic philosophy, arab cinema aesthetics and embodiment. As I mentioned her recent book is The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos, published by Duke last year but is joined by other incredibly important books like Hanan Al-cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (2015), Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (2010), Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multi-sensory Media (2002) and The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema Embodiment (2000). She leads research on the carbon footprint of streaming media. In 2020 she founded the Small File Media Festival, which celebrates movies that stream at extremely low bit rates. With Azadeh Emadi she co-founded the Substantial Motion Research Network of artists and scholars working on non-western approaches to media, and she programs experimental media art for venues across the world. She's a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and now teaches in the school for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser in Vancouver. Today very happily she is with us here in New York City and please offer a warm welcome to Laura Marks.

Keynote lecture: Laura Marks
Laura Marks

LM: Good evening it's lovely to be here with you thank you so much stuart I'm really grateful to the people invited me and made it to be here who are Shaina, Ashok, Stuart, Rattan, Cam and Ananya. And thank you all and yeah this talk is going to be quite improvised so we'll see how it goes.

LM: I made up a new acronym for CAMP, Compressed Abundance Musters Participants. And this I'm not sure about muster because I think there's something kind of military about that word and I know that Shaina has ticked the word 'participatory'. But anyway there it is, a new acronym to suggest how light images travel easily and invite involvement from various kinds of actors.

LM: So I'm going to be talking about how CAMP's practice shows the richness and intimacy of the low resolution image, as images are dense with implicit information about where they come from and where they are going. And i'll be talking about how low resolution images, or low bitrate images is really what I mean, model the light sustainable infrastructure that will survive when more bloated infrastructure fails.

LM: So I like the title Video after Video as it suggests that video's uses have become saturated and weighed down, especially by shareholder corporate interests. And thus need to liberate video to other purposes. I've always loved video, from the analog days. I love those electrons that consent to convey signals that get corralled into electronic circuits. All so that we can receive image and sound over a distance. But now those electrons are indentured in the video industrial complex. Especially with high resolution, on-demand streaming, as well as video chats, video conferences, addictive video scrolling, ubiquitous video surveillance. All ways in which video has been overtaken by an unhappy and unhealthy, what I would call 'soul assemblages'.

LM: So CAMP, as we've been talking about all day, works to liberate video. Now Shaina said in the interview from earlier this year with Rattan and Stuart... she said we thought the internet was a forest where you can hide. But the artists have kind of realized, regrettably observed that the internet seems to have become this scrapable interface where images feed capital and corporate and state surveillance. And yet, and yet, those as Ashok pointed out in the same- actually when we were speaking together a couple of weeks ago, Ashok pointed out that the context of those images is missing. So even when a face, or a place, is pulled up by some surveillance system such as Google Earth, it's context remains hidden, or implicit. And I think of that context as a connective tissue that when images get stolen and codified as information, they get pulled up from this this plane which constitutes this connective tissue, and that all remains hidden and implicit.

LM: So those hiding places that Shaina mentioned. Those hiding places still exist in the internet and in the image itself, and as I'm going to talk about, in the infinite. So I am going to be talking a lot about the infinite, the infinite world, if you like. Where these few images come from, they're really the tips of icebergs that we rarely see represented. And yet we know it, we live in it. We live in the internet most of the time. And the infinite lingers in the images that surround us, whether we really see it there or not. So the infinite is that connective tissue that lies latent in the scraped image.

LM: As I'll be talking about with a helpful diagram, most of the infinite lies is ignored as only those bits of it that feed capital or power get unfolded. So in this talk I'm going to characterize some of that infinite life that we only get small glimpses of around or in between images. And I'll be talking about what I call 'unfolding differently', choosing other things to unfold from the infinite, other than what are generally selected because they feed capital or power. So pad.ma published this very important text 10 Theses on the Archive in 2010. And their fifth thesis: 'The archive deals not only with the Remnant but also the Reserve' - This is a very interesting idea that the reserve is that which is not deployed. And they give the example of CCTV closed circuit television. So it's obviously a byproduct ofcapitalist surveillance system, prison industrial complex, and yet it can also be deployed as CAMP notes, to sabotage capitalism. Or for- in a speculative way, as a reserve whose purpose we do not yet know.

LM: I love the way that CAMP writes about images, because they suggest for example with this concept of the reserve, that there is an infinity to unfold from images, if we can figure out what is important to unfold. I personally feel a kind of- when I'm around, you know, CCTV images or the kinds of images that exist on the pad.ma website, I sometimes feel overcome by guilt. And it is the guilt of not unfolding sufficiently. I don't know if other people feel this feeling in the presence that are not... that you feel have not been sufficiently witnessed to the responsibility of being a witness for the image. And I think I should get over this guilt because it's not helpful to anybody. But it might be a trace of the kind of spirit of messianism that pad.ma puts in their theses on the archive.

LM: I'm going to talk a lot about triads. Triadic logic. And I'm going to start with this diagram that I devised that tries to explain Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic semiotics. I find this way of thinking about signs so useful because it shows how signs which for Peirce are everything that exists in the universe, they are always in movement, always in relation, they're conversational. Peirce's definition of a sign is a sign or representamen, represents something - it's object, to someone - it's interpretant in some capacity. So a sign is very conversational, it's always a negotiation between the thing that it is representing and the one it is representing to. So it's always selective, it can never tell all about it's object. But it always generates a new sign that is speaking to a new interpretant or a new audience, and there always has to be that relationality that interests. There's almost like a little bit of salesmanship in Peirce's semiosis, saying what would you, what can I tell you about it? In what capacity?

LM: And yet the object, the initial sign, is never exhausted, and more and more meanings and context builds up around it. So Peirce's semiosis shows how communication is infinite and inherently incomplete. And I think a theory like this aligns very nicely with the work of CAMP, because of their moderate optimism that control can never total.

LM: Also with triadic thinking there is no identity. You know a sign is never just one thing. There's no stasis. There's no objective point of view because it's always in relation. There is no dominant point of view, which might be a mistake by Peirce, which I'll try to correct in a moment, always relational and in motion like I said. Now CAMP too is interested in triadic thinking, and they use the triad of subject, author and technology. And I think what they mean by this is that none of these three entities dominates the process of the work of art, or the process of communication. But instead the powers and affordances each of them contribute.

LM: I drew this just for you. This is a- it looks like a squiggle, but it actually... this is one version of a diagram of my Enfolding-Unfolding aesthetics, which is a concept of mine that has a very fine lineage, drawing from thinkers of continuity such as islamic neoplatonists, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Gilles Deleuze, Édouard Glissant and David Bohm. So I'm going to explain it.

LM: I mentioned very briefly that for Charles Sanders Peirce who is one of the men whose thought has inspired my cosmology, the universe is comprised of nothing but circulating signs. And of course he doesn't mean signs in the (?) sense that are basically linguistic, he means everything. Oh I shouldn't have done this... example of a sign. So like a leaf falling on the ground is a sign, and that it's falling. Something like that right, they're not human. Not only.

LM: What you have in the lavender is a picture of the universe. It's like a still image of a film, where I think of the universe or the cosmos, is always always unfolding and enfolding, in a constant process of creation, of pulling what has been unfolded back into itself. Such as if you're familiar with Spinoza, it's also a very spinozian idea of nature as ever-growing and ever-reincorporating what has been created. So that's great. It's great to live in the infinite cosmos and to be aware of and be part of this process of enfolding and unfolding.

LM: So you see those red arrows, those are showing the direction of enfolding from the infinite and folding back into the infinite. And then there's a blue squiggly line which suggests the image. So I think of the image as a selective unfolding from the infinite. Whenever an act of perception or prehension happens, whether it's me, you seeing my friend Ardell in the audience and creating this image, or whether it's the soil behending(?) the leaf, those are acts of unfolding the infinite into the image. These are happening all the time. And it's beautiful, there's an intimacy between the image and the infinite that we can feel every time that we perceive, the other entities are also experienced.

LM: And then I've got this kind of chunky black line because this is a triadic and actually that black line is information, in many cases a mediator between infinite and the image, especially in our time. So I think of information as a selective unfolding from the infinite, according to a need to represent or a need of power. So sometimes, I think this is going okay... You see how I've drawn the image as kind of in between infinite and information. Because sometimes- let's just talk about as humans for a moment - sometimes what we perceive comes straight from the infinite. But often, especially in late post-industrial capitalism, what we perceive is generated from information. So this is the world of cliched images, sounds, even cliched tastes and smells, feels that surround us. They are generated by information.

LM: Depending on where and how you live, it may be that more of the images that you experience are information images. So in my book The Fold, I characterize something that I call the 'information fold' which is a dominant fold fed by individual image folds, but that takes on a certain power, certain political and economic power. And yet those two planes, the image plane and the information plane, those are always enfolding and unfolding too. So there's no stasis here, power is ever changing. Nothing is permanent. The way the information fold captures smaller acts of unfolding, is sturdy, but it is temporary. And I think of... the information fold is composed of many smaller folds, you know molar(?) style. So it appropriates and instrumentalizes small, just little, very small fragments unfolded from the infinite or from the image. And usually serves some kind of capitalist extraction. And I just said that the image also sometimes unfolds from information.

LM: So what I call 'unfolding differently', actually happens all the time when we pay attention to other aspects of the infinite. Oh look here's another helpful diagram. So this is a close-up of one little piece- this is just like a fragment of the infinite. So here you can see the beautiful field of the infinite. I've even got music to go with it. Where is that music coming from?

LM: You can see better here how these these unfoldings are happening in the image. And in my book I actually argue that this is how we individuals are created by our acts of unfolding. That's why they look a little bit like individuals. And you see the cycle of unfolding and unfolding as everything rises from...

LM: okay that's pretty good

LM: And this is the book where I explain that..

LM: So now I'm gonna go back. So in the Khirkeeyan project that Shaina did in 2006 we can think of this beautiful project in terms of enfolding-unfolding aesthetics. This is a project that she did in Khirkee extension village in New Delhi, a diverse neighborhood about a kilometer long, where she created an ultra local tv program using CCTV equipment and a local area network. And you can see this in the gallery if you haven't already, to connect people, through these 4 frames, super proto-zoom, network in real time and the friendliness and intimacy of these conversations between strangers is so striking. And also the way they perform for each other. I like another of them where somebody is talking while he's being shaved, he's got shaving cream all over his face.

LM: They're all kind of unfolding themselves for the camera to present to these strangers to share bits, to articulate bits of their experience of life.

LM: And so here there's a kind of quite organic process that happens from infinite to image to information, where the people willingly participate in this ultra local technology to unfold themselves to each other and to create and to communicate. And the image is folding outward to each other. And now as it's archived on pad.ma, they unfold to us or to viewers who visit the site. And then you see how somebody has heavily annotated this video on pad.ma with a transcript and keywords. And here this information is actually carrying out additional unfolding, to try to get closer to all those infinite details partially captured in the image. So there's a real kind of delicate play between how words can unfold the infinite and how they can kind of codify the image and close it off, like 'oh it's just gossip' or 'ah hmm gossip, what could they be gossiping about?' Right? So there's a fluidity to this act of unfolding.

okay I think this is going fine

LM: So these dense words like gossip, labour, daughter-in-law - they each enfold infinities that the viewer, if they choose to, can imaginatively unfold. So something that has really come home to me in a pleasant way while thinking about the work of CAMP and pre-CAMP is the role of the imagination in carrying out further unfolding and in really kind of expanding and contributing to the infinite. The imagination, imaginative creation folds back into the infinite, making it even bigger.

LM: Here's another example of how information can sample quite austerely from the infinite. This is from CAMP's project, the book project Wharfage from 2009. Ships' cargo lists that correspond to I believe ships in From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf. So it's a great, you know, these these very plain lists stimulate the imagination as you imagine the people who need all this macaroni and plastic slippers, biscuits and garlic, plywood and linoleum. And we can imagine how they were manufactured in India, the workers who bundled and packaged them, we can imagine the sailors who oversee their passage, the ports that receive them, the shops that will sell them, the people that use all this stuff. So we can imagine that if we want a further unfolding. These very very kind of vibratory and telling words and numbers. And then it's also extremely striking that in the other direction, the ship has a unique or a single cargo - charcoal from Somalia. And I find this to be a sharp slice of information that unfolds vividly as I imagine that Somalia's central good of interest this time was charcoal.

LM: A tree... so you think about trees that are burnt for export as biofuel, you can think about deforestation, the air choking with smoke. That very specific number of bags and who might what workers bagged them up, how much money did they make? And I don't mean this to sound kind of immiserated, like 'oh the poor Somalis', but just to be an example of unfolding from information. Unfolding the infinite through information.

LM: Yet another example from CAMP's project in the UK. This is one sequence that they call CCTV Social where British surveillance workers in a mall, the more senior one, is explaining to a couple of trainees the how to log the image with the codes for the ethnicity of the people they're observing, as you see here. And they're asking little questions about it. So here, you know it's clear that information extracted from the infinite image can be lethal or can at least be punitive. And at the same time, these words like 'Asian male' are so roomy and contain so much space to hide. And I'm also really struck in this sequence by, you know as the title says, that the socialness of how they teach and learn how to condense all this information- into- all of this infinite into just a word or two. It's like 'yeah, but what do you call a euro- is that the code for a European man?'

LM: So it shows the the role of humans in their jobs of surveillance as becoming vectors of information.

LM: Okay. I mentioned earlier that pad.ma criticizes the messianic tone of some writing on the archive that assumes that what is left out of the archive has been somehow oppressed, or they say condemned to a shadowy existence under the idea of a bare life. As though archivists have to come to the rescue of those pathetic undocumented lives. They say 'they desire to document that which is absent' - oh sorry - these desires to document that which is absent, missing or forgotten, stages a domain of politics which often privileges the experience of violence and trauma in a manner in which the experience of violence is that which destroys the realm of the ordinary and the everyday. So instead, pad.ma seeks in the archive the radical contingency of the ordinary. And this is something that I like very much, how sometimes what you unfold - oh my goodness - sometimes what you unfold - but I actually have a little bit of buffer time right? - is it's contingent. It might be only interesting and precious in and for itself. And not connected to other things. It might not, you know, change the world.

LM: And this is kind of - if you know Siegfried Zielinski's concept of the anarchive, Zielinski really resists pulling things out of the archive in order to instrumentalize them in some way. Or these things that seem completely ordinary, may be, if you think back to that diagram, they may be the tips of deeper folds where when you you pull on them a whole new fold emerges, displacing the current dominant fold. And that is revolution.

LM: I'm going to talk a little bit about the travels of images. Images give hints as to where they come from and where they're going. And you can scrutinize an image and it's material support in order to unfold their travels. So this is quite explicit in the case of CCTV, and also on the pad.ma website with it's generous annotations.

LM: The cell phone videos that we see in From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf tell us about the age of the phone. There's plenty other ways, you know, movie credits for example, that images tell about their history and where they are coming from and going. But sometimes you need to study the material more carefully to detect how it has traveled. There's also the ways that images tell about the infrastructure that supports them. Surveillance images show the type and position of the camera, streaming video images drop out when the bandwidth is too low.

LM: Now I'm going to say a word about the low resolution or low bitrate image. I'm going to argue that these are rich images picking up on the contention that EriKa was making earlier with Hito Steyerl's definition of the poor image. So Steyerl's definition of the poor image is of an image that becomes compressed in the act of circulation. And it's not correctly applied to the work of CAMP, such as From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf and the CCTV series, because these are images that begin low res. They're low resolution or low bitrate by design with the CCTV images, or by necessity with the earlier cell phone images.

LM: And I would like to argue that images that are born low resolution are rich and enfolded information that can be drawn out by an interested or a mustered, m-u-s-t-e-r-e-d, spectator. So for example in From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf those precious cell phone videos made by sailors, the artists give them titles in their annotations on phantas.ma such as this one that they... this music video that they call 'Major and Minor Scale' in which the song is full of longing, expression, an intention of desire, an act of communication, the waves, the distance, the feeling of commonality with the sailors on the other boat. And in this one that they title 'Reality and Fiction'... there are so many infinities that we witness here.

LM: So, yeah, this video, I won't list the infinities beyond, you get the feeling of companionship in this time of leisure that the sailors have, an admiration that the cinematographer feels for them, the colours of the paint, the painting. In their commentary on this video, CAMP gives an interpretation that imaginatively pulls on those points of the image to draw out a new plane of imagination, thinking about how this work of painting the model intensifies the meanings of these colours.

LM: And so, as I mentioned, thinking about the work of CAMP helps me to think about how imagination expands the infinite. But now, because I really am running short on time, I'm just going to quickly zoom through a little something about sustainable technology.

LM: So I want to argue in what may be unpopular that the current efforts to export wealthy countries' infrastructure, 5G networks, 4K resolution, to other parts of the world is unsustainable.

LM: I share with Ramon Lobato in being critical of the concept of net neutrality, which is a contention that it's unfair for the global south and poor regions of the global north not to have robust infrastructure, that all citizens should have equal access to high-speed internet.

I agree with Lobato that net neutrality is a vision that can never scale meaningfully in a global sense.

It is grounded in a first world idea of the internet, promised on an assumption of unbounded capacity. It does not ring true with how the internet is experienced in many countries.

LM: I call it 'bandwidth imperialism', to assume that all regions in the world even want American-style, bingeable HD streaming. And I think that it is a cover for the ICT industrial complex, where ICT is Information and Communication Technologies.

LM: I've been working a lot on the environmental impact of ICT, of data centers, servers and devices, which are currently responsible for about 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than double that of the airline industry.

LM: I argue, and this is the impact made by the wealthy world, so I support the ICT engineers who prepare for collapsed informatics, which is making do with less electricity and unreliable or non-existent networks.

LM: And I've been studying countries around the world that have what I think is exemplary infrastructure. And Sudan is one of them, not counting the anti-revolutionary war.

LM: But in Sudan, most people have access to 2G internet, which is fine for most purposes.

LM: And I believe 74% of their electricity comes from renewable sources, from hydro.

LM: So I think that countries like Sudan are actually models for the over-infrastructured world.

LM: And this all connects to the work of CAMP, really specifically because those slight images made by, for example, the cell phone, the Sailor cell phones in 2008 to 2012, those are actually, I think, the ideal.

LM: And I founded a festival that draws attention to this environmental impact, the Small File Media Festival.

LM: And we invite artists to make, and media makers to make works of a very tiny fraction of standard bitrate in 1.44 megabytes per minute.

LM: So concluding, I think that slight images invite an act of unfolding. They emphasize that most of the infinite is enfolded. And they invite people to lean toward the image and to try to personally pull out the infinite, rather than indulge the fiction of high-resolution images that make us believe that all the world is available to us and we can sit back and receive it.

So, compressed abundance musters participation.

LM: Slight images invite an embodied engagement.

They invite interpretation.

They may sometimes hide details in the image that will only be available to in-groups who know how to interpret the image. And that's okay.

So, I think that in slight images, there is little that can be useful for power. A little of value for capital to extract. I could be wrong about that. But I think that they allow us to kind of savour the presence of the infinite.

And yet, at the same time, as pad.ma points out, they constitute a reserve, what they call the mass which waits for the event and produces a threat to the powers that be. When you're not to be like too optimistic about when and how this is going to happen.

But when more of that vast, enfolded infinite unfolds differently, collectively, and maybe submerges the dominant fold.

That's it. Thank you.

SC: Thank you, Laura, so much. That was great.

SC: Maybe just to pick up the final point a little bit about the collectivity of a work like From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf. And I guess, I would just love to hear from you a bit more about how this question of, you know, sharing things by Bluetooth, which is itself sort of a lo-fi means of sharing and distribution.

SC: How would you fold that into this question of unfolding or the, where does that play within the infinities embedded in that work?

LM: Something like Bluetooth or local area network or other kinds of local sharing, they can actually bypass large scale, you know, platforms, telecoms, social media. So they're kind of image circulation that can remain itself remain a little bit enfolded and help to organize collectivity and purpose without being detected.

RSJ: Thank you, Laura, so much for that presentation. I was struck yesterday at Shaina and Ashok's presentation at Light Industry by a quote from Ashok where he said something like everything the camera touches is opened up.

RSJ: And I was thinking of that when relationship to your work, both past work, but also what you talked about today, just to think how the richness of the image or the kind of enfolding and unfolding that you were diagrammatically charting out for us kind of happens in the various operations that everyone talked about in the first panel in terms of the ways that image is taken from, from kind of one place to another interface to many of these movements.

RSJ: And I wondered if you can kind of talk a little bit more and also maybe distinguish between enfolding and unfolding for us.

RSJ: And, and perhaps to suggest as well, given your discomfort with the word 'musters', the word 'mobilizes'. I wonder if that might be another way to think about the image kind of mobilizing, annotation, readings, information that it accretes over time, which I see you as kind of grappling with and theorizing.

Yeah.

LM: Yeah. So any, if we just think of, of any image, how, how does it both unfold and unfold? So, well, I could just use the, the example of the, the video with the, the two, the two sailors, one painting the model boat and one watching.

LM: So I, I argued that, that image, well, it, it, it enfolds the infinite. And I actually, I actually think further, I didn't mention this, but I think that every entity enfolds the, the entirety of the infinite. Some parts of it more clearly than others.

LM: And I get this from Leibniz and Bohm, for example. So everything is a microcosm. But, so that image there, it enfolds, things about the journey, things about the two men pictured and the one holding the camera, the relationship between them, the weather, the time of day, the fact that they have this leisure time, what they've decided to do with it, the fact that he can make a boat and wants to make a boat.

Um, the significance of the colors, um, you know, what they are thinking at the time, um, and, and more and more and more. That those things are all enfolded in the image. And, um, uh, and more, more things that we, that we will never know.

LM: So the act of enfolding is not going to,... it is enigmatic. So it's not going to perfectly pull out what happened, what was going on in that moment. But it will, it will draw it out, you know, in relation to where we are, um, you know, we will learn about the image by imagining and by doing research.

LM: Research is part of unfolding. So even from one slight little image, and more when it's a movie, there's, I won't say an infinite amount, but there's a lot of unfolding that can be done.

LM: And you can think of everything like that. Actually, I do, I do enfolding-unfolding aesthetics in my everyday life. And so I'm never bored. So I'm like, oh, oh, what's enfolded in you? Though I also, I do warn that, you know, not everything is meant to be unfolded or not necessarily by, by me or by you.

SC: I wonder, I mean, without wanting to be too literal about it, but I'm just thinking about a work like, Bombay Tilts Down and, and the formal structure of the screens as a sort of unfolding encounter. And how that relates to something like pad.ma or, various online platforms that CAMP has developed, where the experience again is a different kind of unfolding.

SC: I mean, you talked in very interesting terms about their use of the archive. But how would you unfold this argument sort of in terms of both, the physical more phenomenological experience of something like Bombay Tilts Down versus the online encounter?

LM: Erika and I were talking about how experiencing Bombay Tilts Down in person is so, you know, physically, you know, not quite overwhelming, but very, very, very, complete. You know, and the, the music and the bass and the, you know, almost, almost nausea. I mean, certainly like completeness of that image. I hate to use the term immersive because I think that anything can be immersive. You just immerse yourself in it.

LM: Um, but yeah, it's, it's quite, quite, yay! Um, but yeah, so that, um, that embodied aspect of unfolding, that's actually the very last of the 10 Theses on the Archive.

...I don't remember the whole thing, but the, the importance of the archive is to feel it. So you really unfold it with your body.

And then I think you do something, right? You do something with this embodied, um, reception.

LM: Uh, oh gosh, now I've kind of forgot where your question was going.
SC: It was, I mean, you answered one part of it perfectly. I guess I was thinking about, you know, pad.ma and some of the online platforms too. And that's... again, not immersive in the sense that's often, the way that term is often used. Finish that, but I have one more question when you're done.

I do have a thing to say. Cause while you were talking about, I think, the format of the installation and also the format of platforms, kind of thinking back to, like 80s psychoanalytic film theory where the idea of the outside of the image, the idea that the frame is sort of censoring the world.

I find it very liberating, not to think that way, but instead to think, in a kind of Deleuzian way, that the image, frames, it intensifies the world. So it chooses a little piece of the world, to allow us to actually experience more of it. It's not keeping anything from us. I just wanted to say that.

SC: And then just in terms of the question of embodiment, particularly in Bombay Tilts Down, for me, sound is one of the primary carriers of that. And, you know, hearing voices from the past of the poets that had once occupied that exact site. But how does sound figure into your equation vis-a-vis images?

LM: Yeah. Um, oh, I, I forgot to mention that, I actually define image as perceptible.

LM: So, it can be a visual image, an audio image, a gustatory image, et cetera. And sometimes I even extend it to be, uh, prehensible after Whitehead. This is quite a, quite a leap, but, you know, a thinkable image.

Mm-hmm.

RSJ: Just looking at the time, and I know we have a hard out at 6.45, so we should turn it over to our very, very, very patient audience, and ask if there are any questions for Laura in the house.

RSJ: Of course, we can keep going, but I know, um, there will certainly be some questions, and maybe we can take a couple together even. There are microphones, floating, so if you have a question, please, raise your hand, and I see a hand back there.

Thank you, Laura, for your talk and your brilliant work. It's so inspiring.

Um, I have a question about, um, the way you talk about unfolding and enfolding. It's like, it's very non-violent.

It's, it's happening. It's always happening. And, um, I wonder how you think about resistance or, um, because I know you think about it, but I, uh, I would love to hear from you about how that factors in.

And you mentioned Glissant, and I was thinking also about opacity. How does something like opacity feature in a diagram like this?

LM: Yeah, thank you for asking.

LM: Well, I mentioned, the violence in, that I diagrammed there is mostly taking place in the dominance of what I call the information fold that is like, it's like a dominant ideology, but it also has the power of making only certain things seeable and perceptible or thinkable.

LM: So that is a lot of power. And the resistance to that is what I call unfolding differently, which can be quite difficult. You can do it individually, but actually to make a political difference, it needs to be done collectively.

LM: And this is hard work. I talk about this in my chapter called 'The Information Fold', which is a chapter that deals with machine learning and things like that.

LM: And the other side of politics is, the politics of enfoldment. And that is where opacity comes in. Where, the point of view, the diagram - in the diagram, each point represents a point of view.

LM: So no two entities will have the same experience. So it may be that something that is evident to you, will be enfolded from my point of view.

LM: And it's often the case that whole, groups of people or groups of other kinds of entities... It's not often the case. It's always the case...

LM: Um, no, no, it's often the case that, there will be whole groups whose, experience is entirely enfolded from the point of view of others.

LM: You know, I said it's not always the case because I think there is a very few people like very, like quite wealthy and well represented people who are like completely unfolded.

LM: But in most cases, yeah. So enfoldment, can be a source of, strength, a way of organizing. It's similar to what, Moten and Harney call the 'undercommons'. So in, not being detected from dominant points of view, lies a way to safely, you know, organize, until that group is ready to, what I call, unfold differently.

Thanks a lot for asking.

Thank you, Laura. It was really a fantastic presentation and a wonderful structure to think about CAMP.

You just made a comment on hard work and labour and, and I was thinking about the idea of enfolding and how that connects to CAMP. But that idea of labour, somewhere close to it is the idea of riyaz, which is a Hindi or an Urdu word, used in classical music practice.

Which is the systematic daily practice or an exercise and several exercises done to be able to go to a certain space.

And I often think of CAMP's work and those who work with CAMP, and there are several. That process of endless editing or where we talk, we talked about the found footage. And, I think to think of an alternative structure, the idea of riyaz as CAMP's practice, where, pad.ma or everything else they do is actually practice in somehow getting to the crux of the work that maybe then becomes, even if you don't use the word immersive, but an experience that is all encompassing, in Bombay Tills Down.

Or as rudimentary but equally immersive in Khirkeeyan. So I think the idea of riyaz comes quite central.

So to think about labour as riyaz is a possible way to think about enfolding maybe.

That's a beautiful comment. Thank you. I would just add that, um, uh, you're also pointing out the importance of practice and discipline. And this is necessary to, uh, to figure out what to unfold and when and how.

So we're not just randomly going around unfolding stuff and spending all our energy. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Thank you.

Okay. I think we actually are at time, unfortunately, but this was extremely generative, Laura. Thank you so much. And, um, those of you joining us for the performance upstairs, um, will be rooted up there momentarily.

Uh, thank you all for being here. Uh, thanks again to CAMP. Thanks again to Kiran Nadar Museum. Thank you.

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