What is the most urgent need that you have?
To gain an understanding of how the Indian government, art and design institutions and sources of funding in India can be influenced at the policy level to promote and support New Media theories and practices at the intersection of the arts and sciences.
What is the best/ interesting case or project on new media arts that you have just recently experienced?
Ashok Sukumaran’s project RECURRENCIES. I am intrigued by the shift away from the elitism and glam-power of technologies and the digital/computed towards the renewed exploration of “energies” – in this case, electricity – and “communities” and how New Media arts can span or perhaps even heal “divides”. This return by the artist to the “traditional” and the “communitarian” is an approach which questions the esoterica of much of New Media art emerging from the post-industrial, knowledge- and information-based developed societies and is, I believe, “Indian” in its essence. This project, for me, also relates directly to projects undertaken in Srishti like the “Moon Vehicle” and “Kabir” which seek to bring together (traditional and new) media as design for social impact rather than just the experiment, the aesthetics or the experience thereof.
In your opinion, is there a potential for change on and change through a policy level, i.e. has the status of policy as an accelerator/ a meaningful factor for practice changed?
I believe that the status of policy (from the point of view of the government) as an accelerator or a meaningful factor has not changed much for the better as yet in India. There are some personages or institutions attempting to or hoping to help forge a policy on par with that in the United States, UK or Europe. In the process, some catchwords and slogans have been bandied about and some documents are in the making in the hope that someone up there will take a look at them and do something about them. Figures like Rajiv Sethi and Ranjit Makkuni are iconic in their efforts to get the government or corporates to create policies that will result in greater support for New Media ventures in pedagogy and the arts in a scenario where the government knows which side its bread is buttered; government understands “new media” to be nothing more than the creation of revenue-generting technology and digital-driven commercial enterprises. There is little interest in the possible social and cultural consequences of leapfrogging over a huge mostly ignored and despised rural base combined with rapid industrialization into the information society and emergent new social divides and accentuation of old ones. However, there may lie a glimmer of hope in the thrust that artists’ collectives and galleries in India are making towards the New Media arts, in spurts. Then, there are institutions like Sarai and Srishti working with New Media research and projects, in the case of the former, and New Media as tools for realizing alternate pedagogies in the case of the latter. Overall, these are but pockets of change and it is hoped that the intersection of pioneering institutions with those involved in the larger task of conscientising the government on New Media arts and education opportunities can lead to possibilities for increased funding and grants for the permeation of New Media arts across disciplinary and sectoral boundaries in India. This is in tandem with the keenness shown by some foreign universities and funding and grants bodies. But in the end, India must have New Media technologies, practices, arts institutions and pedagogies that are Indian in “essence”. The emergence of a policy at the government level or at other broad enough levels seemingly lies much further down the road.
