2011 - Bangalore: Space, the final frontier. A DAI-project curated and tutored by Renée Ridgway in collaboration with The Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) and Srishtie, School of Art and Design

The nine student participants in Negotiating Equity / Space the Final Frontier embarked on a two-week voyage to India to collaborate with Srishti School of Art and Design and CEMA (The Centre for Experimental Media Arts). Their first pit stop was New Delhi with a half-day seminar with Raqs Media Collective and a visit to Khoj, an artist led, alternative space for experimentation and international exchange.

Upon arrival in the IT capital Bangalore, Space The Final Frontier commenced, an expansive trans-spatial /trans-local investigation into the notion of 'space'. Public space, political space, virtual space, mediated space / the space of media, territorial space, temporal space, inter-subjective space and even perhaps extra-terrestrial space, are departure points. Students, artists, curators, architects, cultural producers, sociologists, algorithm theorists, and urban geographers will embody the practices of collaboration and self-curation, which are central to this participation. Seminars, lectures and interactive events included technological and aesthetic means of mapping, algorithm theory and reflections on the future of search.

Guests from abroad as well as local residents and students engaged with the city's inhabitants to further articulate these 'spaces of flux' through artistic projects using locative media. Simultaneously, we will be developing a meta-project, the 'Shadow Search Platform' (SSP) that collates information and data from the participants 'psychogeographic' exploration of the city into a database. This index will in turn be used as a platform in which to develop diverse types of search engines.

Space the Final Frontier ultimately provided research on the nature of 'search' in the 21st century, looking critically at Google and Facebook as well as thinking about alternatives. How do we find what we seek and how do we know what we are looking for?

Final presentations will be held in and around Bangalore and at Chitra Kala Parishad on March 17, 2011.

Confirmed speakers: Prayas Abhinav, Renée Ridgway, Nishant Shah, Hans Varghese Mathews, Deepak Srinivasan, Vasanthi Das, Rustam Vania

If you would like to attend or participate in the events in Bangalore, please contact: Meena Vari meena@srishti.ac.in

http://negotiatingequity.net/
http://spacethefinalfrontier.net.

CEMA

The Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) is a lab for research into the hybridity of social roles and functions that art + design can perform. The lab was setup in 2007. It emerged out of a history of experimental media practice at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore.

http://cema.srishti.ac.in/site/
http://srishti.ac.in/