“SMART” ARCHAEOLOGY Facebook includes archaeology as a necessary attribute for user-retention on its social network. Memories are used as currency to barter the time of its users. It has a feature that brings back memories which are a year old at regular intervals. This feature allows easy access to data that made milestones of our everyday memories serving as a gambit to scroll, click and navigate within the back alleys of the social network. The back alleys form a rhizomatic network and getting lost becomes the social network experience. Digging through accumulated data is apparently easier to catalogue than digging through accumulated dust, while encountering a similarly layered experience. After re-imagining and positioning ‘mapping’ at the finger tips, it is probably the turn of archaeology. The archaeology of the future, someday, shall be studied by combing through data that is old but has never aged, in lines of ghost codes that makes up unused but still active email IDs, floating websites and still online but defunct servers. The archaeology of the future, probably, is a line of code.
“MODERNIST MATERIALS” &“CONCRETE JUNGLES” As per the census of India in 2001, about 72% of the population lived in rural areas, and 28% in urban areas. By 2011, these figures had changed to 69% rural population and 31% urban population. It is estimated that around 60,00,00,000 people are expected to make urban India their home by 2031, implying a 59% growth over 2011. The current housing deficit in India stands at 19 million units, which might double by 2031. [1] Urban Sprawl in India can be compared to the uninhibited takeover of the Kudzu vine over its surroundings with housing developments leading the charge. Billboards have become the menu cards of ambitious new skylines offered as lifestyle choices, with each proposal claiming to provide an exclusive choice for an urban life. The billboards propose a very hopeful future for the 600 million people who are expected to make urban India their home by 2031.They provide different pictures of typical plans turned into ambitious visions providing a home for its
consumers, thus solving ‘housing’ for the aspirational middle class. “Typical plan” is still the comprehensive modernist tool to market housing for a diverse set of livelihood aspirations. Concrete pavers, concrete columns, 4” concrete walls, glass railings etc., present the palette of urban housing within the city and sporadic exposed brickwork aesthetics address the agenda of the “sensible”. The materiality of the urban sprawl thus resulting from a still modernist design agenda is quite limited to an inherently monochromatic and non-malleable palette and the lines representing such land uses upon the city remain stubborn. The image of the city is thus represented by a comprehensive application of material to every visible forcefully-designedsurface with each material picked from a catalogue. “A Concrete Jungle”, “A Silicon Valley”, “A Smart City”.
‘CHANDIGARH MEIN MITTI KAHAAN HAI?’ & INVISIBLE CITIES “Chandigarh mein Mitti Kahaan hai?” We heard this line at the Chandigarh College of Art back in March 2016. A fellow artist and curator for Kochi Students’ Biennale, Paribartana Mohanty and the writer had gone to the Chandigarh College of Art for a preliminary visit. Both of us are working with government aided art schools across the country to curate work for the Students’ Biennale at Kochi that runs parallel to the upcoming main biennale event in December 2016. The protocol for the Kochi Students’ Biennale mandates that preliminary visits to such schools to get a few reference points on what the school is about. Subsequently, a curatorial brief is developed and a project is initiated with the students to produce content that represents the school at the Biennale. To break the ice with the students and to initiate a conversation, we asked them about what inspires them; “Aap ka art kahaan se aata hai?” (Where does your art come from?). A simple enough question which usually prompts the students to share a lot of their stories and in the process gives us an insight into the students’ sensibilities, their points of origin and points of departure. At the Chandigarh College of Art, during a similar conversation, one of the first year students
June 2016 | CITY OBSERVER
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