Shape Recognition
May 4, 2018
University of Chicago
University of Chicago invited CAMP to present at the Sawyer Seminar.
Urban Art and the Network: Infrastructure Symposium with Rahul Mehrotra and CAMP.
Location - Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry
Shape Recognition A particular irony occurs when say, the official water supply system of a city like Mumbai is unable to recognise the rain that falls down all over its "network". This system has a bad case of "operational closure", at the same time as it has a leaky materiality. Art's engagement with such networked realities has to do with a formal and sensorial analysis of the failure, decay, parasitism, loopiness and new kinds of hierarchy and neurality that actual networked systems have produced all around us. It is no longer an idealism or criticism of the form. The question then is what emerges when an environment seemingly saturated with a concept meets an artistic practice, for which to network means - to jump domains rather than stay in one protocol, to infiltrate and create unexpected intimacies, to montage reality and the imperceptible - akin to the cut in film.
Mumbai-based transdisciplinary studio CAMP present a sequence of 10 examples from their work, in which new shapes appear stretched across technologies, imaginations and actual geography, after the network.
