So if Bombay was the ‘-dividual city’ – that is, the forces that come before the individual: flows, moorings, speeds, halts, accelerations – now the case shall be somewhat the contrary. London. I am interested in seeing London as a city of ur-individuals, that is, that which supercedes and exceedes the individual. Not less or before the individual – but that which is more than the individual: individual++?

Cities like London are the promised playgrounds of lifestyles, of fashion, of trends, of branding, of being cool. Go to areas such as Bricklane and Shoreditch you can see people form all over the world performing their individuality to the maximum. So the obvious outcome of this, therefore, is not to see London as a city which is before the individual but rather seeing it as a city that is MORE than the individual, that which is in excess of it: of branding, of fashion, of advertisement, of musical subcultures, of utopian reflections of one’s self projected onto the canvas of different lifestyles and imagined freedom. And what else better way to explore this than to take pictures of that which is more than what is, to introduce that which EXCEEDS the individual into everyday life in London. So for this purpose, to begin the first stage of this experiment, I will breed artificial characters into everyday scenes from London. Avatars. Virtual realities bleeding into imagined realities until both seamlessly inhabit the same space we live in. Call it, again, perhaps, the magical realism of the 21st century where, instead of spirits and surrealism of the everyday minutae, virtual reality-bred creatures invade scenes we are familiar with and cause a little bit of havoc .

The working title of the project will be Uncanny Valley based on the robotics theory where the hypothesis is “that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness (wikipedia)” Is not the idea of consumerism and lifestyle also based on this impossible proximity: the closer you get to what you are after there further you are…? Whatever the concept that will eventually emerge, another technical experiments here for display to see what I am thinking off…

Been in Bombay for awhile doing some research and some pixelography (me and a friend came up with this term as photography does not quite do it justice anymore …). The aim here as the idea evolved is to create a portrait of the city in terms of what I like to call ‘-dividualism’ — that which precedes the individual. We have seen too many picture of smiling faces, or more specifially, too much photography of teeth. Of individuals and teeth. Of the National Geography imaginary of the exotic world that we all grew up on.

But for anybody who stays in Bombay for more than a few days will know that in such an enormous metropolis, most of the people we never can or will experience as individuals. Rather, it is the non-linear mass of collective movement, flows, moorings, accelerations, trans- and inter-actions that we experience. This is what I call the “-dividual city.” So I am more interested in seeing a kind of an a-anthropocentric vision of the world: not seeing frozen moments, but seeing fluctuating frame-rates, seeing different timescales of existence from cars to people to buildings to nature bubbling in-between!

Some illustration sketches I was doing for a friend’s experimental fiction book he was writing a couple of years ago.  Many things happened in between and the book never got the light of day.  But quite enjoyed these sketches and the process along the way …

Some posters I did for the series of talks and seminars with film makers and speakers we hosted at SOAS with our media collective SACREDMEDIACOW. The aim of these was to make them as simply as possible as they had to be photocopied black and white. The exception is the conference poster that I made in color. No conscious Bauhaus functionalism and minimalism here … just low budgets.

Some more experimentos. Sometimes, I must admit, there is just no beating digitality. Yes, doing sketches by hand is fun and has its own aesthetics and pleasure that comes with it. But then there are times when the visuality that emerges from “jamming” with light on photoshop that just has no comparison. Next step to achieve similar effects in moving images, in time-based painting.

Check out below and be sure to enlarge the image to see the desired effect real size.