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!

The first experiments with a new style I have been developing.  All of these are mostly taken from Corsica over a few weeks last month (a few from Livorno and Rome).  I am using HDR here but as with any other technique, its only to serve you achieve something.  Not the end in itself.  Quite liking the visuals that are emerging…

Some experiments with style that I worked on mostly when in Corsica last month. No particular content/theme; rather working towards a certain visual style that I want to use. These are mostly HDR even though I am trying to avoid the too plastic style that many HDR pictures unfortunately are known for.

Found these old 35 analog photos that I used to do about 10 years ago and scanned in quite a while back.  Quite fun to see how things have and have not changed.  These were taken on travels and on class assignments etc.  I still have hundreds of b&w negatives I should get down to scanning in an seeing what I overlooked  …