excerpt
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Calcutta is what I call home. Decaying, neuralgic and overtly nostalgic—detractors complain. Its skyline, cluttered with enough phallic interjections of steel and concrete—supposed markers of a modern metropolis—underlines the dichotomy that is Calcutta. But what makes a city successful? And what remains of a city—architecture, memory, maybe an idea of home?
As contours of shapes and intimacy of spaces are lost to the mutation of memory, often a trail lingers. For those who have left, cities linger too—an ephemeral sillage of sights, sounds and smells, eventually blending into a garland of blurs. Photos of Calcutta from my archive encounter an algorithm that repetitively applies the statistical function of mean on sets of images. The ensuing sillage questions the necessity of superlatives, seeking solace instead in the relative anonymity of average.
—
Calcutta is what I call home. Decaying, neuralgic and overtly nostalgic—detractors complain. Its skyline, cluttered with enough phallic interjections of steel and concrete—supposed markers of a modern metropolis—underlines the dichotomy that is Calcutta. But what makes a city successful? And what remains of a city—architecture, memory, maybe an idea of home?
As contours of shapes and intimacy of spaces are lost to the mutation of memory, often a trail lingers. For those who have left, cities linger too—an ephemeral sillage of sights, sounds and smells, eventually blending into a garland of blurs. Photos of Calcutta from my archive encounter an algorithm that repetitively applies the statistical function of mean on sets of images. The ensuing sillage questions the necessity of superlatives, seeking solace instead in the relative anonymity of average.
︎ click on the contact sheet for a full-screen view of the images
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︎Virtual reality installation designed and developed at the Embodied Storytelling workshop (17-31 May, 2018) conducted by BeAnotherLab at the Interaction Design department, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK).
Print titled ‘Coffee House’ exhibited at the Pavilion of The India Story 5.0.
references
Shulman, J. (n.d.). Photographs of Films.
Sugimoto, H. (n.d.). Theaters.
Khan, I. (n.d.). Pretty as a Thousand Postcards.