Personal Documentation of Public Space and Hybrid Media. Section 1:
Project: HIT Course: Public Spaces Hybrid Media
Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology
Rajasee Ray 29.11.10
Section 2: For me, Public Spaces and Hybrid Media was a course about real spaces, real time, real people - and working for and with beliefs and identities, with the help of various tools. Our group project, HIT, located itself very snugly in the "real spaces", "real people" bit, because we explored our space - the vegetable market on Sampige Road, and the road as a context to the market - and identified the hierarchy and structure - both working as well as material - of the market, set in Sampige Road. We also identified some key people who were integral parts of this working hierarchy. Through our process, we struggled with "beliefs" and "identities", because we started off planning for a place we never knew, with generalized problems and solutions - and ended up with an understanding of a complex space, which had convoluted working systems that forced us to revisit the effectiveness and, in fact, use of our original plans. The two things that were part of the initial course description - were the RTI and the media tools. I think that during the course of the project, HIT ended up using the RTI as a tool for dialogue, among other things. The sound workshop contributed by helping us decode and recode - to get a better understanding of the space, and what we could gather from it. Most of all, our group project was about attracting attention, and being loud enough to be heard after we'd left - being loud enough to entice a public discussion. We used what tools we thought would be most appropriate for this intention, and the space we were working with, and ended up with a hybrid form of real time communication that we called "tactics of debate". In our small way, if only for the moment that we were there, I think we changed the nature of the space that we were in,
making it more participatory, communicative and definitely entertaining. Section 3: Many many updates later, our final intention with our project was, in my words: > to use "tactics of debate" to comment on the market(s) on Sampige Road, and the people who uses them, including us. > and consequently, create a space for a public discussion. Since the beginning, I was extremely interested in the ownership vs. usage question that had been brought up so many times in our class discussions. Who owns a space(physical/virtual) - or, for that matter, a Right? And who uses these? What is the relationship/hierarchy/structural system between the owner and the user? Many of these questions came back to the word "citizen". There is an illusive security in being a user that tricks one into believing that one has the privileges of the owner, especially in market spaces. This is, of course, glaringly evident in spaces like FoodWorld and Mantri Mall, where sitting on the floor or asking for the location of the live camera for the fun screen draws the attention of higher security officials with walkie-talkies who have obviously been "called in" to make sure you're abiding by the rules as well as not a terrorist. It is also present in the psyche of the shopkeepers at the vegetable market on Sampige Road, people who on the surface level talked about their shops and their market project and their problems of water shortage and electricity shortage, but on the other hand passingly mention a court case, which, on further inquiry at the local MLA's office, turns out to be a dispute about their shop rents being paid to the wrong official. It is also there in the very act of being present in a public space, which is officially, and in all appearances, owned by the "citizen", albeit extremely indirectly. In all public spaces, there is a constant shuffling of inclusion and exclusion that happens with different people at different times. Counter publics get created by time, situation and momentary majorities - and then are drawn back into the surge of the public, only to be replaced by a different counter public. In our public debate, where we vocally, and visually, drew as much attention to ourselves as possible, we created more systems of inclusions and exclusions, among the people who were/weren't listening/stopping/watching/participating/commenting/sharing/being influenced. One minute we were the exclusions, using the pavement to fight, the next minute, we were inclusions, participating in discussions with shopkeepers and shoppers and owning the space and their attentions, if only under the pretext of facilitating a conversation. And if these terms like "ownership" and "usage" can be used as freely as I have just used them, is any "user" a momentary "owner" of a public space, specifically a local market? And what then, is a passive user?
I was also extremely interested in the individual resource/audience/participant in a space. What is this person's motivations/priorities/responsibilities? Our exploration of the market on Sampige Road sort of forced us to look at these individuals more carefully, not just as part of a larger working hierarchy of structure - but also as distinctly different people with their own stories, histories, motivations and intentions. The shopkeeper on the third stall from the right was not just a shopkeeper with the same problems of water and electricity shortage - but Mr. Shiv Kumar, the right-hand man of the president of the market association, with immense faith in local politicians, and an optimist when it came to projects, be they government projects - or design student projects. The president of the market association was not just another link in the chain of hierarchy - but Mr. M. K. Swamy, a patriot who would, after religiously completing his rituals at the market temple every day, take a round around the stalls in the market before sitting at his store. This approach to the exploration of the space, of course, needed to be placed adjacent to a broader perspective of the working structure and hierarchal system of the market, to attempt to understand the workings of the space at different levels. Section 4: The reason the four of us got together was that we wanted to make multiple small fun interventions, with the focus on the media used, instead of the message relayed, and HIT the public with awareness and agency to do with the RTI. We put together a number of ideas, including a live projected twitter map, a black box of RTI success stories, guerilla logos and posters, a megaphone in a public space to voice general concerns, and many other such plans. I was really excited about the different kinds of media that we'd been shown as tools, and wanted to try them out and see what response they'd get from the public. At this point, this experimental trial-error looked like the most interesting avenue to explore. http://hititnowrti.blogspot.com/2010/11/plan-that-was.html Our project was initially not space specific at all - but for logistical reasons, we needed to choose a space and we decided that the Malleshwaram market would be an interesting space to work with, because it was old Bangalore where new places like the Mantri Mall was coming up. We clubbed our investigation of the space with the sound workshop. Our theme for the sound project was to do with unvoiced questions, when we started the investigation. We learnt a lot about the market, and the project that the corporation was working on with the space, and the problems that were still there. Mr. Shiv Kumar, a shopkeeper, told us about the local MLA, who he said we should go and talk to about the project. After working on the sound piece, we continued with our investigation of the space. We also put up posters about the RTI in Kannada and English down Sampige Road and in the market, and conducted small exercises like slipping handwritten notes about the RTI in front of people while they sat eating at
Mantri Mall, and impromptu theatre pieces informing people about the RTI at Mantri and in a bus. Everything generated some amount of interest - but the interest was always momentary - just when we were putting up the forms, or performing the improvisations, and was more an interest in the form that we were using - the posters or the play-acting - than a lasting interest about the topic of discussion.
We also talked to the MLA about the market project, and questioned him about the things that hadn't been completed when they were supposed to. His comment on the fact that new stores like FoodWorld and Reliance taking away the customers from the market was that the shopkeepers at the market were never courteous to their customers, and this was the reason why they were losing the customers to these supermarkets - which had excellent customer service. http://hititnowrti.blogspot.com/2010/11/mla-talking.html It was at this point that space suddenly became more important than our trialerror experimentation at interventions. We realized that things weren't as simple as the people in the market standing up for their rights from the government. The market - and the people there - had their own problems. Half of the market was occupied by illegal squatters, the hawkers who were supposed to move in hadn't budged from the market on the main road and 8th cross - where they got more customers - and there was a court case going on regarding the payment of rent for the stalls to the wrong authority. The talk with the MLA, juxtaposed against the conversations with the people at the market, suddenly made the space a whole lot more complex, rich - and confusing. And although I didn't know where to go from there, I was quite fascinated. This was a space with subjective problems - that couldn't be solved by demanding documented information from the government, because many of the problems had to do with fundamental questions of change and commercialization, that were points of debate rather than documented wrongs that someone or the other was accountable for.
We were quite at a loss there, needing desperately to evaluate where we stood - and what we could do with the information we had collected, and where to go from there with the time we had left. After the panel review, we decided that half-hearted attempts to revive our original ideas of RTI interventions were out of the question. We had an intense discussion about where we stood, and decided to use our confusion to our advantage. We focused on two main points of tension in our space: the debate between markets and supermarkets, against the backgrounds of small trade, commercialization, globalization and changing times - and the debate between the active and the passive citizen, against the background of Sampige Road and the RTI as something we'd recently delved into during the course. The public debates themselves turned out to be extremely fun, loud and participatory events, that got a huge amount of response from the people on the street. Three of the people who participated in the discussion asked for RTI forms, which they said they would use. I think that the most important thing about these "tactics of debate" is that they helped to make the pavement of Sampige Road more engaging and participatory as a public space. Referring back to Ash Amin's article where he talked about public spaces familiarizing the unfamiliar, and making the familiar unfamiliar, the "tactics of debate" succeeded in using this familiarization - and also, in some sense the unfamiliar - to make Sampige Road more engaging by facilitating a discussion among complete strangers after first attracting attention with a loud verbal fight on familiar issues. It was also extremely encouraging that the debate continued in some places even after we'd moved down the road. Section 5: The first and foremost assumption we made as a group was a generalization of public problems. We saw the RTI as a tool to get information from the authority - and the public space as a conglomeration, among other things, of various problems with civic workings. No space is of course, this simple, and there are various problems on the part of all the users as well as owners of every space - and this was eventually quite evident in the Sampige Road market. Every conversation we had with the people at the market, and finally the one with the local MLA, made this clearer and clearer. We also assumed that the characteristics that made any public space individual would not adversely effect the workings of our first intervention ideas, because we assumed that all places had such problems, and failed to realize that there might be more to these spaces than just that. I think that more than an assumption, I chose to ignore the individuality of any public space we chose to then work with, because I was excited with the prospects of using these different tactical media tools in public spaces. But sooner or later, of course, it was bound to come up, which made our process quite interesting.
We spent quite a lot of time in the market, discussing amongst ourselves - as well as a lot of time spent just ambling down Sampige Road, and various shops and supermarkets, not to mention Mantri Mall. I think that this time helped us familiarize ourselves with the distinct characteristics of each space the market, each supermarket, the road, different areas and shops, the mall, which helped us to both improvise our performance interventions in the mall and the bus, and also plan our "tactics of debate" so as to get a good response. An assumption that we made about the final form of "tactics of debate" before we actually carried it out was that it would be useful as an artistic comment and to generate a momentary public debate, and not beyond that. But when the RTI came up, and people actually asked for the forms, i realized that we could have pushed the design of these debates a little further to actually initiate action as well as reaction from more than just three people, if we collectively wanted to. Another very basic assumption I made was to do with the from vs. content debate. While planning the interventions and tactics, I had assumed that the form had to be focused on more than the content to grab people's attentions. Somehow, in trying to do that, we left the content to take care of itself. This is one of the many reasons why our initial ideas, which included an off-tangent experiment I worked with on facebook where I commented on dozens of status messages, which were usually in the form of questions or complaints with the sentence "file an RTI!", did not work. In many of these ideas, the form tended to overpower the content, making the audience or the participants momentarily entertained - but never lastingly intrigued. The response we got from the last public debate, where we spent some time deciding the nature of the content of the debate, actually put this into perspective. Section 6: There were many points in the project, during the investigation and the interventions - as also the final debate - when I had to re-evaluate my stand on a lot of things. Working within the group, I think I was quite cynical from the start of all our intervention ideas, but wanted to do them, because of the novelty of using such tactical media in public spaces, and the intention of creating awareness was never really important to me. I don't think I really admitted that to myself till we actually started doing some of the small interventions and improvisations. I was also, consequently, never let down by the turn of events in the process, because I never really expected things to go anywhere. In many senses, I was extremely comfortable in my role as a passive observer, stepping out of my way only to get a better viewpoint of spaces and people. In fact, the complexity of the market space, and its individuals and working structures was quite fascinating to me as it unfolded, and I would have loved to explore it more. "HIT"ting is fun, but I think I ultimately enjoy teasing out my
understanding of spaces and people more. Which is why the final public debate, which forced us to take stands and further dialogue about many issues including, and especially, active and passive citizenship, made me think about many of the things I said, without thinking, during the discussions. I was explaining the concepts "active" and "passive" to an interested college student during the debate, when I suddenly let flow this torrent of a confession about how "passive" I was. It was funny, because I'd always shrugged this off with many excuses, not unlike the ones Boris was using as his arguments for being a "passive citizen". But then there was an absence of self-assuredness in my explanation of the "passive" that made me want to think about my shrug-offs. I haven't done that yet, though introspect further. It was an uncomfortable moment, caught on record.
Section 7: I wouldn't give up any part of the process we went through, because I think there's value in the way we realized the weaknesses in our assumptions, and then repeatedly accommodated new understandings into our project. But, I think I would have really liked to rethink our small interventions and guerilla tactics and spend some productive time on their content as well as their form, before carrying them out - because, most of our interventions turned out to be quite spontaneous, and only momentarily attractive. The posters we put up, for example, were black and white messages about filing RTIs.
If we'd kept the space in mind, maybe we could have made the posters about communication within the market, between the shopkeepers - and the corporation - and also the squatters, made them more colorful. I'm still quite cynical of any of this actually making a difference, but it would be interesting to see the response of the people at the market. But I'm still not sure what exactly I have to say about this communication. That it is necessary, definitely - that a less harsh and more comfortable kind of debate should happen between these people, yes - but how a poster with a few words would bring that about, I don't know. Maybe the intervention with the megaphone would help. Another thing I would like to do, not differently, but additionally, is to redo the public debate in Kannada in the market - and make it about the problems the shopkeepers and squatters face as active/passive citizens. This debate, would, I think, bring many new things to light, if only to get the "users"/"owners" of the market to actually voice their opinions and prejudices. And during the final public debates that we did do, on retrospect, I would also like to have brought up more examples and more RTI forms - and dwell further on more topics of conversation - like small trade, commercialization, globalization and even the nature of public spaces. It would be interesting to see if we could collectively, with everyone present, come up with some sort of hypothetical opinion, if not solution, for all the things that are wrong with the market and Sampige Road today, just as Boris and Madhu, both individually scored a few wins and losses for their arguments depending on the people who joined in the conversation.
Section 8: MAPTIVISM What I liked best about their project was how they subverted the idea of information to subjective data. I thought that that was a very interesting way of looking at information. Unfortunately, I missed their final installation, which I was really looking forward to - because their concept of a map really intrigued me, and I was extremely curious about how effective their installation would be at mapping the subjective data they'd collected as opposed to just displaying it, while not restricting themselves to conventional mapping tools. Their constant focus on information was a very refreshing approach, that very much influenced our final switch to "tactics of debate". WITTY NOT CUTE Their project had extremely well thought out tactical media approaches - that our project mostly lacked. Their "witty not cute" stand was drastically different from our "hit", and this made their project all the more interesting to me, especially as it lent a new perspective to our own project as well. I think that primarily, the difference between our projects ended up being the target audience; while theirs was the city's middle class youth, ours was everyone on Sampige Road at a given point of time and location. The way they closed the loop of action in their final intervention was also extremely neatly done. It was a good use of available resources, that would have lent some validity to our project, if we had applied it for our final discussion as well, which we did to a very small extent through the giving out of the RTI forms. FYI Their exploration of the "passive citizen" was what interested me about their research. Like our group, they also started off with many assumptions, many of which were proved true. Their juxtaposition of the different attitudes they met with came out extremely interestingly in their final project. Their project and ours came together for me in our final public debate of the active and the passive citizen, but what was really interesting about theirs was that their "passive citizen" was located in a residential complex, whereas ours was on the streets. Section 9: SET 1: 1. I think that our "tactics of debate" made people think about themselves and the decisions they take daily - think about it in a public forum amongst strangers and a few people they interact with everyday - and voice these thoughts. Even if a few people walked away unaffected, I'm sure many people we talked with those few days, had some things to reflect about afterwards and I'm not talking about the three people who actually took back the RTI forms. Also, referring to the Zielinski text, our dual arguments of market vs. supermarket and active vs. passive citizen were, in a way, an image or projection of the audience and participants of the debate themselves. The issues we talked about are issues that are much discussed and confronted on
a daily basis, so our "tactics of debate" acted as both a reproduction or a "spectacular proof" of their much-negotiated personal choices as well as an image or a comment of where we perceive these choices to be coming from, and the consequences they might have, and therefore offered people more than one avenue of introspection or external-reflection. 2. There were many instances where both we and the people who participated in our debate learnt new things. The first and most obvious example is that of the three people who learnt about the RTI and took back RTI forms. The other examples are more subjective, and have to do with how the public discussion in real time force people to take immediate sides and defend themselves - and since it was a debate, there were always both sides to the story, even among tight groups of friends. More than learning from the debate, our tactics encouraged people to learn from each other, and the public nature of Sampige Road and the market is what actually let us turn our debate into a pedagogical forum, for ourselves as well as for the people who participated. 3. Our project used the familiar-strange nature of public space to change the level of involvement and participation that was present in Sampige Road. It rearranged the familiar and the strange by attracting attention with a loud verbal fight, and then enticing people to join in the debate. So it did change the amount of interaction on the streets, using the pavement as a platform for a debate, where people actually voiced their opinions and took sides, and interacted with strangers about personal choices. It rearranged the observer/performer on a market road - and made the shopkeepers come outside their shops to watch and participate, and the passers-by stop and engage in the discussion. 4. I think, and am repeating myself to answer this question, that people rethought their stances of bribes, corruption, action and choices at the debates. In terms of form, our project challenged the position that interventions have to have one particular message to actually make a difference, and played around with dualities, debates, sides and arguments to facilitate discussion, which further facilitated an albeit small change. And in terms of content, we used the RTI to challenge the commonly held assumption that nothing can usually be done, although this did not help more than three people. 5. As a pedagogical endeavor, to the "active citizens" we left behind their fellow citizen's argument of the "passive" side, and vice versa, thus creating a space for discussion as well as introspection about everyday choices that everyone makes. We said that we were people who had our own responsibilities, and not much time to make a life for ourselves. On the other hand, we said that our city and our public spaces were ours - and small decisions affect big changes. SET 2: 1. Whatever we said about relating the Zielinski text to our project had to do with our live screen projection, which was later abandoned. However, the
concept still holds for any projection of an image of the space, whether we project it as a real time performance, or a reproduction of the space. We basically projected everyday choices that the people make in our performative debate - and our arguments were, in many ways, their own. I believe that, as I mentioned before, our "tactics of debate" acted as both a reproduction or a "spectacular proof" of their much-negotiated personal choices as well as an image or a comment of where we perceive these choices to be coming from, and the consequences they might have, and therefore offered people more than one avenue of introspection or external-reflection. And this is also why we decided to both leave our personal comments and also create a space for discussion through our "tactics of debate". About the Warner text, our entire concept of debate was a play of pitting publics and counter-publics against each other, in fact actually creating a counter-public from among neutral users of a space, and then through an over-dramatized debate, drawing out these arguments and weighing them against each other. About the Winner text, after much deliberation we finally did use our gun as a logo, because we decided that although the gun was a very politically and culturally heavy symbol, this would be a positive thing for us as it would attract attention in the kind of space we were working in. We also used the RTI form as a tool, which on retrospect has a lot to do with its inherent politics, although we didn't really think of it that way. Burrel's text made us rethink some of our guerilla ideas - as spam-like approaches often have a negative impact where people get irritated with the message one is trying to propagate. And my brief but pretty explosive stint on facebook, manually spamming people, proved this, as "file an RTI!" soon started receiving some negative responses as well. 2. The process we followed to create our audio files was a simple decodecode process. Our investigation of the space was amalgamate with our sound exploration, so this helped us in terms of audio records of what people said so that we could actually decode these and recode them again for our larger project as well as the sound piece, to understand the space better. So yes, the layered sound piece that we produced finally was also an indication of the complexity of the space we were exploring, although it didn't really hit us till we talked to the MLA. But we kept using sound recordings to further our investigations, and our final debate was, very much in the spirit of the process that the sound workshop followed, more a coded comment on the issues we debated, than a straightforward stand. http://hititnowrti.blogspot.com/2010/11/soundscape.html 3. a) Hacking and Critical Making We "hacked" a few spaces in the course of our project, especially Mantri Mall, where we used the way the Mall was structured to perform some small interventions, like a short play-pretend about two people talking about going to file and RTI in a taxi, which was actually a seat in the Mall. We used Mantri
Mall's feedback form to write down about the RTI. Also in our husband-wife debate, we "hacked" a critique on commercialization and global branding into supermarkets by pretending to be real customers. About DIY citizenship, we did leave behind RTI forms with three people who were going to file them, and also some more forms to people who might. b) Collective Cultures We changed the nature of the space we were working with by using an extremely participatory and interactive "tactic of debate", familiarizing the strange, and vice versa, and this is where our project links with the Ash Amin text, as I have mentioned before. c) Site I think that our final project effectively brought different aspects of the work site together, including the Right to Information, the nature and characteristics of public spaces - and also some form of audio-visual media in the sense that we use three things to attract people - a loud verbal fight, visual gestures of conflict and boards over our Madhu and Boris that graphically represented the side they stood for using images and text.
d) Citizenship and Accountability Our "tactics of debate" not only brought the RTI to the forefront while question the choices that people make everyday, but also took both stands of the active and the passive citizen, thus encouraging people to think and decide for themselves. We met many people who are model citizens in every way, standing up for their rights and optimistic about the future - and conversely we also met many people who thought that the country was doomed - and that bribes were the only way to get through every day. Instead of attacking one or the other of these stands, we let them debate it out openly in a public forum, which I think, is why our project was different and exciting for us as well. Section 10: On hindsight, there is a lot more that I would like to look at through the lens of the project we just did, and a lot more lenses that I'd like to look at our project through as well. One of these lenses is the ethnographic perspective, with which I'd like to look at Sampige Road as a whole, and map our different interventions into it to create a layered understanding of the space and what we did there. Section 11: I think that the most influence I've had during the course of this project is that of the other PSHM groups and their different approaches. The different people we worked with from the beginning of the course have also influenced the way our project turned out. We were very much influenced by the Complaints Choir of Birmingham, and also the efforts of the activists who, like Anil Kumar, have exposed different areas of corruption. This influenced us during our investigation process.
Deepak Srinivasan's idea of a social comment through the evolution of man also influenced our final decision of putting a comment out there rather than a seed for change. Pooja Sagar's perspective of assimilating data is something I'd like to still try with our space. Also, Zeenath Hasan's overview of making connections was always helpful at every step of the way, especially when we were getting stuck with our direction. Another huge source of inspiration were the MKSS jan-sunwayis, whose formats we twisted and played with to come up with our "tactics of debate".
Link to Documentation: http://hititnowrti.blogspot.com/Â