Ruchika Nambiar - The Lilliput Proletariat by Art in Transit

THE LILLIPUT PROLETARIAT / JUL - DEC 2014 RUCHIKA NAMBIAR Diploma Project Documentation

Art in Transit Project Cluster Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology

THE LILLIPUT PROLETARIAT / JUL - DEC 2014 RUCHIKA NAMBIAR Diploma Project Documentation

Art in Transit Project Cluster Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology

Project Documentation Book Ruchika Nambiar Diploma Project 2014 /Project Cluster Art in Transit /Facilitators Agnishikha Choudhuri, Amitabh Kumar, Arzu Mistry, Samir Parker Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology

Cover photo credit: Alok Utsav

/ OVERVIEW Art in Transit is a public art project that aims at enhancing public spaces in Bangalore by turning them into cultural hubs that facilitate meaningful interactions through art and design. In collaboration with the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation (BMRC), our pilot project at the Peenya Metro Station began in July 2014, with thirty seven of us exploring ways to create and introduce relevant interventions into the station that would transform it into a space that is sensitive to the cultural context within which it is situated. This is a documentation of my individual contribution to this project.

/ CONTENTS Public Art Practice

Formulating my Project

Motivations Why this project?

My enquiry Finding my hook in Peenya

Understanding public art The risks and limitations

The proposal Framing my intervention

Immersion Dissecting Peenya

Narrowing my study Researching Peenya through the lens of my project

The First Run

Learning from Experience

Conceptual groundwork Developing my narrative

Reflections On myself and my practice

Material explorations Realizing the project

Refining my project Conceptually and materially

The first exhibition Testing our projects onsite

103

Overcoming blocks The challenges of public art

105

Powering on Continuing work on my project

Public Art Practice This project provided us with an opportunity to interact with and create work that was relevant to a very diverse audience. It required us to develop a wholesome understanding of what it meant to place our work in a public space, and furthermore, in a space of transit. We began this project with exercises that helped us understand a public space and consequently create work that was sensitive to it.

/ MOTIVATIONS Why this project? While I’ve never had any particular aversion towards the concept, the idea of ‘public art’ has never truly resonated with me, and still doesn’t, if I’m being completely honest. I find myself unable to associate with the values often attached to the notion of a public artist – values of social and political activism, of having a certain agenda, of affecting immediate change, of addressing issues with a certain urgency. Limiting and stereotypical as these values may be, they don’t speak to my practice and keep me from associating with the idea of public art. Suffice it to say, any desire to be a ‘public artist’ was not the reason I opted for this project. Having said that, the idea of my work receiving the kind of exposure it would in a metro station was appealing. My work has always focused on expressing personal views and opinions, especially regarding socio-cultural evolutionary patterns, in a persuasive manner. I’ve always tried to use forms and methods of expression that make large quantities of information and loaded concepts palatable. This project provided me with the challenge to do the same in a space of transit, with an audience that had limited time and patience. It provided me with an opportunity to ask myself how I would engage such an audience and create in their minds a lasting impression of my work. 13

/ UNDERSTANDING PUBLIC ART The risks and limitations

Public art and my practice

Being a public art project, there were a few constraints that I needed to learn to work within, the biggest being that the audience was diverse and one that I had no control over. Unlike my other projects where I could tailor my work to a demographic profile of my choosing, I now had to create work for people of varying ages, socio-economic backgrounds and levels of education. Loath as I’ve always been towards ‘democratizing’ my work, this was a personal block I needed to overcome and find a way to look at the matter in a positive light.

My work is and always will be, in both direct and indirect ways, a living record of myself. I use my work to preserve myself in bits and pieces, given my ridiculously potent fear of losing myself. While some of my works directly record my personal experiences (albeit in whimsical, semi-fictional ways), others maintain a record of my views on various matters and present them framed within a certain context. It is often the latter method I turn to when I’m required to create a piece about something other than myself. I find it impossible to invest myself in a project unless I can find a way to weave into it an issue that

Another challenge with public art in general is gathering funds and resources. With this project specifically, this issue widened our audience pool – we now also had to appeal to corporates who needed to see the value of investing in our work. These potential investors hailed from backgrounds far removed from art and therefore, our work required to have enough visual impact to impress them regardless of how conceptually engaging it may have been. 14

‘The Breadcrumb’, a graphic memoir

is of great personal significance to me. Fortunately for me, there are a wide variety of such issues for me to pick and choose from. Essentially, I am interested in change – on the level of the individual and of the collective, as well as the relationship between the two. I like to study how changes in the individual reflect in the collective and vice versa. But the deeper agenda behind that study is to try and understand why people find it so difficult to remain true, integral and whole and consequently use that knowledge to keep myself true and integral and whole. In this regard, while I am my primary audience for all of my work, it is immensely important

‘The Living Library of Dystopia’, a scaled museum model

to me that my work is engaging and easily digestible to other people as well. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I desperately need for people to know me, and know me intimately and accurately, because the more people know me, the less prone I am to changing into someone I don’t recognize. The second reason is that if, in the event I do change into someone I don’t recognize, my work needs to be convincing and engaging enough to interest my new self and remind her about who she was. Having said that, my work always has much too much to say. I write too much, there are too many backstories and altogether my

‘Grandma Wars’, a whimsical history textbook about my relationship with my grandmother.

‘Misandry Spelt Backwards’, a fotonovela about a dystopian misandrist future

work becomes painfully heavy and overwhelmingly detailed. And the problem with my ideas is such that their essence can never be captured in a summarized form. Hence, all of my work incorporates narrative in an attempt to make large amounts of information engaging and easy to swallow. Narratives have the power to persuade in an unobtrusive manner, they have the power to make one sympathetic to the protagonist no matter how practically

unrelatable he/she may be. This project provided my practice with its most stimulating challenge yet. I now had to figure out how to engage an audience that was, firstly, extremely diverse, and secondly, extremely short on time and patience. How could I introduce a detailed narrative with a loaded concept into a space of transience and have it be read fully and accurately?

Public art examples that resonate with me The kind of work I most appreciate is one with detail – where complex and layered stories are narrated through detail, where the work can be absorbed at different levels, macro and micro. But I also believe the form needs to be such that it invites the viewer to examine and explore such 16

detail rather than overwhelm or intimidate. Jerry Gretzinger’s map of an alternative world was one that interested me a great deal. He created this map over fifty years, adding a new A4 sheet to it every other day. As the map grew larger, he added railway stations

and courthouses and malls to “provide for the population”. There were two aspects of this project that grabbed my attention. The first was the fact that this was a speculative world. I am extremely interested in the use of alternative worlds, and especially dystopian ones, in order to illuminate aspects of our own reality that are otherwise invisible to us. Starting a world from scratch allows us to understand the forces and tensions that go about shaping an environment and helps us better understand why systems function the way

they do. The other aspect of this project was the fact that this world Gretzinger created was a civilization, a city, and he therefore would have had to, to some extent, deal with the sociopolitical tensions around the notion of “development”. Such an exercise helps one understand how decisions are made when there are a great number of people affected by the change, it helps one understand how to prioritize collective values, who to favour and what kinds of compromises need to be made. [1]

^ Gretzinger with his work

^ A detail of the map

^ Indigo Blue, 1991

Ann Hamilton’s body of work was also something I found rather fascinating. While I’ve never truly had much patience for heavily abstracted art, hers is different in that her work almost reads like poetry. Hamilton works on large scale installations, sometimes performance-based or interactive. Her work deals rather closely with how histories translate into material objects. In several of her projects, she exploits the very materiality and literal nature of certain kinds of objects, actions and imagery in order to evoke the histories of the culture embedded in these objects and practices. Writes curator Joan Simon, “Hamilton’s installations share an

understanding of socioeconomic subtexts that are embedded in consciousness as well as in place but are often lost or effaced from written histories.”[2] For example, with her piece ‘Indigo Blue’, installed in an old garage in Charleston, South Carolina, Hamilton addressed the selective manner in which the tourist industry marketed the city. The street on which the garage was located was named after Eliza Pinckney who introduced indigo to Charleston. The piece consisted of a platform piled with 14000 pounds of blue work clothes. At the back of the garage sat an attendant who erased blue record books, leaving the eraser dust to accumulate

over time. In the humid weather, soybeans hung in nets around the space, along with the clothes that grew damp over time, lent the space a dense and musty odour. With the piece, she wished to represent a “history that is based more in the somatic experience of the body than in the statistical accounting of events and facts.”[3] Simon goes on to write that Hamilton “[combines] a conceptualist’s roaming of language and ideas with an almost contradictory quest to materialize these referents.” Another installation of hers, ‘Privation and Excesses’, consisted of 750,000 pennies laid out over a bed of honey. Both pennies and honey serving as the basic units of larger social systems of men and bees respectively, the juxtaposition of the two pointed out the inherent worth of honey over the intrinsic worthlessness of a single penny.[4] [5]

^ Privation and Excesses, 1989

^ The Event of a Thread, 2012

Another piece that interested me was Mark Dion’s ‘Neukom Vivarium’, a fallen tree log stored in a greenhouse that acts as an ecosystem of its own, housing fungi, bacteria, lichen, etc. Visitors are given a magnifying glass to examine the smaller living beings. Dion incorporates biology, archaeology, ethnography and history of science into his work. He studies how dominant ideologies and institutions shape our understanding of history and our knowledge of the natural world. Says Dion about ‘Neukom Vivarium’, “In some ways, this project is an abomination. We’re taking a tree that is an ecosystem…and we are re-contextualizing it… We’re putting it in a sort of Sleeping Beauty coffin…[and] pumping it up with a life support system [that’s] incredibly difficult, expensive, and technological to approximate…this piece is in some way perverse. It shows that, despite all of our technology and money, when we destroy a natural system, it’s virtually impossible to get it back. In a sense, we’re building a failure.” While his work deals with how information is embedded within tangible forms, it also questions paradigms of knowedge and the frameworks through which we assess “progress” and the building and furthering of knowledge. Through collecting, ordering and displaying objects, he questions the line between objective scientific method and subjective influences.[6] < Neukom Vivarium, Seattle, Washington,USA

/ IMMERSION Creating tools to study an area We primarily used three tools to dissect an area and gain a wholesome understanding of it. The first was sketching so as to understand how the physical space spoke to us, which elements we chose to highlight, which ones to downplay. The second was formulating metaphors to give form to the more intangible aspects of the space. And the third was mapping the area using self-defined parameters. With each of these tools, before employing them at Peenya, we first tested them out on a different area in order to get a better grip on how to use the tool and understand the nature of information we could gather from its use. Sketching the Purple Line We first tested out the sketching tool along the Purple Line which runs from MG Road to Byappanahalli. Dividing the class into groups, each group was assigned to one of the six stations along the line. I was assigned to the Indiranagar station. While sketching the station, I was rather selective about what I wished to depict and what I didn’t. Therefore, I’d often ignore drawing elements that might have very well been within the frame. I also found the medium of sketching unable to accommodate the kinds of things I wished to represent - details, movement, sounds, etc. Hence, I began “zooming into” certain areas within my sketch to highlight such observations.

^ As a class, we then laid our sketches around maps of the different stations and then recreated the Purple Line, giving a viewer a complete sense of the lineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s geography.

A metaphor for the Purple Line I very strongly associate places with the colour palette of the area, especially affected by light in the area and how much of the sky one can see. CMH road was, for me, an extremely bright, wide, colourful road whose ambience changed drastically when the metro station was built. Using layers of printed OHP, I wished to show the areaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s transformation over time, specifically highlighting the way the colours in the area had changed, going from bright and sunny to gloomy and grey. This having been conveyed in the first few layers, the subsequent layers sought to recreate my experience while sketching the station, highlighting details in the order in which they made themselves apparent to me.

The flipping of the OHP sheets is intended to create a sense of passing time. When we sit down to observe a space, one by one, we notice details about the space that we hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t noticed before. This artefact attempts to recreate that experience by adding new elements to every new layer. I also began annotating these elements with whatever I was thinking when I observed them, something I found I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do in the previous sketching exercise, given that sketching cannot always capture time or movement.

Second iteration of the metaphor The OHP booklet did not necessarily employ any specific metaphor. Therefore, I repeated the assignment using the same basic concept and visualised the metro as a large living machine that sucks and drains the city of its life and colour in the process of being built.

Sketching the Peenya Station We then moved on to sketching the Peenya metro station – our project site. What struck me about the Peenya station was the airiness, caused by its exposed metal skeleton, and the amount of light that entered the building. While this was something I’d have liked to convey through my sketches, they haven’t really come across. I also chose vantage points that would highlight the sheer number of lines that converged at several different points.

Personal metaphor for the Peenya Station When I saw the Peenya metro station, I was struck by how open and airy the space was, simply because it was still being constructed. You could see parts of its skeletal frame, letting light into the building. While on the metro towards Mantri Mall, it seemed every station was more complete and refined than the last one. I’ve always imagined the metro as this underground creature that emerges from the ground whenever it senses a lot of activity above. While not necessarily harmful, this creature does cause a fair amount of destruction as it emerges from the ground. Once above ground, it begins gaining an

armour of metal and concrete, becoming still and lifeless, and people soon grow numb to it, but it still remains an alien structure that can never truly belong. Group metaphor for the Peenya Station Group members: Alok Utsav, Anchana Kota, Aroushka D’Mello, David McKenzie, Ria Bajaj, Sayori Mukherjee, Vrinda Gupta, Ruchika Nambiar Our next task was to come up with a metaphor for the station as a group and to create a single artefact to represent that metaphor. Our group’s theme was Objectification/Personification. While discussing our individual metaphors, we noticed an aspect they all shared: they spoke of a journey, of moving from point A to B, of changing along the way. From Alok’s steak metaphor to Anchana’s ocean currents, they all dealt with flow and movement from one point to another.

^ Finding a common metaphor from all our individual metaphors

Attempting to find a metaphor specific to Bangalore’s metro, we zeroed in on the idea that Bangalore had just crossed “puberty”, it wasn’t as old as cities like Mumbai or Kolkata. We decided to take the idea further, comparing Bangalore’s metro to an adolescent boy’s attempt to grow facial hair. We realized the strength of this metaphor was that every stage in the growing of facial hair had an analogous stage in the development of Bangalore’s metro. So we chose a form that would give equal consideration to each and every stage without summarising or condensing any of it.

^ Group brainstorming

We created a flip book of sorts, illustrating the different stages with a simple semi-poetic story to go along with it. While the illustrations were of facial hair, the poem was written such that it could apply to both facial hair as well as the metro. We make no mention of the metro, except in a subtle reference on the cover page, so as to emphasize how very similar the two ideas are.

Cover and packaging ^

^ Scenes from the flipbook

Mapping Yelahanka We first tested the mapping tool out on Yelahanka before moving to Peenya. Drawing a circle of 2-km radius around our college campus, we split up into 18 pairs, each pair taking an equal slice of the area, with a brief to map anything that Google Maps does not show you. Partner: Siddhanth Shetty Siddhanth and I explored the slice covering a significant portion of SFS colony as well as the whole of Purva Venezia. Several of our ideas to represent the area involved highlighting the contrast between local Yelahanka and Purva Venezia.

As a class, we also came up with a common legend so as to lend some consistency to our individual slices.

Siddhanth and I created two maps. The first was a map of auto, car, walking and cycle routes used by Srishti students to go from Purva Venezia and SFS colony to the various Srishti campuses. The map also depicted the density of Srishti students living on the different streets of SFS colony. The second map consisted of three transparent layers that illuminated the differences between local Yelahanka and Purva Venezia - the first layer depicted the difference in architectural styles of the buildings, the second depicted the changing colour palette across the slice, and the third depicted the difference in the kind of people between the two areas. We used photographs of real people in Yelahanka and juxtaposed them against Sims characters in Purva Venezia to say that people living in such complexes play their lives like a simulation game â&#x20AC;&#x201C; they live a romanticized and rather plastic existence.

^ Routes from Purva and SFS to the various Srishti campuses as well as student density in SFS

^ Changing architectural landscape

^ Changing colour palette

^ Changing aspirations

As a class, we then put our 18 slices together to create a large, unique and comprehensive view of the 2-km radius around the campus. v

Mapping Peenya Partner: David McKenzie We then moved on to mapping whatever area of Peenya we wished to map, using parameters of our own choosing. David and I chose to map the names of all the businesses, big and small, along a winding route flanking both sides of the Peenya metro station. We then presented the information in two layers - the first contained only the portion of the name that described the service provided; the second contained the unique proper noun portion of the name. The intent was two-fold: to map the services in the area; and to do a reverse-demographic mapping of the area based on how people named their businesses. It was a study of how people chose to represent themselves - because no matter how big or small, one would always name their business with care. It gave us insight into how people thought, who they wished to target and what their aspirations were, based entirely on whether they chose to name their business Sri Raghavendra Pan Stall or Luxor Infotech.

^ Mapping the services

^ Mapping the names

Complete double-layered map v

A brief glimpse into the mailbox of a control-freakish, obsessive compulsive emailer. Assigning myself the task of organizing all things in class that required organizing, my duties included writing long and meticulous emails to my poor weary classmates, monopolizing the class Facebook group by posting countless notifications and reminders, making endless lists, and finally, tracking. Tracking, tracking, tracking.

Formulating my Project After having gained an in-depth understanding of Peenya and its relationship to the metro station, I began drawing from those insights and framing my personal intervention in the station.

/ MY ENQUIRY Finding my hook in Peenya

Framing questions

While Peenya fascinated me, it took me a very long time to get a grasp of the area. I couldn’t get a sense of it the way I could with city spaces in general and this frustrated me a great deal. This was mostly due to the fact that, at first glance, there wasn’t anything tangible to get a hold of, to study. There were hardly any people around in the industrial areas, people only came there to work, there were no autos and buses because people got there on their own, there were no shops, no bakeries, nothing. What particularly surprised me was that there were no ads, there were barely any on the very main road and none at all if one travelled deeper.

I then framed the following questions that found relevance in my own practice and used them as a lens to further explore Peenya:

There were none of the usual markers for me to study, no obvious signs through which people revealed themselves. For this reason, the businessname mapping truly helped me overcome that block because it pushed me to dig up the more subtle non-obvious ways in which people revealed something of themselves. Until then, I’d struggled to characterize Peenya. 48

What tools may one use while speculating as opposed to investigating the future of a community? What are the tensions, questions and challenges that emerge while trying to understand what ‘development’ means? What tangible markers or artefacts may we find in our environment that have a community’s cultural and historical information embedded within them?

I then began making notes of the observations that nudged at those questions: Tools for speculation - Sites for possible change - Empty plots - Changeable graphics such as movie posters, signage, graffiti, etc - Indicators of an existing system that can be used to further a story - Political hoardings, clusters of shops (e.g. street full of steel shops) - Ongoing phenomena/processes that can be exaggerated -Weeds growing over footpaths, moss growing on walls Tensions around development - Development across industrial/residential/commercial areas - Differing rates based on proximity to the metro - Areas that are still open to new building - Differences in the provision of civic amenities and public maintenance Tangible markers embedded with historical information - Text in all forms, shop names, advertisements, discarded items, lost items, waste material, fliers, food wrappers, truck art, most frequently bought items at stores, etc.

^ Belonging to ‘The City’ series, Lori Nix [7]

Tapping the information

the city and I decided to exploit that aspect and exaggerate it in order to weave a narrative out of it. The fact that Peenya had no advertisements was also another aspect I thought I could make use of, considering it was something that made Peenya very different from the rest of the city.

I now had to figure out how to tap the information I’d collected in a way that made sense to my practice. There were several aspects to choose from, but I decided the one with the most potential was the fact that Peenya already had a very dystopian air about it.

Choosing a form

Alternate realities, dystopian ones especially, being a topic of interest to me, I decided this was the aspect to explore further in my project. Peenya already seemed very far removed from the rest of

While I mostly veer towards print media, specifically books, I don’t like to limit myself in terms of form. For this project, I had to settle upon a form that would make sense to both my practice

as well as to a public site of transience. Miniatures dioramas have long been a great fascination for me and I decided it was an option worth exploring. It had the potential to accommodate long, detailed and nuanced narratives and it was a form that invited its audience in for closer inspection. It was a form that could quite literally stop a viewer in his tracks simply out of curiosity to inspect the level of detail. < Pierre Javelle and Akiko Ida [8]

^ 3D Cartoons by Matt Roussel [9]

/ THE PROPOSAL The following is the formal proposal for my individual intervention at the Peenya station. Overview This project aims at illuminating the strangely pure, almost dystopian quality of Peenya’s industrial area by locating it along Bangalore Metro’s green line and demonstrating the vast demographic shift that takes places between Peenya and the last stop – Mantri Square. In the form of a miniature train diorama, the project hopes to display this shift by drawing from various tangible clues in the area that help build its demographic profile, focusing primarily on advertisements and consumerism, and secondarily on other markers such as language, clothing, transport, etc. These clues shall find themselves represented in the scenes that populate the diorama. Context There is a certain kind of imagery we associate with the notion of ‘urban development’. We require things to look a certain stock52

photoish way in order to be satisfied with our development. I’ve had the opportunity to engage with this theme a few times during the course of this class, whether it was representing urban people as Sims characters living a simulated life, or whether it was metaphorising Bangalore as an adolescent boy waiting to grow facial hair so that he can finally seem grown up. Mapping & Research To better understand this notion of development within Peenya, I sought tangible markers through which people revealed themselves, their intentions and their aspirations. One could understand the people in the area by examining the advertising in the area, the sizes of the businesses in the area, the way people named their businesses, etc. However, one interesting feature of Peenya industrial area was its lack of advertisements. There were no billboards, no posters on the walls, no autos or buses that had their surfaces plastered with ads. Here was a place advertisers had decided wouldn’t yield them

anything. Furthermore, here was a place that the government had long ago serviced with roads and pavements and streetlights, but had ignored ever since, allowing weeds to claim the area. Industry workers came here to work and went back home. They got here with their own vehicles, there was hardly any public transport. It was an abandoned city. Except for the fact that there were people in it, there were no other signs of life. Interestingly though, the kind of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;developmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; that we are familiar with - that includes malls and flyovers and high rises - is taking place just at the fringes of this industrial hub. Peenya being the force that builds the city, it is almost ironic that it powers all the growth that happens just outside its boundaries while it itself remains an unchanging little bubble. Objective I wish to speculate what kind of bubble Peenya may turn into in the midst of the growth happening at its fringes. It isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t to say that Peenya would remain stagnant, but simply to say that it may witness growth of a kind that is perhaps not recognizable to us given our current cultural vocabulary. I hope to do this by exaggerating and extrapolating a dystopian future for Peenya narrated in the form of a miniature train diorama one often finds in train stations.

^ Example of a miniature train diorama

Values and issues I hope for the project to create a sense of strangeness and irony, something a dystopian narrative has often been able to accomplish. However, my intention isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t necessarily to portray Peenya as undeniably dystopian, but rather to blur our understanding of it and make

us question which world is truly dystopian - whether it is the one within Peenya or the one outside of it. By pitting our familiar, recognizable world against a dystopian Peenya, is it possible to make our idea of development seem strange and alien even to ourselves?

Content Communicating Intentions I intend to exploit the very convenient fact that on the other end of the metro line is Mantri Square which bears a vastly different demographic profile when compared to Peenya Industry. I hope to treat Mantri Square as a representative for this typical notion of development I have spoken of thus far and use Mantri Square as my subject of

Peenya inside a bubble. Scenes inside recreated from real life.

one half of my study. Since my dystopian narrative needs to be rooted in the current reality of the area, I intend to use advertisements in the area as a reflection of peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s aspirations. So while extrapolating the future, I hope to populate the diorama with scenes that have been recreated from ads in the area. Almost to whimsically suggest that sometime in the future, people have been successful

Commuters inside metro stare at this strange land in wonder

Scenes outside the bubble recreated from advertisements

Bubble has tunnels through which it supplies and powers the rest of the town.

in making their lives resemble their pretty stock-photo advertisements. Now Peenya having close to no advertisements, its representation would have to find its roots elsewhere. Therefore, I propose to create the Peenya side of the diorama with real scenes that were observed in Peenya e.g. trucks bringing in their load, deserted roads, close to no autos, weedy pavements, a few factory workers here and there, etc. The metro train will run across the two areas, in some ways serving as the one link between the two areas. To further strengthen the dystopian nature of the narrative, there will be an abrupt shift in the landscape when the diorama moves into Peenya. Tentatively, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d consider creating Peenya within an actual physical bubble/ orb with a few gates or tunnels through which raw material leaves and enters. The metro train will also be something that enters the Peenya bubble, with its passengers staring out into this alien, unfamiliar land as they pass through it.

Collecting fodder I propose for all the scenes depicted in the diorama to be taken either directly or exaggerated from the actual existing areas of Peenya and Mantri Square. I plan to document all existing advertisements in Mantri Square and use them to recreate the scenes that will populate the urban portion of the diorama. Instead of looking solely at existing billboards in the space, I may also consider documenting the kinds of products people use/buy in this area (e.g. Colgate toothpaste, Mountain Dew, Samsung smartphone) and recreate scenes from television ads of these products. At Peenya, I plan to document actual people, buildings and activities in the area and recreate them in the Peenya portion of the diorama. To add an extra dimension to the project and make its narrative more nuanced, I also intend to push the diorama into the form of a 3D comic/ infographic. It could include pop-out text, call out boxes or speech bubbles that appear here and there, perhaps even an interesting statistic floating above a miniatureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head.

^ Example of 3D infographic elements

Site I imagine the diorama being placed on the first floor of the Peenya metro station, between the two stairways. I hope to use this location because it is spacious enough to give people the chance to walk around and examine the piece. It is also a space used both by those going towards the trains as well as those leaving from them. Another location I might consider is the front lobby, right after the entrance.

^ Proposed Site

Why this form? Miniature dioramas are a joy to behold no matter who you are or where you come from. This is also a form that is far more effective than other forms in making people pause and take a closer look. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s one of the best forms that can be exploited to show detail and different levels of information because it is something your audience will actually stop to examine closely. Way forward The following are the steps I propose to carry out next in order to realise my project: - Document the journey and the changing physical landscape (architecture, flora, fauna, civic amenities and maintenance, etc.) between Peenya and Mantri Square. - Make an extensive primary bank of all advertisements in both Peenya (if any) and Mantri Square. Create a secondary bank of information regarding clothes worn frequently in the two areas, frequency of public transport, sizes and names of businesses, etc. - Document through photographs key buildings, businesses, people and activities in order to recreate the same as miniatures. - Conduct fly-on-the-wall studies at Peenya and Mantri Square to observe the products and brands people buy or use. - Study the site and decide on a scale and size for the diorama. - Experiment with materials for making different kinds of miniatures (architectural models, human figures, vegetation, etc.) and continuously build an inventory of items required for the dioramamaking process.

/ NARROWING MY STUDY Researching through the lens of my project I first began making picture banks for both Peenya Industrial area as well as advertisements in Mantri Square. This initial research would help create a database from which I could later curate scenes for my diorama. But this exercise also helped me refine the boundaries of my project - I realized that gathering advertisements from Mantri Square alone was rather irrelevant if I was goint to critique the idea of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;developmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in general. So I modified the boundaries of my research and began gathering advertisements not only from all over the city, but also popular ones seen on television as well.

^ Peenya Industrial Area Picture Bank

< Ad Bank

A brief glimpse into the mailbox of a controlfreakish, obsessive compulsive emailer. Exhibition prep periods were particularly hectic when it came to coordination, but Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d be lying if I said the control freak in me didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t enjoy it just a little.

The First Run Officially beginning work on our final projects, we began working towards our first work-in-progress exhibition, where we had the opportunity to test out our ideas and interventions on site by creating either a portion of our final piece or a working prototype of the same.

/ CONCEPTUAL GROUNDWORK I began by creating a schedule for my project, leaving myself atleast two weeks of buffer time at the very end for touch up work.

Developing my narrative Developing my dioramaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s back story was the first thing I needed to complete before moving on to any other part of the project. Rather than think of it as a diorama, I wished to write it like the opening chapter of a novel so as not to allow the form to prevent the narrative from being layered and nuanced. It is the future and happiness is now in abundance. Dreams are now reality. The skies are blue, the leaves are green and the roads shimmer in the soft glow of the streetlamps. Wind blows through a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hair as she sips hot coffee on her balcony. A man smiles in satisfaction as he clicks the lock on his sleek new car before disappearing into a tall glass building. A graying old man settles into a hammock while his wife knits in a rocking chair beside him. A little boy chases his sister around as he tries to snatch a large bar of chocolate away from her. Life has never looked more perfect. But there is another side to this perfect land. Not too far away, on the fringes of the city, lies a town called Peenya. Once a proud and expansive industrial hub that powered the city, its industries have since been taken over and controlled by a powerful Ministry - the Ministry of Dreamscapes - that mysteriously emerged early in the 21st century. Some say it was founded by a secret society of real estate moguls. Others say it was a group of elites from the very industries of Peenya. The Ministry controls Peenya through the Peenya Industrial Association (PIA), an autonomous institution that was already well in existence as early as the 2010s. With powerful ties to the government, the Ministry has successfully exerted its influence upon the PIA, further controlling the output of every Peenyan industry. For the last several decades, the Peenyans have worked hard to create the perfect people, the perfect houses, the perfect lives -- all outside of Peenya. For the Peenyans themselves could have

none of the Dreamscapes. They needed to stay focused, to stay real, in order to build the picture perfect world the Ministry demanded. The Ministryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Department for the Managing of Peenyans ensured the Peenyans couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t dream. Besides drugs that subdued the imagination, living quarters were built within Peenya so that the Peenyans would have no need to interact with the outside world. And so Peenya had remained frozen in time. It was an alien town. So much so that the Metro rail that had once transported industrial workers to work everyday had now devolved into a joyride, allowing the people outside to get a glimpse of this strange land that was Peenya. But all was not well outside of Peenya. The Ministry had long lost sight of its original goal to create and provide lives that came close to perfection. Enamoured as it was by the seductive notion of perfection, the Ministry had forgotten that lives had to be lived. Instead, lives were now scripted, romance was now engineered, people were now created and conditioned to play out pre-written scenes and stories over and over. Perfectons, they were called. The Perfectons too were frozen in time and space. Only theirs was nearly a fictional space. There were some that resisted, but they were easily quashed by the Department for the Handling of Rogue Perfectons. Once found to display signs of unprescribed thought, the rogues were sentenced to imprisonment, often coupled with rigorous reconditioning with the hope of reinstating them back into the dreamscape. There were, however, those that tried to escape, some more successful than others. meanwhile, on the other side, some peenyans too had found a means of escape. hoarding expired perfectoscape items, the braver of the peenyans were slowly building an alternative underground perfectoscape. while some were caught and imprisoned by the M.O.P for theft, the peenyans secret lair has yet to be discovered.

Preliminary visualisation In my initial visualisation of the piece, I chose to go with a 6-foot diameter circular base that would sit in the centre of the concourse area and have it covered with a glass dome. The diorama would be divided into three sections - Peenya, the Ministry and the Adscape. A shaft would descend from the ministry area into the base of the diorama, breaking off into several corriddors with prison cells holding rogue perfectons. Just a little way aways, one would be able to see a perfecton breaking out of the base and escaping to the outside world.

Feedback on first visualisation In terms of the story of the diorama, suggestions I received were mainly directed towards the fact that too many story elements relied on text and speech bubbles in English, something that needed to be rectified. Any text I used in the diorama had to include a Kannada translation as well. With regard to the shape of the base, I was advised to go with an angular form rather than a circle, given that fabricating a glass dome of that size would be near impossible. I was also advised to break up the form into different sections and levels so as to lend more interest to the viewing of the piece as well as ensure that no portion of the diorama (e.g. the centre) is too far for a viewer to examine its details. Second visualisation of base Tasked to come up with new iterations for an angular base, I also added another layer to my narrative in the process: I included a shaft that descended into the base from Peenya as well, leading to an underground world where the Peenyans hoarded expired perfectoscape items. This new base had separate blocks for the Ministry, Peenya and the Adscape, connected by roads and flyovers. It had cuts and niches such that the viewer could get closer to the piece at certain points.

List of Scenes My next task was to sort through my photographs of the advertisements and of Peenya and to finalize the list of scenes that would feature in the diorama, while simultaneously compiling a list of materials.

Final visualisation of the base After deciding that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d make my diorama out of eight 2x2â&#x20AC;&#x2122; MDF boards, I laid them out to decide the final shape of my base. I decided to have the three different sections at different heights.

/ MATERIAL EXPLORATIONS Miniature making Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve had some experience making miniatures in the past, though never to this scale. However, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve always been rather limited in my use of material - often sticking rather religiously to m-seal. I knew I would have to devise more efficient methods in this project and find ways to standardize several of my processes.

^ Past miniature work

Cold porcelain clay I researched how to make cold porcelain clay, a cheap, homemade substitute for polymer clay and decided to use it for my organic forms. A cooked mixture of fevicol and corn flour, the benefits of this clay was that it took a whole day to harden once exposed to air, unlike the more unforgiving m-seal, and the clay could be coloured by kneading acrylic paint directly into it.

^ First batch of clay

^ Mixing a basic flesh tone into the clay

I then proceeded to make master body parts for my miniature humans. I made an arm, a bent leg, a straight leg, a head, a male torso and a female torso, hoping to be able to combine different pieces to create a variety of postures. < Human masters

Silicone Molds In order to create copies of my masters, I made flexible silicone molds using a dough of silicone sealant gel and cornflour. The flexible mold would enable me to pull the pieces of clay out while still soft, giving me a chance to further pose them before they harden.

^ Making copies with silicone molds

Laser cutting I decided to print and laser cut all my inorganic forms such as building facades, roads signs, etc. This method saved me a great deal of time cutting and painting, leaving me only with the task of sticking and assembling the pieces.

^ Laser cutting files

^ Laser cut pieces

^ Assembling the pieces

Miscellaneous items I had to use a variety of other materials for miscellaneous items in the diorama, for e.g. making trees out of wire and clay, streetlights out of drinking straws, etc.

^ Miscellaneous items using thermocol, straws, icecream sticks, wires, etc.

/ THE FIRST EXHIBITION Completing one square of my diorama I decided to complete one square of the Peenya section of my diorama for our first work-in-progress exhibition. I wished to complete this portion because I knew that, removed from the context of the rest of the diorama, this would be the only portion that would find relevance in the metro station because it contained immediately relatable elements such as the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Helpers Wantedâ&#x20AC;? fliers or the yellow street signs.

^ Rough layout of my Peenya square

^ Putting together elements to create mini scenes

I also had to plan for a temporary wooden stand upon which to place my exhibition piece. I came up with a few iterations with varying degrees of stability and I finally went with the first iteration itself, with modified measurements.

< First stand iteration

< Alternative iterations to increase stability

Content writing for the exhibition Aside from working on my personal piece, I was also part of the content writing team for the exhibition. Our job was essentially to write all the content for the exhibition - poster and invite copy, labels, etc - editing and sourcing Kannada translations for all the material. Our team also worked with the graphic design and branding team to come up with a brand identity for the project and for the exhibition. After swinging between different extremes we settled on the idea that the essence of the Art in Transit brand was ‘to create meaningful pauses’. In this vein, we settled on the name ‘Ksana’ (meaning ‘moment’ in Kannada) for the exhibition and the tagline ‘Finding Interludes’.

v Kannada translations for the exhibition text

^ Defining the projectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s brand identity

Exhibition days The exhibition went on for three days between the 26th and the 28th of September. Open to potential investors on the first day, the second and third welcomed the public as well. The exhibition also received a fair amount of news coverage.

< My exhibition piece Photo credits: Alok Utsav

^ The overall exhibition Photo credits: Nos. 1-4 Aroushka Jinelle Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;mello, No. 5 Alok Utsav

< Media coverage

A brief glimpse into the mailbox of a controlfreakish, obsessive compulsive emailer.

Learning from Experience In this section, I reflect upon my experience with my personal project, with the work-in-progress exhibition and with the idea of public art in general and detail my next steps towards the completion of this project.

/ REFLECTION What I’ve learnt about myself and my work While I’ve always understood myself and my practice extremely well, especially so in the past three years, I’ve always disliked applying a term to myself because they all seem extremely unrelatable. While I had long before begun with an intent to become a “graphic designer”, I’d soon realized that, easy as the title may have been to adopt, I rather detested calling myself one. I have always found the term “artist” extremely alien and sometimes rather hollow too. However, after having conceptualized my diploma project for this course, I realized that narrative was something that had always featured in all of my work, whether in subtle or obvious ways, and is something that will continue to find its way into everything I do. And so, one very significant thing this course has given me, is a satisfactory way to brand myself, as a narrative artist, and is finally a label I won’t cringe while using. With any project I have undertaken, I have always had complete faith in the fact that I will complete it in time, no matter what the circumstances, because anything else would be entirely unacceptable for me. However, I have always been aware that this utter faith does cause me to pace myself rather poorly, knowing as I do that even if it is the eleventh hour, I will finish the assignment. This is something I have been trying change for long, and while on the one hand I am glad that with every new project, I very consciously 91

pace myself better than the last, on the other hand, it’s still not good enough. I still find myself underestimating how much there is to do on the very last day. For this reason, I am grateful for any and every opportunity to submit completed work – such as this exhibition – because it allows me to improve my pacing that much more before the submission of my final project. Besides allowing me to complete a portion of my final project, the exhibition gave me the chance to test out the execution of a diorama that is complete in itself. While I did have an idea of the individual processes that went into producing its elements, the exhibition gave me a concrete idea of the time and effort it takes to finish a piece and render it in its final form, thereby allowing me to more accurately estimate how much time seven more pieces of the same size and detail would take. It also allowed me to explore the best methods of creating certain elements such as foliage,

roads, pavements, etc that would only require to be made during the final assembly stage. Furthermore, the exhibition allowed me the opportunity to find out if my expectations were being met in terms of the response my work was getting on site. I observed that the diorama was, as I had hoped, a sufficient hook that drew people in and made them want to examine the piece closely. It was also, as I hoped, a source of delight, especially for the locals of the area who were able to relate to familiar sights and scenes even if they had been reappropriated to fit my narrative. However, something I hadn’t accounted for was the fact that there weren’t enough triggers to make them want to understand the story that the diorama was narrating through its details. The triggers that were provided were more puzzling than intriguing. This is something I definitely require to overcome because the story only reflects in the details of the piece.

Strengths Developing Craft: I have made miniatures before and I have made dioramas but never to this scale or level of finish and never for a project that is to be 92

displayed in public. I am glad that I’m able to use a medium I’ve used before but at the same time develop more sophisticated methods of executing it. It’s been

a great advantage to me that I’ve been able to upgrade my methods – moving from m-seal to porcelain clay and silicon molds, from handcutting and painting to laser-cutting and printing, I’m grateful to have had/sought the knowledge of the most efficient ways of doing things and the foresight to apply them in the right places. The quality of my miniatures has greatly improved my project will turn out better for it. Envision: I have always had a very clear image of my final product in mind, no matter what the project. Its details are not necessarily rendered, but the bigger picture and its desired impact are always crystal clear to me right from the first day. I always know what kind of impact I wish to have with my work, what kind of presence I wish to create for it. Even though these aspects are entirely open to change and improvement, I always have a starting image that describes to me the colours, aesthetics, tone, flavour and voice of the project. And I believe my more than decent understanding of the way people think and the things that draw them in helps me decide exactly what needs to be done in order to create the intended impact among my audience. Challenges Stretch/Explore: The controlfreak that I am, while I am saying I find it extremely challenging to “explore playfully without a preconceived plan”, I have to quite honestly admit that I don’t really even want to. That’s how far gone I am, I truthfully don’t wish to change or work on it. I do understand the benefits of that working style and would perhaps consider working that way on a more casual project, but I can’t say I enjoy its risks too much on a time-sensitive project. Express: This is an aspect I perhaps don’t always hit the mark

with. At all points of time, and with all projects, I simply have too many things I wish to convey. I know of the need to edit, but the essence of a lot of the things I wish to convey can only be satisfactorily conveyed through detail. For this reason, besides my work itself, my explanations and concept notes of the work become painfully verbose and I find myself struggling to keep it short while at the same time get in all the information. I believe there’s a way around everything even if it hasn’t been found yet. So I don’t necessarily believe editing down is the only solution; 93

I do believe clever packaging of the same quantity of material can make it digestible. So my goal with all of my projects is to find the best ways to unobtrusively engage people with content they would normally find too long or overwhelming.

/ REFINING MY PROJECT Conceptual Modifications I am now exploring how to provide triggers to make my audience take interest in the dioramaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s story and compel them to seek out and discover the story through the details. I am testing one particular suggestion given to me: to provide strategically placed questions whose answers can only be found by examining the diorama. Some examples of the trigger questions: Q. Who is the policeman chasing? Q. Where are the Peenyans hoarding the things they steal? Q. Why are the perfectons being imprisoned? Q. Why is there smoke rising out of the Department for the Handling of Rogue perfectons?

Material Modifications I had to make several changes to the material rendering of my diorama. the laser cut pieces did not necessarily match the style of my humans, the way I rendered my base was far too hasty and clumsy and I had to find ways to add more nuance to my detailing. I decided it was too time consuming to continuously make batches of cold porcelain clay, so I went ahead and purchased four kgs of white air-dry clay.

I then proceeded to use the clay to add simple textures of brick or stone to my walls and buildings.

I also used it to create miscellaneous items such as the items that go on the shelves in the foodstalls, or tiled pavements.

Changing the way I make my people My miniature humans were wildly inconsistent the first time around. I decided to then make whole man and woman masters and make molds of them. I would then make copies using the polymer clay, pull them out while still soft and pose the humans before they harden.

However, this did not work out as the copies came out extremely inconsistently, and touching them up took so long that having the molds nearly became redundant. So I switched to considering 3D paper folded humans after coming across examples such as these:

^ First two paper prototypes

After two prototypes that werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t nearly flexible enough to suit my needs, I finally settled upon a third that had entirely poseable arms and legs. I decided to go ahead with this template and print vector graphics directly onto the paper and have the foldable pieces laser cut.

^ Finalized paper prototype with flexible arms and legs

< Laser cutting template

The benefit of this method was that all my humans would now be neat and consistent and it would save my having to paint them. I was quite pleased with how they looked within the diorama; they seemed to lend a certain caricatureeffect to the piece.

^ Before | Photo credits: Alok Utsav

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^ After

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Final modifications to my base stand Upon suggestion from my faculty, I further modified my base stand so as not to have its form resemble high-rise buildings with terrace dioramas on top. I added stands at the bottom and a slightly larger box that would sit atop the stand and take up half the height of the stand.

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/ OVERCOMING BLOCKS Pitch Presentation In order to overcome challenges we faced in raising funds for our final projects, I was part of the team that worked on a pitch presentation for potential investors. We dealt with putting together a visually impactful presentation that conveyed the essence of our project and made it appear worthy for investment. I was personally involved with coming up with the narrative flow of the presentation as well as creating visualisations for final projects. v Highlights from the presentation

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Project Budget I also had to put together a budget for my project.

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/ POWERING ON In this last stretch, my time is mostly going to be spent on rather mechanical work - the assembly of my laser cut pieces, the folding and sticking of my 3d paper humans, and altogether the final assembly of my complete diorama. Aside from that I will be taking care of the fabrication of my base stand and vitrine and planning the lighting for my diorama. According to plan, the project will be, for all practical purposes, complete by early December.

^ Laser cutting, more laser cutting

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/ THE LAST 4 YEARS I have always maintained that I’ve learnt more in my four years at Srishti than I have in my seventeen years before it. At the end of my first year at Srishti, I had mapped my areas of interest. I had understood the themes that recurred through all of my work - themes like history, human behaviour, politics, collective identities and socio-cultural evolution. I learned that I had to make my work personal, it had to have elements of my own life embedded directly into it in order for me to take interest in it. I realized that I used my work to preserve bits and pieces of myself in tangible objects. I find myself marvelously fortunate to have learned these things so early on so that I could spend the next three years consciously steering my work in a particular direction and picking my courses and subjects of study with intention and awareness. In fact, I find it a matter of pride that, of the 60 odd courses I’ve taken at Srishti, there are perhaps exactly 2 that I did not particularly enjoy. And I still did well in them. Srishti, for me, has been epiphany

after epiphany. While I always knew in theory that a person could be more than one thing in their life, I realized I’d never truly believed it until I came to Srishti. I learned that I could read and write and illustrate and make books and do graphic design and study philosophy and write research papers all at the same time. And I shudder to think that had I studied anywhere else, I would never have understood that. And that’s the most important thing this institution has given me - it restored my faith in the world and in people. I realized there truly did exist adults who were whole and integral and hadn’t sold their souls, and I stopped being so afraid of growing up and becoming an adult myself. I have met the best and brightest people I know here and I’m fortunate to have shared their company. But also just as important, I learned about what I wished my practice to be. I learned that I had to create my own content. I learned that I didn’t want to be a graphic designer anymore than I wanted to be an engineer. I learned that the deeper enquiry

behind all of my work was to understand why we had created a world where it is so hard for a person to remain true and integral and whole. I realized that I studied this in order to keep myself true and integral and whole so as not to lose myself. Understanding these things early on in my time at Srishti gave me the opportunity to build on them, test them, stretch their boundaries and understand how they manifest in my work. And that kind of a testing ground allows me to leave Srishti armed with everything I need to know to steer myself very consciously towards goals of my choosing. This project specifically gave me a way to comfortably brand myself. I’d always struggled with labels. I couldn’t see myself as a ‘graphic designer’. ‘Illustrator’ didn’t work either because that wasn’t my primary medium of expression. I liked writing, but that wasn’t all I did. I hated the term ‘artist’, it felt far too pretentious to call myself one. But more than anything, I couldn’t see myself branded as any one of those things because it was not what was special about my work. I knew people far more

qualified for each of those titles. I didn’t want to receive clients by positioning myself as a ‘graphic designer’ because I knew graphic designers of far greater calibre who’d do a much better job for them. For the same reason, I couldn’t justify calling myself an illustrator or an artist or a writer. I could do all of those things perfectly well, but they were simply not the essence of what I did. It took me a while to figure out what it was that I did that I knew I could do better than most people, what it was that I could bring to the table that others could not. This project helped me realize that it was narrative. While it had always featured in all of my work, this was something I realized I’d never escape. This was something I knew I could give someone in my own unique way that they could not get from anyone else. And so, I leave Srishti, finally with a label for myself that I won’t cringe to use that of a narrative artist.

/ REFERENCES 1. Maisie Skidmore, “Jerry Gretzinger has spent 50 years creating a map of an alternate world”, It’s Nice That, August 27, 2013, accessed October 28, 2014, http://www. itsnicethat.com/articles/jerrys-map 2. Joan Simon, Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects. New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2006 3. “Indigo Blue: Ann Hamilton Studio”, http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/projects/ indigoblue.html, accessed October 28, 2014 4. “Privation and Excesses: Ann Hamilton Studio”, http://www.annhamiltonstudio. com/projects/privationandexcesses.html, accessed October 28, 2014 5. “The Event of a Thread: Ann Hamilton Studio”, http://www.annhamiltonstudio. com/projects/armory.html, accessed October 28, 2014 6. “Mark Dion – Artists – Tanya Bonakdar Gallery”, http://www.tanyabonakdargallery. com/artists/mark-dion/series, accessed October 28, 2014 7. “Lori Nix”, http://www.lorinix.net/the_city/16.html, accessed November 19, 2014 8. “Minimiam: Playful Mini Dramas By Photographers Pierre Javelle And Akiko Ida | DeMilked”, http://www.demilked.com/minimiam-miniature-figures-food-pierrejavelle-akiko-ida/, accessed November 19, 2014 9. “Sport Car Collections: Beautiful 3D Cartoons by Matt Roussel”, http://sport-carcollections-humberto.blogspot.in/2013/12/beautiful-3d-cartoons-by-matt-roussel. html, accessed November 19, 2014 10. David Eagelman, “Brain Time”, published on Edge.org 11. Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time”, E-Flux Journal, No. 11 (December 2009) 12. Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder”. Exhibiting Cultures - The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp, Steven D. Lavine.

/ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS With graduation a mere four weeks away, a general kind of sentimentality and mushiness colours my vision. Therefore, there are several people I must thank, not only for this project, but for the time I’ve spent at Srishti. * * * My project facilitators for their unwavering faith in my ability: Amitabh Kumar, for your infectious enthusiasm towards my project at all times. And for giving me such fantastic new ideas that I only wish weren’t downright impossible to incorporate in the time I had. Samir Parker for always giving me suggestions that I didn’t take at first, but ended up doing your way a month later. And of course, for those hilariously cheesy jokes you always have up your sleeve. Agnishikha Choudhuri for being the grounded, sensible backbone our class desperately needed. Arzu Mistry for driving away our lethargy and pushing us when we needed it most. My classmates for being the most positive, energetic class I’ve ever been part of, and for putting up with all of my long emails. A special thank you to: Radhika Mantri, for Owl Jolson and all the back and forth pep-talk over Facebook. Alok Utsav for being the sane co-administrator of our now comatose ‘Art in Transit’ Facebook page and keeping me grounded in reality. Well, you tried. And thank you in advance for agreeing to help with the video-documention of my diorama. David McKenzie for all your fuel we used up riding around Peenya.

My fellow non-humans at Srishti: Meghna Saha, for our shared love of philosophy, Alison and all things miniature. Biswajith Manimaran, for being the only person ever to make me truly see my flaws. Manush John, for your extremely entertaining, refreshingly poor understanding of what not to say in public. Reuben Samson, for all the long email rants about our common distaste for the world in general. Rohit Dasgupta and Aniruddh Menon for being two of the most deep, sincere and thoughtful people I’ve ever known. My faculty: Alison Byrnes, my life-tutor, for inspiring an acknowledgment note that would be longer than everyone else’s put together. Vivek Dhareshwar, for teaching me how to think with clarity. Ramesh Kalkur, for telling us we had to have existential angst. Nupur Sista, Danika Cooper, Avy Varghese, Dr. Jyothsna Belliappa and Mr. Satish Jayarajan for some of the most enjoyable courses I’ve had at Srishti. Ravindra Gutta and Rustam Vania for giving the kind of feedback that reminds me that no work is ever truly complete. Carl Lindquist for your infectious passion for new knowledge and experiences. My parents for my education and for letting me keep a monstrously large diorama in the house. My brother for being my most unyielding critic. And finally, Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology, I shudder to think of who I’d be today had NID accepted me four years ago.