Projects
3x4
DELHI/ LONDON
2014-15
Using a live telematic videoconference connection, the art installation functioned between two geographically distant audiences located in separate 3x4 metre blue-box room installations at Khoj Studios, New Delhi and the Southbank Centre, London. Spanning five time zones the installation was connected 6 hours a day from 12 to 14 December 2014, combining two cities not just spatially but temporally, from the start of one person’s day to the end of another’s. Produced by Paul Sermon, Claire McAndrew, Swati Janu and Vivek Muthuramalingam.
In megacities such as Delhi and Mumbai — and within one of the fastest growing cities within the world, Ahmedabad — more than 50% of the population live in informal urban settlements. 3×4 metres is the plot size seen to be provided in resettlement colonies, a government initiative which relocates people within informal inner-city settlements to vacant land on the periphery.
3×4 looks at informal settlements differently where informality is not viewed as a problem, but a promising new model of urbanism for the global south. The project uses an immersive telematic networked environment to provide a playful, sensorial exploration of new hybrids of digital space. Merging two 3×4 metre room installations in Delhi and London through mixed-reality, this transnational dialogue intends to set an aspiration for developing metaspace platforms in megacities of the global south. It builds upon practice-based research conducted as UnBox LABS 2014 Fellows in Ahmedabad, India; which used an immersive installation to explore the qualities and values built through self-organised communities that are lost in the resettlement process.
Using a live telematic videoconference connection, the installation functioned between two geographically distant audiences located in separate 3×4 metre blue-box room installations at Khoj Studios, New Delhi and the Southbank Centre, London. The audience groups in these green and blue-box spaces are captured on camera and brought together through a system of live chroma-keying and are placed onto a computer-generated background image.
The complete composited image is then displayed simultaneously on large LCD video screens in both locations. As the merged audiences start to explore this shared telepresent space they encounter the digital background environment they now both coexist within. These background scenes directly reference their combined social setting, ranging from informal settlement dwellings and Delhi environments to contemporary compact interior designs, micro living solutions and imagined worlds. More information at http://3x4m.org/
The Team
Swati Janu
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