The Fourth Dimension

Interactive art flourished in the international art world in the ‘70s and ‘80s with the burgeoning of interactive computing and virtual reality. India had to wait till the ‘90s to see its effect on artists. “I made my first interactive computer-based work,titled Brahma’s Home Page,in 1999. The Internet had just hit us and one could produce some interesting clickable interactive art through HTML coding,” says artist Baiju Parthan who,after a gap of six years,is getting back into interactive art using the more complex game engine physics to present Mumbai as a theme for gaming. The works are tentatively fixed to be showcased next year at Vadehra Art Gallery,New Delhi.

While technology is an integral element of the works of artists like Parthan and Narendra Yadav whose exhibition of site-specific installations and kinetic sculptures called Memory Minus Me is going on at Gallery Maskara till May 21,there are others like Bose Krishnamachari and Navjot Altaf whose works bear no trace of technology. Krishnamachari’s experimental installation titled LaVa (Laboratory of Visual Arts) involved exhibiting a rare collection of books and DVDs on art,photography,fashion and a range of other subjects. He’s in the process of making a mobile van to take LaVa around the country next year.

Altaf has done a series of interactive works in Indian villages that involve community projects like the design and creation of water pump sites and children’s temples in collaboration with adivasi artists.

One of the biggest hindrances that interactive artists face is finding gallery spaces to exhibit their works. “Galleries are reluctant to exhibit interactive art as they’re not exactly sellable,” says Japanese-born contemporary artist Ashok Sukumaran who won the Golden Nica award for his interactive artwork titled Park View Hotel. As a representative of Pundole Art Gallery says,“We find interactive art nothing more than a form of gimmickry.”

Perhaps it’s the unavailability of gallery spaces that has given birth to interactive public art or interactive art on a massive scale like Sukumaran’s Glow Positioning System in 2005 that traced the silhouette of the Colonial landscape of Mumbai in a string of lights which participants could control by turning a hand crank. New media artist Vikram Sood embarked on a project in January 2010 to laser tag the sides of high rises from Churchgate to Goregaon over a span of four nights. Shilpa Gupta’s Shadow 3 captured and projected viewers’ simulated shadows on a screen. It was on view on Carter Road in 2009.

“Interactive art,in a way,is more palatable to the general public than to collectors and art connoisseurs,” says Gupta. Thatis,of course,not to say that some galleries,like Volte that opened in 2009 with Mukul Deora’s exhibition that provided the viewers the thrill of smashing a car,don’t actively promote interactive art. “Some of the most popular exhibitions internationally in the last year,like Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s at Tate Modern,England,have been interactive,” says Tushar Jiwarajka of Volte.

Which is probably why most of the artists who dabble in interactive art have firmly entrenched themselves in the international art scene. Gupta,for example,is exhibiting at the fourth Auckland Triennial in New Zealand and the Vancouver Biennale in Vancouver in June and having a solo show at the Castle Blandy in France in December.

“It took one afternoon to set up my installation titled Time Travel (which was positioned in a train and endeavored to show viewers “a bit of their future” through a camera installed in front of a laptop) in New York but in India,it took no less than 16 days with a crew of seven to eight people,” says Bangalore-based artist Tara Kelton. She will be exhibiting her interactive works exploring the theme of virtual urban space at Volte in December.

Up Next
* Bose Krishnamachari’s LaVa-an in stallation of rare books and DVDs
c* Baiju Parthan’s exhibition based on game engine Physics
* Tara Kelton’s works on the theme of virtual urban space
* Shilpa Gupta’s shadow works projecting viewers’ simulated shadows