Installation video @ Auditions 2013, Khoj Studios, New Delhi
"And as an extra added feature, you spin on the planets' carousel for free"
Two-channel video + an erratic and unstable sound environment created using multiple wireless devices. Different wireless signals criss-cross the room and the listener moves around the space picking up traces of sound. The signals are constantly changing and each listener possibly has a different experience of the videos as a result.
The sound environment has been composed using recorded sound, spoken text, film soundtracks and composed sound and music. It will be heard and experienced as fragments of narrative, interrupting and interfering with each other, and at times altogether disappearing. This will produce variations and instabilities around ideas of spectacle and the peculiar landscapes of entertainment and consumption that we participate in.
"The spectacle that falsifies reality is nevertheless a real product of that reality", and Snow City is a winter wonderland in the heart of Bangalore - a massive theme park covering 12,500sq.ft with temperatures maintained at subzero degrees centigrade. "Entire area is filled with snow made out of water and air, which is eco friendly and edible too."
The circus with its "enormous traffic in replacing and recruiting men, animals and apparatus" is almost tragic in its scale and obsolescence. Here, it is also an ode to Jonas Mekas’ 1966 film, 'Notes On The Circus', an in-camera edited diary-film on the extravagant outtakes of the circus. This video was made on the last day of Gemini Circus’ Bangalore show in 2012, very close to Snow City, on Parade Ground.
Possible sounds
1. Recordings of Gemini Circus in Bangalore, afternoon show, February 2012
2. Theme Song from Barbarella, 1968, dir. Roger Vadim and starring Jane Fonda, based on the comic book series Barbarella, by Jean-Claude Forest
3. Theme music from The Circus, 1928, Charlie Chaplin’s silent film, for which he composed a new musical score in 1967
4. Extracts from La Societe du Spectacle, 1973, by Guy Debord
5. Remnants of a conversation with Dasharath, a former trapeze artist and trainer with Gemini Circus. Dasharath is originally from Manila, joined the circus in the 1940s, lost two siblings to a circus that got left behind in Pakistan during Partition, and subsequently lost his passport and has remained in India ever since
6. A short interview with an event manager from Snow City, Bangalore, August 2012
7. Harmonica
8. Music box
9. Guitar strings
10. Xylophone
11. Snow City DJ mix
The title of the piece is from "Here", a poem by Wislawa Szymborska. Text excerpted from Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka, and the Snow City website http://snowcityblr.com