My thesis revolves around three areas of inquiries, multiple mediums, translating cultural theory, use and impact of tools and technology and how forms and knowledge might emerge while working across them. In other words I am investigating how multiple mediums in combinations or as a collection of disparate artefacts, could be used to contemplate on social theories and impacts of technology. I am trying to discover what Nigel Cross’ term – “designerly ways of knowing", could mean in terms of knowledge production and seeing if an interdisciplinary and multi-media form could facilitate that.

In my first set of experiments I choose an arbitrary and common tool; the dental toothbrush and created different types of media artefacts about it. The intent was to discover and demonstrate how different media could combine to create an experience where each media artefact complements the other. The process involved an analysis of the object in different levels concerning its history, form, usage and symbolic meaning. Along with that I chose Bruno Latour’s essay ; "Technology is society made durable" specifically the ideas on how linguistic structures could reveal relationship between tools and humans.

The formal exploration were injected with ideas from the theoretical essay. After various iterations on the visual language I arrived at creating illustrations using 3D models in sketchup and combining them with phrases inspired by Lators essay. This resulted in a set of artefacts.

These artefacts were then laid out as a collection in its final form and the sound piece was played to activate the space and create an absurd environment in which the audience could encounter the different artefacts.

The second exercise involved a prompt where we visit a shell gas station and respond to the space with the motive of the project. I started using a camera to encounter the site and I became aware of different interconnected phenomena that appeared as objects and symbols in the space, such as credit cards, fuel prices and a homeless man and an emergency stop button. Since I was analysing objects I was drawn to the the ‘Emergency Stop’ button and I wondered if this is an object and a symbol that signals how socio cultural system could go wrong and that there was no way to stop it with an emergency button. What if the credit crisis or the elections had an emergency stop button ?

I started abstracting the object to see where else an ‘emergency stop’ button could be placed and how to activate its symbolic meaning. I felt that I was unable to draw easy parallels from my earlier exercise and apply it to this case. The method didn’t proceed as a step by step process and needed tweaks according to the different contexts it was being applied to. Amongst the set of material being used an empirical force seemed to be missing. This realisation made me discover a software forum that was discussing different ideas about adding an emergency stop button into an application. The content was treated in different ways to give the stop button a more general meaning.

In the third exercise, I choose to pursue a different interpretation of the context I had set for myself. Instead of starting from an object to create commentary about our technological society, I chose to work with theory as the primary material.

This lead to the creation of an exhibition space for a book called ‘The Stack on Software and Sovereignty’ by Benjamin H Bratton. The starting point was a poster that was designed for the book using a graphical language inspired Wolfgang Weingart, I started isolating the different layers mentioned in the book and expanded them by creating short graphical video loops. These elements were constructed from a list of objects mentioned in the text. The idea was to see if the poster itself can become a video installation.. Since the starting point was a poster, I decided to project the video on graphics that were printed and placed onto a surface. This created a more spatialized effect and the audience read it more as an exhibition than a video. I also started separating content that explains that elements and placed them in a sequence in the space around the projection wall. I am interested in seeing how these spatialized exhibitions could be brought back into a digital space that lives on the internet as well.

Looking at the forms that the project has produced so far and its larger goals, the ideal audience will be those who might walk into a museum. This could be people above the age of 20 who have encountered some form of exhibitions before and have a curiosity to engage with slightly challenging content. It could also include audience who have engaged with theory but does not necessarily find it accessible. Apart from understanding the audience at an individual level they could also include research and educational organisations who are exploring ways to translate and publish their work to wider audiences at events or on the web. The first two projects bear similarities to the form of art installations and museum exhibits. This means that the audience could also include a population that might encounter a site specific work. This broad range of audience means that the work itself need to create multiple entry points catering to the possibilities. This was seen as information architecture challenge and the content was carefully grouped into different types. Introductory, explanatory, advanced and poetic.

Currently I am working with projection mapping as technique to see how information can be distributed across different surfaces and perhaps this could also consider the different types of audience. This also allows for considering different forms of intelligences such as the visual, kinesthetic etc to have corresponding mediums which was one of the foremost reason for experimenting with combinations of different mediums to begin with.