Draft renders

the big bang sequence from Hari Shankar on Vimeo.

meteor/comet sequence from Hari Shankar on Vimeo.

History on Womens Shoes

BRIEF- My work briefly is about women's shoes and their history and types..It came from my liking and facnination towards the many different types today. Women's shoes are as varied as women themselves..., thus i will try on focussing on the different personalities of women who wear these shoes. Today shoes are not only for protecting our feet but have become a kind of style statement, where people choose a certain type to suit their individual personality.

FORM- It will in the form of a book, or a photo album (not printed) showing different personalities of women and the kind of shoe suiting their personality. Ofcourse this album or handout will have the history of shoes and how they have evolved over time,
with Illustrations of different shoes. It will not be text heavy.

I Remember Now..

BRIEF - My personal history in music - how i saw it and how i see it. My musical experience in the last 5 years, ever since i got into Electronic Dance Music (2006). Music has played a major role in my life - the people i know, the memories that i can remember, etc - all vaguely relate to the music i listen to.

- Talking about the different genres that i have gotten introduced to.

- The events that happened and will happen each year

- My thoughts, then and now.  - Also involve people's view - (a short interview)


MEDIUM - A Sketchbook-like booklet or a graphic novel
Will be using sketches of characters in my life and minimal text. (eg, conversations between people) The sketches will start from black and white (past) and progress to colors (present)

Am looking at something simple and more on a personal level which could involve a bit of humor in the conversations.

Along with the the booklet will attach samples of the kind of music i listen to. In a form of a CD or a chip.

There used to be this park here.......

every place talks of its history. However, every person absorbs and remembers different parts and aspects of it. Thus it forms a collective history and every one derives their own little memories from it.Our Project aims at understanding this personal and collective history of people living in Bangalore. This revolves around the change that Bangalore has faced through the years and the various events that have occured.

Medium: ~ Voice recordings and visual data. E.g Radio show, collage etc.

Aim: ~ To get people to go back in time and revisit their memories and place themselves in the context of bangalore as they remember it first.

~ Since individual memories are born out of collective memories, it will be interesting to observe the picture formed when both are put together to form one big historical picture.

~ To also observe the differences of opinion and the different aspects which are important to them.


Kamala.
Apoorva.

Time, Presence and Justice to History.

"The past is not merely the precondition of the present, but a condition of it." - R.G.Collingwood. (from the article Time, Presence and Historical Injustice by Berber Bevernage)

When we recollect the past, do we actually reconstruct it? When we are talking about history, are we referring to the word 'history'? Or an idea? Or a memory? Or history itself (which only exists post the event which it describes, and is hence different from The Event because The Event in its present state is not called The History)? We construct 'the idea of the past' in the present. But we call it The Past. This is problematic. What is The Past? Events, people, experiences, places, sights, sounds, smells, emotions. All that put into one word. This one word makes us recreate these experiences based on what we know from our own memories and others'. These experiences automatically do not 'exist' as we imagine them, because they are labelled past. There is always the dichotomy between what we are trying to recreate now and what has already happened. Yet we try to describe these histories to the realest details, so that they may transcend our man-made boundaries of time (near-real being near-existence, being near-presence, being near-present). The way in which we view time itself might be the reason why we can't make sense of it. I don't experience days or hours or minutes. I experience time organically, non-systematically. Who's to say what my past is and what my present is? It seems to me that for the benefit of communication, we've brought down richer experiences into flat dimensions. Hence arise terms like 'anachronistic', 'warped' or, my personal favourite - 'absurd'. What's with that?

mindmap - project

This is an initial mind map. I want to explore ideas related to "the present" or "actuality" and how the past feeds into it. I want to come up with a simple story that talks about how we can never really capture the present, and how we always view the present only when it has transpired into the past. These assumptions are primitive, I know, but I'll hopefully have some more arguments over the course of this week.

Final Project

My key words of the project are
LOST (poets, stories or events)
BLACK WHITE
3D MEDIUM - (murals, textile, paper etc)

*subject to change

A Sense of Time

"To other animals who live more by instinct than do humans, the instant of actuality must seem far less brief. The rule of instinct is automatic, offering fewer choices than intelligence, with circuits that close and open unselectively. In this duration choice is so rarely present that the trajectory from past to future describes a straight line rather than the infinitely bifurcating system of human experience." - George Kubler (1962)

This statement opened me up to a lot of thought about the ways in which we perceive time. I don't wish to compare the nature of animal experience to human experience because I do believe that animals too make informed choices that we cannot detect. But I do know that the common human experience is pretty much how Kubler describes it - the line of time is constantly dotted with choices and thus we divide a continuum into so-called instants. This idea of dividing time into an infinite number of instants seems problematic to me. Because then, we depend on certain measures by which we define our own experience of these instants. There is an argument i came across:


1. What we see, we see as the present.
2. We see motion.
3. Motion occurs over an interval.

Hence, What we see as present occurs over an interval.


So then, what is the present? It seems to be more than just an instant (because 'instant' is not a quantifiable term), it is experienced at varying lengths in different situations by different entities.
Yet we seek to define the idea of a past "present" by trapping it into the space between choice and action..

Is this a western philosophy of time? Why do I find it logical yet problematic all the same?

These are some of the questions that are emerging out of Kubler's essay and are feeding into my project inquiry. More soon!

Existence, Meaning & Transmission

"This preference for reducing all experience into a more powerful flow; the themes and patterns are few in number but their intensity and of meaning is thereby increased."

This line seems like a perfect destination to the long journey of the article. It sums up the importance of everything in the article. Since History is largely the interpretation of the past, I feel its true beauty is in it being imperfect, hazy, transmitted, retold and reinterpreted and unfolding into numerous forms, in the contemporary and relevant times. The attached meaning to the art, apart from its orignal intentions, tell their own beautiful history.
Be it the tool used, the form, the experience, the exagerations, together with different mindsets of historians, resistances to ideas, imagination etc make up History. The history of History.

" The visible portrait of the collective identity, whether tribe, class, or nation, comes into being. This self image reflected in things is a guide and a point of reference to the group for the future, and it eventually becomes the portrait given to posterity"
The 'material culture' throws light on all the above things and more. All materials used, expression, beliefs and challenges, all reflect and narrate a beautiful History without any words.
Since the author says that the beauty of the art is anyway incommunicable. Although it can be experienced, understood, empathised with and connected with. Thats where a Historian comes in where he is able to communicate the invisible.

"..,the single life contains an infinity of present instants, each with its innumerable open choices in violation and in action"
Although the author talks about the bifurcation system in the humans , he spoke about the funneling of experiences in the above quote. They seem to contradict to me at first. But what probably the author means is that the experinces which get filtered dont hold so much of our interests, signals of which could be carried down arranged in a sensible pattern.

"Prior to 3000B.C the texture of transmitted duration ........in all their meanings"
This instance reminds me of Cosmic Calendar where time is mapped. From birth of the universe till this second has been spread over one calendar year. The past few thousand years have just been a milisecond or something at 11:59 pm on 31st dec on the cosmic calendar. I think a Cosmic Calendar is a very good example of an astrologer and an historians work.

"This reciprocal relation of real surface and deep illusion is apparently inexhaustible"

The nature of actuality

“The emptiness of actuality can be estimated by the possibilities that fail to attain realization in any instant; only when they are few can actuality seem full.”
Upon reading this statement, I am reminded of two other quotations I came across recently:
a)”When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”-Sherlock Holmes, and
b)” An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”-Laplace
In short, I don’t really see the validity of this statement. The author, like Holmes, seems to be assuming that the full set of “possible” events and outcomes is a finite quantity, and hence that actuality is, to some extent, accurately determinable. The second quote states that once the actuality of the present is realized, the future would cease to be unknown, and would perhaps be something we could directly experience in the present (I am, in a way, comparing it to a point I made in one of my previous essays).
But it seems that actuality is something that will never be even moderately known to us, so the amount of thought that goes into this subject just seems to be a little futile. As the author mentions, the inadequacies of our senses prevent us from ever attaining actuality, an obstacle even our technological advancement cannot overcome.
But it’s interesting to note how the nature of actuality can actually differ between species, or even, people. Prior to this i assumed actuality was merely a description of existence, and everything that goes into it, including events from the past. But the author’s argument that the events from the past cannot be known to us directly, and only through (rather dubious) signals, hence should be excluded from the definition of actuality, does make sense. The point he seems to be making here is that our senses, and only our senses, can actually receive direct inputs from the world around us to shape our notion of actuality. Here, i wonder if that’s an assumption that can be made...and whether our senses are actually “perfect” enough to be making accurate sense of the world around us. But then again, i guess we’ll never know any alternative.
But one point i don’t really agree with is how he claims that since “the perception of a signal happened ‘now’, but its impulse and transmission happened ‘then’”, we have to exclude the past from notions of actuality. It doesn’t matter when an event actually occurred, and when the signal was sparked and transmitted, as time itself is a subjective quantity, dependent on the space and nature of observation. Hence, all that should matter is the perception of the signal, not the generation of it.

Final project : how we are going about it

We are looking into myths and construction of beliefs from them as our subject of interest. Our basic source of inspiration is the conflict between two different worlds of the objective and the subjective.

There has been a concept of " The World " and " My World" around different civilizations.

For example, presence of Sun is one objective truth and complete dependence of life on Sun is why it is worshiped around in different civilization. But the heat and light of Sun falls different on different geographical parts of the world and hence, for the people there the Objective presence of Sun is interpreted differently according to their subjective experiences. Still certain civilizations have constructs that believe in world being as one concept ( like Greek civilization) whereas some don't have this concept which leads to multiple interpretation and their existence as myths and stories.

we will add more description later about how we are exploring this domain of formation and existence of History as narratives.

Here is how we are going about the story ...
We are using time as a metaphor our context of subjectivity and objectivity. Sun dial was used as one of the first devices to read time. Obviously since then how the time was measured and understood had been different throughout the globe. But what happens when we travel across these time-zones. Time is obviously a experience as well. This is where our abstraction comes from.

Meghma and Piyush

History of Things, George Kubler

“Now and in the past, most of the time the majority of people live by borrowed ideas upon traditional accumulations, yet at every moment the fabric is being undone and a new one is woven to replace the old, while from time to time the whole pattern shakes and quivers, settling into new shapes and figures.”

An illustrative analogy runs through my mind: metamorphosis, a range of caterpillars transforming into brilliant butterflies…colors, shapes and sizes. Over150 million years of existence, largely consistent in morphology, but who says butterflies aren’t evolving everyday?

It’s interesting though, what if we never had any structure existing while entering the world? What would we fall back on? With no past- could a space exist just in the present? There would be no concept of time if it does, as time is comprised of the threefold- past, present and future.

New life always survives and grows by using that which came before it- seeds use the soil-water-sunlight, birds use worms-fruits and man began by using nature and then man used his ancestor’s precedent creations- tools, methods of food preparation, survival techniques etc. It is a fact that we wouldn’t be where we are if not for our predecessors- the mistakes, inventions and journeys they followed, allow us to use the present as our starting line.

‘Replacing’ though is a tricky concept, reminding me of the quote- “Sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of- Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses” Jacob Bronowski, English scientist and philosopher. When being replaced things are different yet somehow in someway cognate. Moments take full circles and come back again to form some celestial unknown balance. Like meeting an old close friend after many years, the chemistry would most likely remain the same, but life would have changed so much individually that the friendship is never the same anymore, no matter how identical the relationship is to the past, the meeting in present is all that’s vital.

The passage talks about change. Two kinds of change: one that is of renovation and the other of a complete breaking down to create afresh. But change for most of us is a modified continuity of the past, and that is in the larger sense no change at all. Lets say I am a part of a popular social gang, then I see how ugly it is so I move to another popular social gang- that is no change at all! The ‘change’ is still confined to the same boundaries. History has seen many such external changes, mere reconstructions. As J. Krishnamurti idealistically states, change cannot come out of influence, it cannot be induced, it can take place only outside the field of thought, not within it, and the mind can leave the field only when it sees the confines. Only this sort of change could shake historic patterns that need shedding, allowing us to settle into fresh original figures.

Mind map For Final Project