Mediating Resistance: Indian New Media Art

Abstract

In India, the steady globalization during 1990s, affected landmark shifts in our everyday experiences. Machines like the personal computer or the video recorder, were unpacking exciting intersections between the human and technology. This paper revisits video and website art projects from those early days of the internet to its contemporary manifestations, looking closely at how image making practices took on new meaning with the changing nature of the interface.

The first generation of intermedia artists worked, undeterred by an unreceptive art market and the lack of patronage from state-run art institutions. Occupying multiple contexts of growing communal unease, feminist positions, and the tenuousness of the human condition in a regime of consumerism and surveillance, a rich body of work advancing cultural resistance came to the fore. The paper takes four artists as its field of inquiry- Shilpa Gupta’s early interactive websites, some of which are now lost to obsolete web platform of geocities, the art activism of Nalini Malani’s video installations, Gigi Scaria’s video explorations on anxieties of urbanization and the composite images of Delhi Hectic by Arjun Jassal and Azhar Anis, engaging with the greater dissemination realized through social media. Playful, yet contentious, these art based interventions are mindful of Jacques Ranciere's understanding of the political import of aesthetics, affecting a visibility and conversation around issues repressed to a societal blind spot. The paper situates video and website art in the center of rising regional and global discourses, while reflecting back at the conditions surrounding its production and circulation.