CAMP’s ‘media’ art critically engages with media based on huge infrastructure and mass communication, and ‘repurposes’ it socially and technologically to rethink the meanings of relationship and connection. In Khirkeeyaan (2006), one of the works included in 8-channel Moving Panorama of the exhibition CAMP After Media Promises, the artists set up seven sets of mashup of security cameras and cable TV wiring in the Khirkee neighbourhood of New Delhi.
The fact that people who face the camera also face each other, while also facing their familiar TV sets, produces a tension in the TV image: a redistribution of the gaze, a grid of speaking and listening, and a sense of liveness that is also physically nearby. Video became the ‘site’ for these interactions and conversations. According to Ranjit Hoskote and Nancy Adajania, this work linked the urban village’s constituents by deploying a micromedia, not massmedia (NJP Reader #1: Contributions to an Artistic Anthropology, 2010, p.19).
Borrowing the idea of micromedia, the curator in Micromedia: A Mini-Talk for You in conjunction with CAMP After Media Promises will tell only one audience member about the exhibition according to his or her interest. In the talk entirely tailored to them, the curator could learn the audience’s viewpoints to explore the exhibition from, while the audience could more actively create their own exhibition experience.
