Diagram for the Last International
Video Loop
Performa Festival, New York (2013); National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) (2014)
In 2011-12, while thinking about weaving disparate processes, interests and possibilities of all kinds together, Raqs invited Suraj Rai, a self-taught computer programmer, to create a snapshot of their working and thinking together. Suraj plotted the signal traffic between the three Raqs computers while they sat together in their studio on a typical Delhi afternoon. The snapshot pattern of a moment of the traffic and intercourse between their computers evoked a picture of their world, and of them in the world. A speculative meshwork emerged.
For ‘The Great Bare Mat and Constellation’ this meshwork of lines became the basis for a drawing for a carpet (Design: Amitabh Kumar). The meshwork enveloped a house in ‘House of Everything and Nothing’ (Outset, New Delhi, 2013), and for ‘The Autodidact’s Transport’, the lines encased a metro carriage (design Mansoor Ali). The video, ‘Diagram for the Last International’, has been edited by Rajan Singh and Manas Jyoti Baruah.
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