Raqs finds correspondence with Charles Jencks’ work as designer, critic, historian, concrete poet and artist, and with his Post-Modernist manifesto and former home turned Grade I listed museum, The Cosmic House. The concept of parallax describes the changing perception of objects in relation to their background, based on the position and movement of the viewer. The work borrows the term to describe perceptions of a particular moment in history while moving through time; folding time, space, imagery and narrative to interrogate varied geographies of perceived centres and peripheries. 

The film The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone sees Raqs Media Collective experiment with new visual textures achieved through nesting, embedding, and juxtaposing contemporary footage with found archival images, some of which have been sourced from Jencks travels in India in the 1980s. The film is extended into physical space of The Cosmic House through a set of animated topological shapes and time cones that appear and disappear on screen, and in Raqs Media Collective’s wall drawings and AR ‘interferences’ entitled Betaal Tareef: In Praise of Off-time (and its Entities).

There is a 1980, hidden, in every year.