Infrastructure primitives / retooling

To share experiences and lessons from our retooling of mass technologies, mostly in specific contexts in India. The two technologies discussed here are electricity and television, we could say "meta-media", having shaped digital formations in fundamental ways, and now being shaped by them. Via "untooling", we propose that the current history of certain technologies or media (and how we learn about them) may be deemed insufficient. The opening up and "resocializing" of such deeply embedded systems, is also a way to rethink and re-learn the term "infrastructure", a term central to developmental and institutional rhetoric in India and elsewhere.

Electricity is both "power" and control, both material and symbolic. It is also "open source", unencoded, having a rich history of development around it. To rethink the various conditions of engagement with it, and to suggest other "currencies" using it, we have begun a long-term project early this year. Some early, "self-authorized" projects that also can be found at http://recurrencies.net/test are:

1. A collaborative street-lighting project. 2. The wireless sharing of electricity, by "contract machine". 2. The modification of decorative lighting technologies for other uses, including "signalling". 4. A combination of domestic lighting and public switching. 5. The recovery of a defunct electrical system, to "therapeutic" ends.

Some of these are conducted as workshops, others as "public art", meant also as platforms to think, in public, about material changes in other media: other consumptions and transports.

Meanwhile Shaina Anand / Chitrakarkhana have been working with "televised media" for several years now. Some of their projects include:

1. A student-run television station in/ for a market in Bangalore 2. A TV "channel" parallel to the World Information conference, that transmitted to 3500 homes over local cable. 3. An TV-based "conversational" interface, that uses a combination of household televisions and surveillance cameras.

The combination of the two "primitives" of electricity and television is to ask how we can look at alternative systems both with and without "content" . What legal and property implications, what threats and promises are present in the slippages between the container and the contained? What insulates, what leaks? As the size of the container grows from domestic/ consumer to national scales (via the urban), what happens, and how may we learn from what is currently on the ground?