Infrastructure Primitives -- retooling

shaina anand/ ashok sukumaran

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?