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Bombay_RGB (2008)


In June 2006, I visited my family and home in Bombay, India, after spending a year and a half at graduate school in New York. My return coincided with the implementation of large-scale redevelopment projects across the city fueled by a real estate boom that had developers scrambling to convert property into high-end housing projects. In less than two years, my neighborhood of modest family owned cottages, open spaces and smaller community gardens had been replaced by a strip of high-rise condos and luxury apartments. Disoriented and perturbed by this drastic transformation, I began to make short video recordings of the changing urban landscape on a borrowed MiniDV camera.

Bombay_RGB is a reconciliation of personal feelings of nostalgia with a political concern towards the unchecked redevelopment of Bombay. Combining clips of familiar landmarks, construction and archival images, the project attempts to preserve an imaginary homeland and (re)construct a narrative of place. The algorithmic separation of the video into red, green and blue channels as well as the digital processing of location based sound have been achieved using a custom software patch and stand between objective realism and subjective experience, protecting the landscape and culture from the medium’s propensity to codify representation as a map without a territory; a simulacrum of personal experience.

Bombay_RGB has been performed as a live interactive narrative and also shown as a single channel video.

SCREENINGS/PERFORMANCES INCLUDE:
- Liminal Space, F(r)iction Project, Brooklyn, 2010
- Experimenta, Bangalore - India, 2009
- Simply Screen: Inbetweeners of Asia, The Transart Institute, Berlin, 2009
- Screengrab Exhibition, James Cook University, 2009
- ArtHouse Film and Video Festival, 2009
- Investigations of Place, Jersey City Museum, 2009
- VideoChannel 2009
- Mixed Messages: The New School 2007