9.46 mins | 2020
Anisha Baid is an artist and writer from Kolkata, India. Her practice and research involve an investigation of pervasive technologies through an examination of their design, diversity of use, and their relationship with ideas from science fiction. Her work attempts to poke at the flat-scapes of the computer screen to decode computer labour through the interface – a technological tool that has converted most spaces of work into image space. She is also invested in understanding digital image cultures through the lens of photography and works extensively with appropriated stock images and commercial imagery.
Interview of Anisha Baid with Charu Maithani
Charu Maithani [CM] // What are your current pre-occupations, especially with the impact of COVID-19 in the past one year?
Anisha Baid [AB] // The past year has been quite a journey. For many of us who did not have to suffer the immense economic and personal hardship, the initial lockown became a time for slowing down and looking inward – which would not have happened otherwise. The work My Room was made in the latter half of the year, when it seemed that all I was doing was staring at walls and screens. Soon, the two became the same for me – a kind of home, a confining architectural space that was both refuge and restriction. This past year I have also been writing extensively to hone it as an integral part of my practice. I have been working on a few essays, laying out my research around the computer interface and its metaphorical design elements. I have also been working as a writer at the ASAP (Alternative South Asia Photography) Connect platform, where I have been tracing the media histories and landscape of digital image practice in the region.
CM // My Room draws attention to the relationship of windows and screens. On the screen you draw the window of a room when the computer screen by the way of being connected to the world wide web metaphorically is a ‘window to the world.’ It resonates with Anne Friedberg’s ideas in The Virtual Window… where she compares screens to windows with their framing quality, permeability and ventilation. But we don’t see the computer screen the way we look out of the window. We have multiple perspectives, multiple images and moving images, and of course multiple windows. What aspects of the connection of screens and windows are you exploring here?
AB // I have been thinking about this for a long time – about the horizontal and vertical planes in media through time, and how they perhaps have certain inscribed modes of engagement. So the vertical – the painting, cinema screen, the photographic backdrop, and the computer screen are all opaque surfaces that are designed to project an illusion of depth – a picture plane. In contrast, I think the horizontal plane – that of the table, the typewriter, the piano, the keyboard, or even the kitchen counter are surfaces of labour and technique. Perhaps it is a stretch to make these distinctions, but that’s where it started for me. Friedberg’s book was also a great revelation, especially into the historicity of the idea of ‘virtual’– which did not always denote an ‘imaginary’space as we commonly use the word now, but comes from the idea of a possibility, a virtue. I understand it to denote an idea that exists outside oneself, but not in a way that it is ‘unreal.’ Friedberg describes it as “an immaterial proxy for the material.” In this sense, I understand every photograph to be just as virtual as my digital world, and just as virtual as the scene outside my window.
Perhaps on the surface, we do not look out of the architectural window in the same way as computers, but the experiential quality of visual perception already embodies the possibility of multiple perspectives, disjointed frames and fragmentation – I don’t think it is by default ever a ‘whole picture.’ I think this popular perception is because of our modern conflation of realism with photorealism as Lev Manovich has pointed out in his essay on the Paradoxes of Digital Photography (1995). I discovered Hans Richter’s abstract cinema from the 1920s where he would create combinations of moving frames – which starkly resemble how window and frames operate on the digital screen now. I think our imagination about space is heavily interconnected, and that popular interface design draws from the rich history of experimentation and observations made by cultural practitioners before it, and continues to be so.
With the work, I am trying to point at this through a very simple act of representation – drawing a room. The user interface of Paint 3D was also a starting point for this, because it became possible for me to observe the flat plane of drawing in the third dimension. I then tried to continue this process of zooming out and shifting perspective to connect my physical room with the one I was drawing. There is also the central question of perspective – the linear perspective that has dominated representational practices since the Renaissance– where the drawn image is only solid and “realistic” when it maintains this linear perspective and as soon as this perspective is broken, the image is revealed to be immaterial or flat or virtual. This work is currently showing at the Mind over Matter exhibition at the Technical Collections museum in Dresden, Germany, where it has been installed as a large projection, and two moving office chairs are placed for the viewers in a way that allows for moving or inconsistent perspectives.
CM // Not just windows, but you seem to be evoking mirrors as well. In My Room you create a roomon the computer, drawing the lines of the room, windows, desk, a plant, and a computer – the very computer that you are working on. Here the screen is ‘mirroring’ the room or perhaps the room mirrors what you have drawn on the screen. What is relationship of mirror and screen in the context of this work?
AB // The mirror is an interesting metaphor as you point it out, that I haven’t considered before. The mirror creates the same virtual image on the vertical plane, but it has a specific quality of inversion which seems to extend the space behind the viewer into the space in front. In that sense, the video also creates a room within a room – the way two mirrors looking at each other would. Towards the end of the work, the screen transforms into a video of my real room. This was recorded using the webcam on my laptop, which is also often used as a mirror now. Another laptop is visible in the scene, along with the frames of the webcam interface on which I recorded this, creating the same mirroring effect. I have often used this technique of framing moving images within the frames of digital interfaces to create a kind of tension between the ‘real’space that the video is trying to show and the ‘virtual’space of the computer.
CM // The sound piece implicates the viewer in the making of the work as though one is watching it live. But I want to think on the lines of the sound indicating the transformation of images. It establishes the interfacial relationship between the screen, image and its transformation. Can you elaborate on your decision and the process of sound design for this work?
AB // The minimal sound you hear in the video was made using a virtual piano on my computer. This program allowed me to view the text generated by the keys I was playing, making it a simultaneous performance of text and music. I was very fascinated by this possibility of a multi-dimensional text editor. In the video, as you hear the notes playing, the letters appear on the bottom of the screen, almost like subtitles. This hybrid keyboard became a way for me to bring in the horizontal plane that I mentioned above into this work. Almost disjointed from the video, the text came from a personal place, poetically expressing the subtle anxiety about being inside and looking out. The way the text appears does establish that interfacial relationship that you pointed out, but I also wanted to make the screen look almost like a live demo or experiment playing out in real time.
In my work at large, I rely heavily on sound design to become narrative voice, the context within which the images speak. Since I work a lot with found footage and appropriated materials, sound and music have been a way for me to create layers of meaning and pace the viewer’s engagement. For instance, my video Two Clicks, explores the onomatopoeic use of the word “click”, to then trace its history and parallel associations. Here too, sound became the guiding metaphor and message, in way, and a parallel history of technology was told through it.
CM // Taking off from the clicking sound of the mouse, the software Paint is part of the work. It’s not just a tool to create the work but folds into being the work itself. In your other works such as Hey Cortana you re-appropriate Microsoft’s Clippy. But you re-arrange them in ways that reverse their functions and use, thereby raising questions around the functional aspects of digital interfaces. How do you conceptualise the function of interface in an artistic cultural space?
AB // Yes, Microsoft software has become a large part of my work rather unconsciously. I think as I’m trying to think about the space of the screen and mediation, I have been doing this through my own experience of the digital, which again has been mediated through Microsoft and other commercial software companies. It became important for me to point to those technological paradigms that we often take for granted as a “natural” or standard mode of operation. As I have grown up using these tools to create my space on the computer – be it MS Word, or Paint or even the idea of the desktop–these tools have also become aesthetic markers containing their own affordances, coded influences and prescriptive behaviours. As Chris Chesher described it in his thesis on computers as “invocational media” (as opposed to merely ‘digital’), computers create human users, and not the other way around.
I see the interface as a kind of language – a semantic medium than a visual or experiential one– which can point to its own history. To do this, I have employed various techniques in my work. In this video, it was through the structure of frames or windows which appear on the Microsoft OS. The canvas, tools and menu options used to make the drawings on MS Paint remain visible, as well as the frames of the webcam software in the later half of the video. I also use these peripheral frames as transition devices that guide the process of editing and narrative building on the otherwise minimal screen. To respond to your question about using these interface objects in an artistic or cultural modality, I think it’s similar, for instance, to the way structuralist cinema operated and brought the medium to the foreground. However, unlike purely structural work, I am often trying to tell two stories through this kind of process and creating convergences between these narratives, between medium and history, or living and imaginary technology.
May 2021