After a marvellous Sunday of markets, mapping the city with rickshaws, lovely contact with locals (both photo’s and good food tips) and (thus) great food, we had a short sleep and were up at 6 am. Monday morning. A lucky shower before the water bubbled off, a welcome breakfast and a quick run to catch the Srishti bus. Northwards across the city we arrived at the Srishti building were all the ‘Space the Final Frontier’ collaborators met and the project officially commenced!

We kicked off discussing and logging into the blog, shortly followed by an introduction presentation by Meena Vari, introducing us to the history and different projects of Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. In this we met the French students of the trans-cultural design program joining our workshop, the CEMA program, AIR; the artist in residence program, curatorial networks, SPORE, the Research programs, R+D, and CEMA PAAR – nomadic media labs, with which we are now working. For more information please see: http://srishti.ac.in, http://cema.srishti.ac.in/site/

Srishti is located in Bangalore science/health belt, surrounded by institutes such as the Foundation of Revitalisation of Local Health and the National Space Centre. Inspired the Srishti school approached a number of the institutes to engaged in collaborative research programs. With several partners they embarked on the investigative and educational event Kalpaneya Yatre 2010, an astronomy festival. See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dfP6lzTWB4

Other projects that were introduced to us were Subjective Cartography 2009 in collaboration with Evan Chardonnay and his team and the Bio Art master class biological arts group SymbioticA, Australia. Successful contributions to art and science competition iGEM. And the Think Tank Synchronisations2004, curated by Clementine Deliss which was part of an ongoing international research called Future Academy, involving students and professionals investigating how art practices will evolve and what the future art education might look like over 25 years. Some of the outcomes of this workshop were ideas such as mobile campus’ and roaming workshops, much as the one we’re a participating in now.

Renée Ridgway then introduced the Dutch Art Institute (DAI), a two-year MA fine arts program in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Participating in one of the DAI programs run by Renée, Negotiating Equity, 9 students have come to Bangalore to collaborate in the ‘Space the Final Frontier’ project. Renée introduced the blog of Negotiating Equity, were our guest speakers – artists, theorists and curators – as our discussions are logged. Read more here – http://negotiatingequity.net

Renée and Prayas Abhinav then presented n.e.w.s, (http://northeastwestsouth.net) a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activity, under which Shadow Search Project (SSP) is operating. SSP is concerned with developing an algorithm that would find off-the-radar or stealth activities; how do you see things that don’t want to be seen? In the coming weeks as part of our research into mapping space, we will also be considering alternative means of search, and so, as a meta-project, we will be collecting data and brainstorming some of the concepts of the SSP project.

We then had a dynamic afternoon of presentations from all the collaborating students from Srishti, CEMA, DAI, Chitra Kala Parishath, Kala Bhavan (Shantiniketan) in the Pecha Kucha format. The presentations touched on diverse forms and subjects ranging from urban gardening, bio art, audio-tours, kinetic sculptures, community space, perpetual motion, oral histories, migration, identity and environments. to new teaching models, based on Gandhiji’s: ‘Design for purpose, learning for sustenance.’
After a day of new faces and new ideas we jumped on the bus back to town center, an eventful ride as we almost drove into and tree and shortly after a rickshaw, mmm, the bus driver clearly wasn’t having his day! We headed to MG road were we visited the Blossom bookshop, waaa, we all had great fun buying a.o Indian cook books, a children’s book with explanation of the god’s and much desired city maps! We landed in a great grand-central-esk café, Koshy’s, were we drank Kingfisher and ate a beautiful north Indian cuisine. Satisfied, we headed home, good and ready for the days to come.