After another night with almost enough sleep, nearly enough time for breakfast and another bumpy busride in the morning sun, we arrived at the Srishti old building. The first speaker of the day was artist and media practitioner Deepak Srinivasan who decided to abandon his original plan of a power point presentation and took us all outside to explore the issues of public space he is dealing with in his own work. Through group activities, first all of us together, later in small groups of three and three, we played with the notion of how we move in public spaces. We were asked to freeze in different situations, within the school campus and outside in the neighbourhood. The small groups of three moved around in the local area, freezing for a few minutes on different locations. Some interesting conversations and situations occurred when passers-by and other people that happened to be around started to interact with the small interventions.

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Our next stop on the program took us back to the new Srishti building where guest speaker Rustam Vanja discussed the issues of global ecology vs. human rights. Using some of his drawings as a starting point, he posed his thoughts on how ecology and human rights issues are often tackled separately. But, as intertwined as they are, also with world politics and economics, we should be trying to understand how we should deal with these issues in a unified manner.

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He was followed by Smiriti Mehra who is an artist in residence at Centre for Experimental Media Art at Srishti. She showed us a few of her video pieces and work in progress where she is trying to capture the essence of a space. The videos were made in and around Bangalore, where she had followed local markets like Johnson meat market and the flower market, trying to figure out who takes responsibility of these places.

When we gathered after lunch, Prayas Abhinav presented a list with words associated with new media art, and we had a session where he explained the different themes. This led up to an exercise where we formed new groups and in 50 min we had to choose some of the themes and curate a collection of imagery of artists dealing with the chosen subjects.

The day at Srishti ended with a presentation by another artist in residence at the Centre for Experimental Media Art at Srishti, Yashas Shetty. Now based in Bangalore, he is working on a project called Bangalore Metamaps [ http://metamap.in ] which is aiming to create a cheap networked pollution sensors that can send out real time data about air pollution. Previously he had done a project with Medialab Prado making pollution sensors in Madrid, where they put out false data about the level of pollution in the city to not scare away the tourists. He also showed us a very interesting project led by Jeffrey Warren, who is a student at MIT, that is trying to invert the traditional power structures of cartography by letting grassroots mappers making their own low cost community satellites. [ http://grassrootsmapping.org ]

The group split up on the way back, some went to the market and some of us went back to our neigbourhood restaurant and had another lovely meal that left us all too full. Again.