Stubborn Structures and Insistent Seepage: Art in a Networked World

Monica Narula (India)

ART IN A NETWORKED WORLD: Who is the Stranger Next to You?; reads a cautionary notice on a wall in the streets of Delhi. The presence of strangers pre--supposes a networked world, with its own traffic of familiars and aliens, its legible and undecipherable addresses; its distant comforts and immediate anxieties. The notice peels off a wall, becomes an entry, a notation in a database of urban realities and a fragment, or a passage in an installation. It seeps back into the world as a carrier of contested meanings.

The evolving language of contemporary art- making makes an open-ended exploration of this networked world a distinct possibility. Yet, can images,iterations and instances of encounters with the network create distinct vocabularies that speak to places of origin (localities)and spaces of dispersal (globalities) simultaneously?

A form of art practice that responds to this situation could be likened to an interference in the signal, or a seepage into the structure. This seepage can be seen as the effect of a downpour or flood of questions, assailing certainties with quiet insistence. Yet, the stance that this practice entails does not necessarily imply a simple alterity. It only poses the possibility of alterities,without itself taking on a transcendental position outside the network.

The presentation takes into account the fact that the environment of artistic practice is now global only in a skewed sense.