Partial install view from the 8-screen moving panorama video essay at Nam June Paik Art Center, filmed by CCTV in Mumbai, 2021

CAMP presents an essay through their practice in a large-format, 8 screen sync-video environment. By not merely presenting a series of works, but making it a journey through the inside and outside of artworks, this format is their response to the question of “exhibition” today. This exhibition is a “moving panorama,” which was historically a painted environment with moving canvases that would take you from place to place, sometimes imaginary ones. It is also a tour through the ages, where electronic media and modernity in general has evolved in compressed timelines, in the places of the world they live and have worked in. CAMP says “the city is big, the image is (still) small.” Many of the images and sounds here have been recorded or produced by unconventional equipment in non-standard situations, from inside control rooms and in cable networks, from the Somali coast to their studio rooftop, from “made” to “taken,” also open to being taken in turn, via their long running open archival practice. The installation has 7 acts in that unfold in duration, 42mins, as well as in space: 0. City after Video • 1. Electric Time and Space • 2. TV Politics • 3. CCTV Social • 4. Leaks • 5. Grey Boxes, Brown Boats and the Sea • -1. Returns.

Using their media archive system developed with Jan Gerber of Berlin’s 0x2620, CAMP proposes an experiment for the videos housed in the Nam June Paik Art Center Video Archive, the world’s only video archive of Paik’s. The system provides such functions as time-based annotations, timeline views, edit and commentary features, so that its videos are searchable and viewable online with highly structured information. Employing this open-source software and web application, CAMP has run pad.ma, short for Public Access Digital Media Archive, from 2008, indiancine.ma from 2013 about the history of Indian films, and the video art program of 2021 Asian Art Biennial, phantas.ma. Through these long-term archival practices, CAMP seeks to expand the territory of video as a medium from documentation and collection to argumentation and exchange. njp.ma is a pilot project as one of the ways to turn Paik’s video archive to public-access museum resources.

Stills from the Seoul live stream on November 23, 2021 as seen on CCTV.camp

“What is a movie in this age where there are more cameras than people?” This is a newly commissioned work in Seoul using a closed-circuit television camera. The camera is set up on the rooftop of the Daerim Plaza in Euljiro, and tells the stories of old towns under the force of urban regeneration. CAMP controls the camera’s movements with computer software as if choreographing it. With the pan, tilt, zoom functions, the camera moves at various distances and speeds to capture the cityscape with some kinetic rhythm. It adds an oblique angle and duration to the old dance between cameras and subjects. The live streams are available online at cctv.camp too. You can also see in the moving panorama section a work produced at the Four Seasons Hotel Mumbai in the same way. More than 60 years have passed now since Paik pioneered CCTV as an artistic medium in the 1960s, CAMP’s work experiments with a new possibility of filming with the technology. For the Seoul production, CAMP is in collaboration with artists Taeyoon Choi, and Youjin Jeon and Minki Hong of Seoul Express.

(Filming: Euljiro 157 Seoul, Oct 15, 2021–Feb 27, 2022)

Mumbai 2018

From the rooftop of this artists’ studio in Chuim Village, you are taken on a virtual tour of the neighbourhood: its forgotten golf course and mango orchards, its Ambedkarite settlements and coconut Agripadas, its 150–year history and the 1.5 seconds in which a spotted pigeon shows us the future. For the past many years, CAMP has been working with CCTV equipment as a movie–making medium. Live video from standard CCTV PTZ cameras allows us to look around this location in great detail, and keep its memory in storage. The 1000th sun setting over Juhu beach is just the beginning of this evening’s story. What follows is in the tradition of landscape cinema. Images from Chuim Village, both near and far are spoken over by three people, who add historical or contemporary details. Sometimes a newspaper article from 1991, or a map from 1905, or an excel sheet from 2018 also takes part.

Manchester 2008

More than 100 people signed image release forms saying that they were already under watch anyway and they chose to release their data stream in another direction. Filmed by 206 cameras of the Arndale mall, then the largest mall in Europe.

Manchester 2008

People usually under the gaze of cameras enter CCTV control rooms to view their city from within the black box. After the 1996 IRA bombings in Manchester, the Andale Shopping Center was newly built where more than 200 CCTVs were installed. The architectural structure and the surrounding streets are intertwined with the camera system. CAMP invited about 40 citizens to the control room, and let them stay there for an hour. Watching CCTV footage, they talked with the security officer about camera images, George Orwell’s 1984, urban regeneration and commercial areas, surveillance and control, security and protection technologies, etc.

Rostock 2007

Security system for a protest camp at the G-8 Summit. Live stream constantly interrupted by videos from near the security fences. The G8 summit in 2007 was held in Heiligendamm, west of Rostock, which attracted protest against capitalism, globalisation and the Iraq war. German authorities closed most routes to the summit site and pulled over cars for spot checks on the main road from Rostock. The site was surrounded by a fence, and rallies near the fence were banned. by any parties, from anywhere.

Connecting CCTV cameras in the city over internet.

New Delhi 2006

Seven arrangements of cable TV/ CCTV hybrids in the Khirkee neighbourhood of New Delhi, 2006. Video became the ‘site’ for these interactions and conversations. Khirkee was once a feudal village, and Khirkee Extension is fractured by all sorts of lines: caste, religion, money, new and old settlers from different regions. This work linked Khirkee’s constituents by deploying a micro-media, not mass-media, self-generated by those from the sweatshops to the women’s quarters.

Bangalore 2005

Daily programming on local media and information politics to 3000 homes in Bangalore. This was a media event run parallel to the 2005 world information city conference, which focused on promoting information technologies, distribution, and access. The content for WI City TV, pirated programming via an illegal but free local cable TV channel, was gathered by artists, videomakers, filmmakers, and editors who interviewed local residents and took shots of the neighborhood surrounding the conference.

Bangalore 2004

Little sister of Pad.ma, home to the big cinemas of India, Indiancine.ma was born during the centenary year of Indian cinema. It is an encyclopedic archive of Indian film, today probably the best of its kind, run collaboratively by CAMP with other groups since 2013. It was originally set up using Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, published in 1999 by the British Film Institute. The website was built with pan.do/ra, and launched in February 2013 at Jaaga in Bangalore, with support from the Bohen Foundation, the Foundation for Arts Initiatives, and the Goethe Institute. Indiancine.ma has created unique links for more than 60,000 films, and is being used by film and cultural studies institutions nationally and globally.

Mumbai 2006

A street decoration can be stretched to its maximum possible length. At 500m this grows bigger than the neighbourhood it started in and travels to another one and back. A decorator’s chaser box is modified, and its usual light-elements are arranged end-to-end, so that the resulting line is a half-kilometer long line of light. A switch at either end is connected to the light control, and sends a single “pixel” of light down to the other side. If there is someone at the other end, they can send it back.

In 2006 CAMP had a switch hanging from a tree across the street from their studio. It would turn on and off their balcony lights. This work questions our relationship with electricity and its distribution infrastructure and a model of flow from the power stations into clearly owned spaces, evoking the leakages, relays and transformations that actually take place.

A zero-sum game. Two parties could have an agreement to share electricity as long as their total consumption would remain the same. The agreement of electrical “sharing” was made between two consumers, the owner of an apartment, and a sandwich vendor on the street below. The vendor can control the current distribution from a set of dimmers. The vendor’s light is exactly inversely proportional to a light in the owner’s living room, and the speed of his fan is exactly the inverse of the speed of her fan. Their electricity comes from separate sources, but the wireless control can maintain the level of total energy consumption. Such micro-contracts can be potentially made by any parties, from anywhere.

Mumbai 2005

When the streetlights go out, another landscape can be seen made of individual forms of celebration now joined together in a giant circle. A moving panorama or a form of cinema. The title came from Global Positioning System, replacing “Global” with “Glow.” It is a 1200-foot ring of light encircling the historical General Post Office and neighbouring edifices in Fort, Mumbai. This is put into effect by ‘viewers’ using a hand-crank, positioned in the center of the buildings’ intersection. The audience is able to ‘scroll’ the landscape, as light travels between buildings, across roads and onto trees and lampposts, forming an imagescape that is starkly visible at night.

The word “kamra” and “camera” have the same root. A camera is just a room with a hole in it. Small people inside this room can see an image of the great outdoors, without themselves being seen. This experience, of watching without being watched, is at the very heart of cinema. These days it is more difficult to achieve since there are reportedly more cameras than people in the world. Yet, we can stage such an experience, from inside a dark cinema hall in the heart of the city. Maybe, the true destiny of CCTV is to make us secretly intimate with each other and our surroundings.

1950–2020

Drawing in form from the video lecture-performance style honed on CAMP’s rooftop cinema and studio that takes its audience on dense archival journeys, the work narrates the social, cultural and political history of the “housing question” in Bombay/Mumbai, by bringing together cinema, state-sponsored documentaries, newspapers, policy reports and archives from social movements, among other source materials. These materials are assembled, via a hand-built web editor, into a new kind of “annotated film” that links to online archival sources.

Mumbai 2018

3 nights on CAMP rooftop for architecture students of School of Environment and Architecture on Housing in Bombay, with live and archival video. Titled Ghar Mein Shehar Hona, this seminar dealt with: Part 1. From Janata Colony to Janata Colony (imaginary to destroyed); Part 2. From Footpath to Flat (via FSI); and Part 3: From Right to Information (Virtual i.e. Real landscapes).

2015, As If – II: Flight of the Black Boxes, 24 Jorbagh, Delhi, 4×14-segment characters, LED strip lights, DMX controller, computer and custom electronics. Photo: Sebastian Lütgert.

A conversation between two people, at the smallest possible bandwidth, that one could call “film,” or narrative. Made of four alphanumeric characters, each having 14 segments. A series of four letters show two women’s chat on everyday topics, and although it is expressed in the minimal way, we can follow their narrative about the proliferation of CCTV cameras in different urban spaces.

Partial install view from the 8-screen moving panorama video essay at Nam June Paik Art Center, filmed by CCTV in Mumbai, 2021

CAMP presents an essay through their practice in a large-format, 8 screen sync-video environment. By not merely presenting a series of works, but making it a journey through the inside and outside of artworks, this format is their response to the question of “exhibition” today. This exhibition is a “moving panorama,” which was historically a painted environment with moving canvases that would take you from place to place, sometimes imaginary ones. It is also a tour through the ages, where electronic media and modernity in general has evolved in compressed timelines, in the places of the world they live and have worked in. CAMP says “the city is big, the image is (still) small.” Many of the images and sounds here have been recorded or produced by unconventional equipment in non-standard situations, from inside control rooms and in cable networks, from the Somali coast to their studio rooftop, from “made” to “taken,” also open to being taken in turn, via their long running open archival practice. The installation has 7 acts in that unfold in duration, 42mins, as well as in space: 0. City after Video • 1. Electric Time and Space • 2. TV Politics • 3. CCTV Social • 4. Leaks • 5. Grey Boxes, Brown Boats and the Sea • -1. Returns.

Western Indian Ocean 2013

A boat has many powers: to gather a society in its making, to distribute goods, to carry people and ideas across places that, it seems to us, are more different than ever before. From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf is a result of four years of dialogue, friendship and exchange between CAMP and a group of sailors from Kutch, who come to Sharjah often. Their travels and those of co-seafarers from Sindh, Baluchistan and Southern Iran show us a world cut into many pieces, not easily bridged by nostalgics or nationalists. Instead, we follow the physical crossings made by these groups of people who make and sail boats. And who also make videos, sometimes with songs married to them.

Folkestone 2011

What could it mean to extend “watching the coast” to “filming the sea”? Are there any National Sea Film Institutions? There should be.
A film that compiles observations made by volunteer guards watching the English Channel, over one year. Filmed by small cameras connected to the eyepiece of telescopes. Produced with the National Coastwatch Institution, Folkestone, Kent, UK.

Kochi 2012

(Its not so much that all that is solid melts into air, but rather that there are boxes within boxes …) Ports and cities have been shy of each other throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Suddenly they make a joint appearance, new container terminal facing the waterfront, sharing their most visible parts. Meanwhile thousands of other pieces of the port – goods, workers, customs seals, excel sheets – are scattered across a “hinterland,” connected by bridge and wire, and surrounded by fences. What could be an image of this fractured landscape? Boxes resist images, but also offer an invitation to the curious. Our work here follows from such a curiosity, claims that images are still possible, and then asks if just rearranging them a certain way could change the tenor of this geography.

Guangzhou 2015

The crane operator and longshoreman seem to have disappeared.
In this “forgotten space” of the ocean (that channels 90% of global trade), their absence, along with the grime and buzz of the port city has been mourned, there have been requiems. But they exist, countless of them, their hand-eye and body workings, rendered tiny and near-invisible against the backdrop of the lego-land image of the container port. CAMP’s work here, filmed on location at the Zhuhai International Container Terminal, Gaolan on the Pearl River Delta offers “a day in the life of” look at what can be seen; of both the systems-view and workers-view of that seemingly automated movement of boxes

Radia Tap(e): Act II (Hum Logos) is a 45-minute audio film spliced from the Pad.ma collection of the Radia Tapes. It covers two months after the Indian general elections of 2009, with the new cabinet in power. The film asks: if debate around these tapes was about whether they are edited or not, or as Justice Mukhopadhay put it, “splice has been added”, then what can further editing do?

2011

A screenplay in melodramatic format, spanning the first three days of lobbying for cabinet spots, in the wake of the Indian general elections of 2009. The dialogue between a political lobbyist Niira Radia and journalists, politicians, and corporate bodies, is entirely from phone taps made by the government, which was leaked out to the public. This work of CAMP is Radia Tap(e)s: ACT I slows them down and asks: what kinds of environments and scenes may lie behind them, and how are they connected?

Jerusalem 2009

This is a series of video probes into the landscape of East Jerusalem. Shot with a CCTV security camera, these images show that before and after instrumental “surveillance,” there is inquisitiveness, jest, memory, desire and doubt that pervades the project of watching. In these specific times and places, camera movements and live commentary become ways in which Palestinian residents evaluate what can be seen, and speak about the nature of their distance from others.shots of the neighborhood surrounding the conference.

Online 2008-

Pad.ma, housed at CAMP was born in Mumbai on the last day of February in the leap year of 2008, after a coming together of artists, filmmakers, coders, lawyers, cinephiles and friends.
It is a long-running future-oriented footage archive of cared-for, densely annotated video material contributed by artists, filmmakers and cultural workers that offers a way of opening up a set of images, effects and intentions present in video footage that conventions of video-making, editing and spectatorship have tended to suppress or leave behind. This expanded treatment takes us into lesser-known territory for video itself as a site and container for shared memories and experiences. Beyond the finite film or video clip.

Online 2013-

Little sister of Pad.ma, home to the big cinemas of India, Indiancine.ma was born during the centenary year of Indian cinema. It is an encyclopedic archive of Indian film, today probably the best of its kind, run collaboratively by CAMP with other groups since 2013. It was originally set up using Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, published in 1999 by the British Film Institute. The website was built with pan.do/ra, and launched in February 2013 at Jaaga in Bangalore, with support from the Bohen Foundation, the Foundation for Arts Initiatives, and the Goethe Institute. Indiancine.ma has created unique links for more than 60,000 films, and is being used by film and cultural studies institutions nationally and globally.