A salient feature of ‘Participatory Art’ is indicative of how ‘engaging’ the work is. It’s a ‘crowd bending’ work which needs commuter’s involvement, interest and active participation.
The first public experiment was with the Smart textile using Cyanotype technique. The fabric was cut into small rectangular pieces and put together to make a figure of a boy hung on the strings tied to two poles. The intention was that when the metro bolted into the station the fabric pieces fluttered by the gush of wind. Soon ,the commuters started to pose and play with the stapled fabric pieces.
Second experiment was done in order to resonate with a larger number of people on a basic level. This is the form of an activity and what better way than to have a live set-up! For seven days in seven different hot spots. Something, that exists in the space with which one can engage in their waiting time. It’s not intellectualized enough to demand intense understanding. Commuters finger painted on a piece of fabric and with a running stitch made flowers. All the participants later come together for a Commuters party where each commuter shared and networked while painting a fabric together. Also interacted with a sensor based installation made using the flowers and a cloud. The commuters also kept in touch via the Facebook page Trippiereasons, for images and more metro activities done by me.
Third experiment involved the Go pro video takes of the Bal Bhavan and the final video edited Adobe Premier pro. It was played in the VR box . The video depicted the childhood days through my lens. Commuters experienced the video while walking on the hop Scotch that had nothing to technology, as well as a game from their time. Meanwhile, also got introduced new technology while going back to their childhood days!
I grew up being exposed to different sorts of textile and that made me aware of the behaviour of the variety in textile. This knowledge excited me enough to challenge the traditional use of textile to evoke human behaviour in a public space. I feel fabrics are an emotion, an art, an experience. It can be preserved, , reformed, recreated and valued by each and every individual, bought or handmade. Textile just don’t remain fashionable, they turn worthwhile and the functionality increases in true from. I have weaved, screen printed, dyed, hand embroidered fabrics. Worked with companies designing garments for a living. I have an unquiet mind and creating art in response to the surrounding tops my index.
The interventions are built in siren or alarm protocol that employed to turn a crowd towards it. The sets were all positioned in the ‘hotspot’ locations and exhibited a tendency for attracting crowds. These sets were programmed set of a natural seeming action, reaction to the set up when one passes the proximity of the space.
This participatory technique, grabbing attention and handling conversations might at points be manipulated. It is more important to establish one’s role in the space. Once the set up started to attract crowd the metro used to take away all. Every 6 minutes there was a new crowd to look at the same set up. My idea of interaction changed from experiment to another. In the first one it was to do only with process and technique of the installation. It grew in the second one to a little more knowledge about the participants life and in the third all about their childhood.
