Parchai's blog

n.e.w.s. is a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activity, drawing upon contributions from around the globe, bringing together different voices, accents and outlooks from the North, East, West and South. | Read more..

In October 2009 n.e.w.s. had organised an open call for proposals http://northeastwestsouth.net/node/392 which looked at implementing the Shadow Search ideas http://northeastwestsouth.net/node/395, developing an algorithm that would find off-the-radar or stealth activities. The winner and 4 shortlisted proposals answered our initial query but also led to more questioning regarding the nature of search and its future potentials and well as pitfalls.

We are now working on developing the Shadow Search Project (SSP), a platform for rapid prototypings and a fleamarket for shadowy search algorithms. It will also look at retrieval systems as filters. What we are planning to develop at this meeting is the backstory, the backend of what the concept of 'search' envelops. This search project (SSP) intends to go beyond interface design.

n.e.w.s. would like to continue with the second competition of the Shadow Search Project (SSP) by putting forth an open call this summer with something that might be entitled ''(Re)search'. Now we have all this information how do we find what we are looking for?

Some sequences of Unspeakably More, a four-day seminar (workshop/gathering) hosted by n.e.w.s. contributors and Khoj at Periferry (a ferry boat) in Guwahati, India will be LIVE webstreamed here. So keep checking!

Seminar on the Brahmaputra and and online forum

Participants: Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Monica Narula, Kaushik Bhaumik, Sanjay Bangar, Sharmila Samant, Siu King Chung, Nancy Adajania, Tushar Joag, Howard Chan, Nishant Shah, Pooja Sood, Sonal Jain, Mriganka Madhukaillya, Prayas Abhinav, Stephen Wright, Renée Ridgway

‘Unspeakably More depends on what things are called than on what they are. (...) Let us not forget that in the long run it is enough to create new names and plausibilities in order to create new "things".’

In the course of thinking through our symposium on curatorship under the broad title Art after Space, our original concept has morphed into something else. The above statement is Stephen’s premise about how to incite a discussion, actually focus on having that discussion as the event, not as a secondary action to an exhibition or what has been termed the “pedagogical turn” in contemporary art.

Periferry on the Brahmaputra, Guwahati

During the past months we have been organising with Khoj this real time and online forum at n.e.w.s. Our reconnaissance trip to Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore last April enabled us to take apart the concept of Art After Space. We maintain that art’s condition is post-spatial, yet it is often frustrating to try and describe that condition with existing concepts and vocabularies. The deeper we got in our conversations – which included or even precluded the internet – the more superficial the available vocabulary seemed to be for what we were actually trying to postulate, describe, or invent.

The performative of “talking art” is something we have been recently discussing at n.e.w.s. In researching and writing our forthcoming book, Arbitrating Attention: reinvesting attention surplus in plausible artworlds as it is affectionately called, different courses of action have emerged, some inadvertently, others hammered out during our weekly Skype meetings or even real-world rendezvous. Somehow we are no longer submerged. What now comes to mind in anticipation of a weekend on the Brahmaputra at Periferry is not only the geophysical and geopolitical context – the water, the North East – but the symbolic dimension: the ferry as the meeting place, buoyancy enabling thoughts, the flux of ideas.