Nishant Shah

I woke up the other day with a strange feeling that I am losing my memory. As I was going through the morning rituals of scrolling through news feeds and social media updates, I felt that I could not remember the world before corona — BC, if you will. It was a strange feeling. I am almost certain that three weeks ago, before the pandemic was announced, before the shutdowns were implemented, before social distancing and physical isolation became the bywords, there must have been other things that were on my mind and in my information streams. Try as I might, I could only come up with vague recollections about events, people, places, and plans that must have occupied my attention.The feeling of preternatural amnesia was complemented through the rhythms of the day. At “work”, I sat at my desk in a dress-shirt and pyjamas, making an attempt to make only the camera-visible parts of me work-presentable. We joked how we have forgotten to wear work clothes. The virus had rendered us sartorially catatonic. The news feed was making me sick because the news Continue Reading …

The infamous Rule #34, one of the older memes of the internet, boldly proclaims, “If it exists, there is Porn of it”. Over more than a decade, this tongue-in-cheek (no pornographic reference intended) adage has borne witness to the fact that the internet has been home to expressions which don’t find place in the mainstream. So creative has been this genre that porn doesn’t just refer to sex any more. Internet Porn (as opposed to Porn on the Internet – go figure) often becomes a way of describing user content that defies regulation and finds creative expressions. Thus, trying to find “porn of it”, while trying different options: Tetris Blocks, Gummi Bears, Hello Kitty, and N95 Masks have all found their often funny, often NSFW bizarre renderings as folks on the web have engaged in creating new fantasies. One of the hashtags that I have been following online has been #foodporn. No, it is not what you think. Nope, it is not about that. OMG, get that filthy thought out of your head – and stop eyeing that eggplant emoji Continue Reading …

When the world officially went online — not just used the internet but realised that we will have to live on it, amid the shutdowns and lockups, something strange happened. Those of us privileged enough to be able to work remotely and continue to be productively engaged, thus hanging on to a semblance of normality in an uncertain world, started to recognise the fatigue of screen space. We were already struggling with the fact that we were living with screens — they were in our hands, pockets, bags; by our pillows, and, with us, on our toilet seats. And then came the video-conferencing explosion. All work got reduced to staring at the screen — suddenly making a lot of us realise that despite the presence of ubiquitous computation, our work and life had a lot of time for in-person and physical activities. As we shifted, taking for granted access, affordability, and affordances, into this online world, we have all been exploring what it means to work in these distributed environments. There are long editorials about “Zoom fatigue”, “platform tiredness” and Continue Reading …

In 2003, when the digital was still a new word and the Internet was a new world, I used to work with a tech company as an Information Architect to build remote and online communities. Part of my work was to review proposals from different stakeholders for a competition to build platforms for distributed and blended communities. In those days before the phrase ’ed-tech’ was coined, there were a few initial proposals that were flirting with the idea of online learning. In our final short-list there were three proposals which were all interesting and innovative. Interestingly, all of them were more or less pitching a same concept, though with different constituents in mind. For our 7 member jury, the dilemma was that 1 of the projects had submitted a budget that was five times larger than both the other proposals put together.  Unable to understand this discrepancy, we eventually ended up calling all the three teams together, to see why their plans and estimates were so different. It turned out that the two teams asking for less money were comprised Continue Reading …

If we think of trust as a physical concept, it becomes immediately apparent that it has intensive and extensive qualities. On the one hand, the feeling of trust – its perception, its experience, its affect, and its emotion – is subjective, customized, and personal. It is subject to both temporal decay and contextual collapse. The sheer ineffability of trust and the surety that it might be broken when least expected from actions and sources unpredictable, makes it an intensive and an intense experience. It requires a continued negotiation, interrogation, and suspicion. Among friends, or other similar interpersonal relationships, the covenant of trust comes with the promise of betrayal. There is no doubt that things/people/ideas we trust, will eventually, even if willy-nilly, lapse and let us down, thus resulting into a constant surplus and deficit of trust. It is precisely because of this contingent and ephemeral quality of trust as an intensive property – that there has been so much attention paid to its extensive measures. Trust needs to be designed, enumerated, quantified, measured, delineated, fixed, and produced as a static Continue Reading …

We often fall into the binaries of the digital and the analogue, positing one against the other. Even when we diffuse those boundaries, we continue to maintain the separations of IRL/VR or metaspace/cyberspace; acknowledging their co-constitutive nature only serves to establish them as inherently discrete. Thus, when we think of a metaphor like ‘digital earth’, we imagine it as a frisson of frictional concepts, as if the idea of the ‘digital’ and ‘earth’ coming together is a fanciful one — one being so grounded in dirty materiality, and the other elevated to the sterile clouds. The invocation of ‘digital earth’ also triggers a pre-wired set of responses to explore this dissonant pairing: There are images of satellite maps, GPS triangulations, Augmented cartography and the seductive visualization of the planet that we have now naturalized on our location sensitive devices. There are ideas of infrastructure — of the giant network of cables and electricity that run below oceans and across ravines to connect us in the digital ether — which is also politically examined for the costs of natural resources and Continue Reading …

An underlying current in the six web-residency calls – despite their diversity in intellectual legacy and emotional orientation – was the signaling of a failure. Not just the unfolding collapse of the geo-territorial and chrono-political now, but a foreclosure of the planetary and human time and space that allows only for a failed future. The different web-residencies that ambitiously, provocatively, and radically responded to these calls of dealing with the imminent failure of future and the future of our unfolding failure, were strongest when they asked for a system reboot in order to liberate ourselves from the fixity of the past and to embrace the hyper-possibility of a speculative future. It is with this manifesto in mind that I narrowed down on the list of two projects that resonated with me as embodying the spirit of the residencies and the urgency of the worlds that they inhabit, inherit, and ingrain. 1st Prize: Natasha Tontey, ‘From Pest to Power’ Natasha Tontey’s ‘From Pest to Power’ is a playful, repulsive, and celebratory repackaging of the insectoid fascination as ‘food of the future’ and as Continue Reading …

Social distancing” is the phrase of the season. If the global Covid-19 pandemic does not come under control, it might very well become the phrase of the year. As we exercise caution in touching — never before has touch been so deeply put under suspicion — and hyphenated phrases like “self-quarantine” and “isolation-units” and “emergency-stockpiling” become a part of our everyday vocabulary, you know that none of them is going to have as much traction as social distancing. If it were a movie star, the phrase would already be generating festival buzz and preening itself to become the Oxford Word of the Year, taking the crown from last year’s “climate emergency”. Perhaps, it is too early to make these predictions. Who knows what more horrors this year has to unfold? It is, after all, only March, and even though we are facing economic collapse, environmental degeneration, and biological warfare, it is telling of our times that we might still have to wait and see what else might show up. One indicator for recognising the urgency of this term is to go back to Continue Reading …

In the age of digital networks, every time a crisis appears, it is accompanied by misinformation. The novel coronavirus Covid-19 had just begun to assert itself as a global epidemic when the first churnings of the misinformation mill started. There was a range of alarmist, panic-inducing messages, posts, and forwards that immediately hatched conspiracy theories about the origin, the spread, and the rate of contagion, introducing doubt and mistrust in the officials working at containing the outbreaks. This was followed by “secret footage” that claimed exaggerated death numbers, suspicious “leaks”, and even deniers who insisted that this was just a hoax with covert political agenda. This early spate of disinformation, laced with fear, and aimed at accelerating mass-hysteria, are perhaps easy to dismiss. Largely, because the virus has garnered so much global attention and coverage that a calmer, more poised, and rational discourse has more or less dominated the conversation, and even the most alarmed are still learning not to over-react: the news of people stock-piling food and discriminating against persons of Asian descent notwithstanding. It is easy, for most of us who Continue Reading …

The joy of total surrender to the smart technologies around us is in the imagined utopia of the world being customised to our needs, wants, whims, and fancies. Never, since Galileo’s decentering of the earth in the map of the cosmos, and definitely not since Darwin’s degradation of the human as a risen ape, have we returned with such ferocity, to the idea of us being at the centre of the world again. The Internet of Things and the world of predictive social web are both so seductive, not because of the proffered connections and convenience, but because they allow us to unashamedly dream of ourselves as the most important things in our life, where everything around us caters to our schedules, routines, desires, and aspirations in one synchronised digital dance. Personalisation is the reward we get for subjecting ourselves to extreme surveillance. We unravel ourselves into data streams that form patterns of algorithmic recognition so that extremely insignificant things are fine-tuned to our personal desires. Life, in the age of customisation, is that mythical cup of Starbucks coffee where Continue Reading …