Temporary Everything (KVR Book I)

Introduction

I have an interest in exploring the temporary in our cities: architecture, performance, functional and aesthetic. I will index uses I experience and others that I can imagine. One of the first few things I will do here is frame a statement about these interests and share it widely, seeking suggestions of projects, experiences/memories and observations which seem to share their concerns.

I will invite some of the people behind the suggested projects to contribute texts, images and audio to this book. I will also invite practitioners to come to the Khoj site to comment on some interesting projects which are already documented here.

<< INDEX / OUTLINE of projects and explorations during the virtual-residency >>

---  THE STORY THAT NEVER WAS (a manifesto of the unstable)

---  TALK BACK (a festival of commenting, ranting and other conversations at the khoj website)

------ 1) JAN 26th-Feb 1st: Punctured City: a tactical guide for autonomous personal actions in the post-terror metropolis and "positivistic security"

The post-terror city is becoming a synthesis of technology, counter-terror and a general lack of trust and goodwill. The counter-terror manifests itself through restrictions, documentation-obsession and what else? We are seeing the rapid deployment of technologies meant for surveillance, tracking and rapid data mining.

How can you and me be the inconsistent, wild, unpredictable, forgetful, carefree, trusting beings we sometimes allow ourselves to be in this world? Have our societies permanently narrowed-down the range of personalities we can be? What are the ways to resist this?

From being an occasion for forum participants to share recent histories of this effort that they can remember it can become a moment to pause and identify the gaps in their capacities and approaches. Developing technologies to address some of the concerns the forum raises can be one of the interesting outcomes of this exercise.

This forum will also discuss everyday tactical ways which could be employed to subvert cynical and pessimistic control mechanisms around us and replace some of them with "positivistic security" systems, which secure us without the aforementioned baggage. Some proposals for these kind of systems (realistic and fanciful/absurd) will be created and shared by the participants as an exercise.

------ 2) Feb 1st onwards: The Edible Maps Community

Carrying forward the interests of my PetPuja project, I will use the potential which the Khoj web community and the Internet in general to create an online-offline community which maps the vegetables growing in Delhi city which are open for sharing. I will also initiate discussions through the web-community about adopting projects like thePETPUJA CANOPY (first installed at 48c festival) which allow vegetables to be grown in public spaces. On the 1st of feb, I will open this community on my KVR space and invite people to participate and contribute in it across the month.

------ 3) Transcripts of discussions I will moderate at n.e.w.s, titled "Shared Journeys" and "Broken Webs" will be added here.

---  SEARCHING FOR DARK FLOWERS (a wiki-novel set in a post-apocalyptic unstable world) [to be uploaded in October 2008]

--- [...]

~~ Prayas