Beam Me Up _ Project India

An Internet-based art and text project, Beam Me Up deals with aspects of symbolic, virtual and physical space. Curated by Gitanjali Dang, the project focuses on net art floated by Vishal Rawlley and Abhishek Hazra, with essays by Anand Vivek Taneja and Nilanjana S Roy.

Beam Me Up_Project India 

Curated by Gitanjali Dang   
This project is supported by Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council  
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Artists: Vishal Rawlley and Abhishek Hazra  
Essays: Nilanjana S Roy and Anand Vivek Taneja  
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Beam Me Up_Project India goes live on Saturday, March 20, 2010. 
Vishal’s project will be live online till 20 April 2010.
On 20 March Abhishek will do a collaborative online performance from 14.00 hrs – 16.00 hrs   
For access to works, texts and further details click here. 

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An overview  
knock. knock. 
who’s there? 
scotty. 
scotty, who? 
scotty. disembodied scotty. for tim berners-lee’s sake. *rolls eyes* for sir timothy john ‘tim’ berners-lee’s sake. open up. let this not be 404 error.  

if you are the true child of popular culture then you ought to have uttered the words, beam me up, scotty!, on more than one occasion. we have all variously opened the door to scotty and happily let him in. because in the bigger picture that flashes on the lcd, with backlight led, we are the servers and the clients. and that really is why we have congressed here in cyberspace seeking interface by way of virtuality.  

the computer and its extensions such as the www and the internet have quickly transmogrified into the fulcrum of epistemological debate. through human–computer interaction, net art projects, such as those encompassed by beam me up, tackle enigmatic riddles vis-à-vis cyberspace, artificial intelligence, endophysics and the like. in this vastly vast virtual, representation and communication exist purely within the framework of snaking networks. through protracted exposures to this charged domain of electromagnetics, both abhishek hazra and vishal rawlley have familiarised themselves with the crinkles the big iron can steam out, and those it thus far hasn’t.  
abhishek and vishal combine the performative and the conceptual in #cloudrumble56 and hauz-i-shamsi, their net art for beam me up_project india. in order to do so, they employ seemingly new fangled hardware and software, from automated attendants to microblogging. but let yourself not get caught up in the farcical provisionality of the new. despite the employment of certain thingamajigs both the artists return full circle to linger on the key notions of representation and communication.
excerpt from Gitanjali Dang’s essay
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Project: Hauz‐i‐Shamsi 
Artist: Vishal Rawlley 
Note: Hauz-i-Shamsi, a water reservoir, built by Iltumish – who ruled Delhi in the 13th century – still holds water in Mehrauli. Legend has it that it was in a dream that Prophet Muhammad revealed where Iltumish should build the reservoir. On inspecting the site, Iltumish is said to have found a hoof print of Muhammad’s horse (Burak); around this he erected the reservoir.  
Hauz-i-Shamsi will now be presented online via webcam. A mobile sculpture of Burak will float on it waters and visitors, in the vicinity and online, will be able to interact with the Burak through phone or web.  
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Project: #cloudrumble56 
Artist: Abhishek Hazra 
Note: i am yet to be a tweet – but i hope to pop on your timeline soon. you can find me and my first, second and other n order tweetcousins by searching for #cloudrumble56 on hashtags.org or on twitter.com. if you want to participate in generating me, please ping me at cloudrumble.livetweet@gmail.com  
if all goes well, i should have a data connection to an artists’ performance this saturday, march 20th. as part of the performance, cantordust will try to conjecture on dr. cloudrumble saha’s tenure at delhi’s legendary ionization chamber from 1952 to 1956.  

during these years dr.cloudrumble, who was otherwise famous for sticking a thermometer into the sun’s belly, demonstrated to the august members of the ionization chamber, the planned way to swim through a river in full spate. cantordust might rehearse some of saha’s moves while weaving an asymptotic life jacket for himself and his participant‐observerlivetweetmakers.  

For access to works, texts and further details click here.