“Byte-sized Encounters” by Tanuja Mishra

Exhibiting Artist(s):

• Tanuja Mishra

My practice stems from my conflicted emotions towards technology, which swing back and forth between fascination and fear. I am lured by the promise of the new with all its possibilities of augmenting human capacities and the potential of democratic reach and cultural inter-change. At the same time, I am repulsed by the invisible technological intrusion into every little nook of daily life. There is a yearning for the old that is rooted in embodied ways of knowing, acting and relating. This tension situates my work in the in-between space of digital-analog, poetic-polemic and process-object orientation. The methods of working incorporate both the experiential techniques of craft-based traditions and the analytical modes of the hacker-maker culture.

The emergent actions and artifacts may surreptitiously sneak into the everyday or blatantly announce their presence as spectacles in the public sphere. In the former case, they act as interrogative probes to examine how culture in-turn is shaped by the technology it creates. Their behavior borders on the uncanny and may reflect through glitches, errors or outright defiance. In the case of the latter, these devices manifest as prosthetic extensions to give voice to the thoughts, feelings and emotions that have been suppressed. They intervene in a public setting to create spaces for agonistic debate and collective reflection. These works have taken the forms of sculptural installations, architectural projections, interactive visualizations, wearable provocations, performative enactments or some combination of the above.