CAMP’s Colliding Images

Bombay Tilts Down (2022) in Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP

On the occasion of the MoMA exhibition Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP, we spoke to Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran, two of CAMP’s founding members, about the works on view in the exhibition and the collaborative studio’s wide-ranging practice.

Stuart Comer and Rattanamol Singh Johal: Can you tell us how CAMP was formed? What inspired you to come together?

Shaina Anand: It was 2007. None of us went to art school. Ashok came from architecture, and I studied film. But I think the frustrations of our disciplines were finding a home in media art and in a certain kind of art practice. Ashok had done some works with electricity and the built environment. Glow Positioning System (2005) connected a whole square in the city via people’s windows. Window to window, everyone sharing electricity and Christmas lights. All of our early works were in public spaces.

Ashok Sukumaran: And Shaina had run a TV station inside a market in 2005. It was an amazing open studio with students where they were producing a television channel for an indoor market of 300 shops.

SA: During that pedagogical experiment of running the market TV station, students worked with MiniDV cameras but they had to flip the viewing screen around. They could still see their subjects, but the people they were filming could also see their image as seen by the camera.

We were doing these wild things on the streets, in markets, in Khirkee village. No permissions. The street is yours; the infrastructure is yours. That privilege escalation, that hacking, that possibility that anything can happen when two unconnected things connect. By then it was 2006 and India was encountering an art-world boom. Galleries were getting bigger and everyone’s art was just scaling up. It wasn’t changing, it wasn’t getting more ambitious, it was just getting bigger. This wasn’t CAMP’s scene, but we were still part of the art world because we were showing internationally by then. But back in India, nobody understood what we were doing.

So we wanted to set up CAMP then because we wanted our own infrastructure, we wanted our own cinema. We wanted our own archive and many other things. But the main desire was to create an autonomous space that we could run our way.

A screenshot from the CAMP website showing a selection of “Backnomyms” generated between 2007 and 2011

SA: To receive a seed grant for the work we wanted to do, we came up with the name Critical Art and Media Practices, the acronym for which is CAMP. But immediately Ashok said, we can’t have this kind of cute NGO name.

AS: It’s the same with pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive). Those words are loaded, but you can also have other words. You can change your mind. So, we decided to play this joke about what the possible expansions of the CAMP acronym could be. Sanjay Bhangar, the third cofounder of CAMP, was a self-taught programmer who was running the Indymedia website and was also a spirited hacker. And we built a piece of software that would spin out different names for CAMP every time the website was opened. We called them “backronyms.” It was a nice way to have a laugh every time somebody loaded the website. We didn’t believe that the joke would last so long and that it would be on the wall of our exhibition at MoMA, but here we are.

Installation view of “Backnomyms” at the entrance to Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP

SC: You’ve talked about CAMP starting to coalesce at exactly the moment the market really starts to boom in India. Was the development of collaborative models a major shift at that time? Or did you feel it wasn’t so much a trend as it was a specific direction for you?

AS: Not all of us wanted to be identified as artists all of the time. Folks had other ambitions within this kind of hybrid structure. We decided we wouldn’t be restricted to what art galleries could consume or show. The idea of a collective had already turned into a kind of sealed envelope: functionally, collectives became the equivalent of any other individual artist.

SA: The text from 2007 that’s still on our website explicitly says we’re not a collective, but rather a space where ideas and energies gather and become interests and forms. The idea for a collective also came from cinema, which no one person can do—it’s inherently collaborative. Also, the internet was new. It showed us that it’s possible to be autonomous without major funding or a big infrastructure. The internet is free, it’s a forest. Organize it. Hide in it. Build something beautiful. Those ideas really did inform us back then.

RSJ: Let’s shift gears to talk about the three works in the exhibition galleries. In each of these projects, the relationship between makers, subjects, and viewers is disturbed and reconfigured. And speaking more broadly about your collaboration, it doesn’t crystallize into any single configuration.

SA: What do you do if you want to make a film? You need a camera, mics, you need someone to press record, you need actors, and you need an audience. But what if their roles are interchangeable?

AS: We don’t use the term “found footage.” We like to say that it’s much more than found—it’s sought out. We went into the CCTV control room in the UK in 2008 in search of footage. For From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, we traveled alongside—not on—the boats for many, many months and years, from Porbandar in Gujarat to Somalia, seeking out clips and stories about what was happening. As we traveled, people were showing us clips from East Africa, or something that happened to a particular boat in the northern Persian Gulf the previous week. It was a form of storytelling and exchange. People gave you a story with the clip, and this exchange was done over Bluetooth—files were transferred from phone to phone. It was a slow process. At some point we realized that these clips were an amazing form of ephemeral media, constantly being deleted from people’s phones, because at the time they had a two-gigabyte memory limit. We were collecting this material from the source before it disappeared.

SC: Can you talk about not being on the boat—about that aspect of remove as you start to compile this material? In Bombay Tilts Down (2022), shot by a single surveillance camera, there’s a different kind of remove, even though you have a more direct relationship to the recording device.

SA: The remove is already there in Khirkeeyaan (2006). I’m not in the room as the filmmaker; I’m not saying “rolling” or “cut.” We’re doing quite a bit, but we’re not calling the shots. Khirkeeyaan is a mashup of two kinds of media that were everywhere in the streets of Delhi and Bombay at that point. One is CATV—which is just cable TV—and the other is CCTV. Until 2012 CATV relied on terrestrial cables and not the dish antenna. So there was cable TV and the small—14-inch or 17-inch—television sets in people’s homes, even in shanties. Then, around 2005 or early 2006, just before Khirkeeyaan, there was a new infrastructure we began seeing in India, which was CCTV, with these tiny cameras that cost no more than 500 rupees (less than $10 then). The cameras were suddenly everywhere—in the little grocery store, in the beauty salon, in the abortion clinic.

AS: They were often next to each other, these two systems, the cable television and the surveillance camera. Khirkeeyaan is the meeting of the two systems, which allowed something new to happen.

SA: Khirkeeyaan was proof of concept for me that if you exit the frame, the dynamic will change. That work’s Nepal episode begins with a girl whose house is bare because she’s a recently arrived migrant, while the other participants are already settled into their homes and lives in New Delhi. An older lady says to her, “Now we eat rice in gold,” and she replies, “I’m still eating rice in silver.” That’s poetry, right? They’re not saying “I’m still poor, I eat rice in stainless steel, while you’re eating it on brass.” When you exit, something else happens.

Khirkeeyaan (2006) in Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (2013) in Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP

RSJ: The unedited footage of the Khirkeeyaan episodes is publicly available on pad.ma. This might be a good moment to pivot and ask about your archival practice, and how the online platforms you have created dovetail with the works in the show.

SA: By 2007 there had been about 30 years of independent video made in India. And if it were to be preserved in a non-state archive, who would be its custodians, caregivers, and contributors? It had to be a community of artists, documentary filmmakers, collectives, cultural practitioners, and sometimes NGOs. That was the motivation behind building pad.ma. But where would be its home? In a library or inside a university, for which you need an ID card? Would it be pay-per-view? No, it had to be on the internet.

AS: Today there are a lot of other reasons to use it, including online disinformation. It links back to the source, which both AI and disinformation erase. Indiancine.ma is a sister project that came out of the centenary of Indian cinema and Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen’s Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (1994). Within our group of cinephile lawyers, scholars, coders, and artists, there was the idea that we could turn an archive of Indian cinema into footage that we could rework beyond the existing individual films. The footage could be re-edited and could fertilize new imaginaries.

RSJ: The exhibition has an online parallel at phantas.ma, where annotated video clips from across your digital video archives drop daily, and are thematically grouped weekly, running for the duration of the MoMA show. Can you talk about how this was conceived?

Bombay Tilts Down (2022) in Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP

SA: Over the 22 weeks of the exhibition, there’s a video a day that is released at 9:30 a.m. EDT, 3:30 p.m. CET, 7:00 p.m. IST. It’s our revenge on the endless YouTube shorts, Insta reels, and TikTok. There’s a new video every day, which will have annotations and is open to comments and discussion right there on your phone when you are alerted to the daily drop via Telegram or receive the thematically grouped weekly dispatch over email. Through these short, poetic videos, we are unpacking works in the MoMA exhibition and going into the larger video worlds of CAMP.

SC: I want to ask about the living archive, represented by your online platforms and the live feed of a CCTV camera. A self-imposed surveillance state has proliferated, and Bombay Tilts Down emerges out of this moment where all these symptoms of image culture are colliding.

SA: The work is an archive. In those COVID lockdown months, Bombay looked the way it did, and now it’s a different city. You will not see that clear sky again in a hundred years. Palais Royale, the supertall luxury residential building, will remain illegal and incomplete, but it did get built. The city has changed, and the four shanties that you see when the camera finally descends—they’re still waiting on unfulfilled promises. Textile mill workers lived there and have been waging a struggle for more than 35 years now. As the mills closed, the promise was that the mill lands would be redeveloped, with one-third used for social housing, one-third for green spaces, and one-third for private redevelopment by the mill owners. The voice of Vilas Ghogre, the Dalit poet and activist, tells us, “Our housing still remains a question.” There was enough land for all of it. But those broken promises are the painful heart of what makes Bombay this extreme, unjust city.

Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP

AS: In Bombay Tilts Down, the music was important, because we were tired of ambient sound. What is the sound of the CCTV images?

SA: BamBoy (Tushar Adhav), who composed the soundtrack, grew up in the former mill neighborhood of Parel; he is into dubstep, grime, and his own version of rap. He was so hungry for the archive of Bombay poets and writers we laid out for him. They were the ancestors he did not yet know about.

SC: Can you talk about the specific formal equation of Bombay Tilts Down? There’s something extremely powerful about how these horizontal and vertical vectors work together as a sort of musical composition in their own right.

SA: When Bombay Tilts Down begins, we’re zoomed quite far in on many of the screens, and you’re looking at the horizon. Then you start seeing ships in the distance. When you’re that high up, say on the 36th floor, and you’re zooming in, your tilt-down will last 12 minutes. That was revelatory for us as we were first taking these shots. As you’re tilting down, you are travelling from that big ship or oil rig 20 miles out at sea, then coming to the fishing boats, which means you’re still at sea for three minutes. In the fifth or sixth minute you’re seeing the coastal road, and the reclamation of land from the sea. Then there’s a scene of crime: this building belonging to this oligarch, or that building with its very checkered history, or another building standing on the property of a former textile mill. The layers blend and fade into each other in a single take. When you’re watching it up close, it’s really like a brush. One day is painted over by another day, and you get that effect because the fades go from top to bottom to match the tilting action, so you really feel like something is gone.

AS: More broadly, a lot of politics has been about land. In Bombay Tilts Down, there’s the idea about the verticality of the development, but also about people who are settled below, and their long, durational relationship to the present moment. These ideas are, I think, quite important, as they’re reshaping our relationship to what used to be called land. And everything in India, including caste, is linked to this battle for space.

Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP is on view at MoMA February 22–July 20, 2025.