Notes from DDR

“The Law and Image Workshop”

“Surveillance” according to the OED means ‘supervision’ or ‘close watch esp. on suspected person’. The meaning forms an immediate connection with ‘Law’ and the powers-that-be in terms of Althusserian ideology. The installation project organized as part of the workshop on the Law and Image at the Media Studies Lab in September 2008 engaged actively in countering/negotiating/ subverting the power  tilt in the study of ‘law’ and its influence/ impact/ reception of the ‘image’ and vice-versa.

Diverse narrative strands developed in the course of the project.  Firstly, discussions on the consequences of actually organizing the ‘experiment’ offered a narrative of negotiations making inroads on ‘space’ and ‘rights’ in terms of legality and human interest!

Secondly, a parallel ‘prehistory’ to the entire notion of ‘surveillance’ formed another narrative strand, vis-à-vis Avinash Deshpande’s The Great Indian School Show and Shaina Anand’s KhirkeeYaan. While The great Indian School Show, set in the Mahatma Gandhi High School in Nagpur, chronicles events at this school, which has installed close-circuit cameras in all classrooms, corridors, the playground and all exits, KhirkeeYaan interrogates surveillance by using CCTV equipment in a local area as a mode of communication. These onscreen narratives were accompanied by images of the project installation on a cellular phone belonging to a ‘witness’ to the installation and a non-participant of the workshop. These images were thus brought under surveillance per se and transferred to cellular phones belonging to workshop participants.

An audio-visual recording of the project participants while discussing the repercussions of the installation epitomized the fluid relations between ‘signifiers’ and the ‘signified’, forming a fourth narrative. The written word or law, a supposedly abstract system , converted into a dynamic ‘reality’ which perpetuated itself through its living inhabitants, or perhaps the ‘image’ in terms of both participants and events within/without the workshop!