Foretelling hyper-reality with art

In 2020 we felt a sense of alienation and confinement that pushed us to explore the digital frontiers and insinuate dialogue on the Internet. And what if the digital dialogue is encapsulated in art? Serendipity Arts Festival 2020, that went virtual for the first time owing to pandemic captured the powerful interplay of human imagination with the omniscient Internet that spawned an evolution of how we perceive art.

The festival proved to be groundbreaking in tapping on the power of the Internet and ensuing innovative integration. It accentuated the profoundness of the digital platform as a medium of expression rather than just seeing it as a temporal space to be used only in pandemic times. This has forged the longevity of Internet art and has made us all the tech generation.

L’Officiel India DigitalRead L’Officiel India in the digital libraryEvery issue and every cover story, on TCG Media.Read now

More so, the artworks presented at the festival were based on experimentation in mediums, forms and subjects in the web space. The festival was interspersed with filmography, AV's, performative arts, talks, workshops, and other multidisciplinary creatives.

The SAF 2020, held this month, proved to be groundbreaking in tapping on the power of the Internet and ensuing innovative integration

Art synergizes with body

Art has much deeper connotations with the body that is masterfully used in storytelling in the webspace. The project, ‘Antigone Interrupted’ that’s a retelling of Greek tragedy brings to life stories of heroes and heroines of the ancient Greek play by Sophocles. Based on a book by academician Bonnie Honig, the audiovisual performance art synergised body movements, sounds from breadths and human voices in the production. The performance art interrupted the ongoing narrative of the usual story and forged new meanings and interpretations. “Working with the story of Antigone provides us with the lens through which we can reflect on the challenges of contemporary democracy,” said Joan Cleville, artistic director of Scottish Dance theatre who collaborated on the project.

Another project curated by Mandeep Raikhy ‘Body in Movement’ expressed how the body reacts when the world is reconfiguring itself amid global changes. The interrogative creatives shall make one ponder how they classify an unproductive, fragmented, archival or dissenting body in retrospect to the changing scenario.

Documenting stories

The festival forged visual documentation of stories as seen in ‘My Story/ Your Story/ Our Story’ curated by thespian Anmol Velania and Goa Familia curated by Lina Vincent.

The former lineup showcased relatable stories through audiovisual and performance art that explored the personal encounters in the superficial realm of the Internet depicted in ‘Nihayati Niji Baatein’ and producing a live tree of online stories where the tail of each story marks the beginning of a new one in ‘A 1001 Quarantine Nights’.

On the other front, the 'Goa Familia' brings a blast from the past and makes us nostalgic. It archives the family life of Goans through vivid AV documentation that emanate shared collective histories.

In another project named ‘The Last Poet’ that combined scenography, film, sounds, theatre and live performance, stories professing freedom of expression is portrayed. Elaborating on the conception of the idea, curator Amitesh Grover said as mentioned on official YouTube of SAF, “I started to research on poets who have been threatened in so-called democratic modern world. I found that there has been a dark history of poets who have been incarcerated, felt hopeless or lost to intolerant societies and that became the starting point of the project.”

Introducing a hyper-real world

We have transcended from the real to the virtual, so what’s next? The festival envisioned that hyper-reality might be the future where a touch can be felt miles away, where a taste that we savoured might not even exist in real-time and many more conjoined experiences might not be even happening in reality! The work 'Future Landing’ curated by Veeranganakumari Solanki portrayed paraphernalia of real and virtual mediated by sounds.

One of the artworks in the project was based on stories edited by Gujarati poet Mir Umar Hassan. It creatively resurrected partition tales through a curvaceous winding mechanism, with ticking clock music and strong base voice drums complementing the work. This work was based on stories of Malwa Chronicle newspaper that featured partition stories in its 1964 publication which were later taken down for depicting the macabre history through the eccentric metaphor of silver pocket watches. The ticking sounds in the digitally interactive artwork allude to these watches and pay a homage to old times.

Another artwork in the project interspersed visually appealing geometrics with meditative sonic sounds that prompted one to meditate. The user interface of the artwork requires one to navigate various hymn-like eerie sounds through keyboard and browser introducing us to a unique auricular experience.

With many festivals going online, some have indeed pushed boundaries in experimentation and made art more audacious and democratic.