STUDENTS’ BIENNALE 2018 | THE EXPANDED EDUCATION PROGRAMME

TECHNOLOGIES AND/OF ART
BY SANTHOSH SADANANDAN

KALADY | 12-18 SEPTEMBER 2018

At the Faculty of Arts, Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady
Other participating colleges: RLV College of Music and Fine Arts, Thrippunithura; Raja Ravi Varma Centre  of Excellence for Visual Arts, Mavelikkara; College of Fine Arts, Thrissur and College of Fine Arts, Thiruvanathapuram

Technologies and/ of Art explored political, philosophical, aesthetic debates around the questions of technology and also its reciprocation within artistic practices. The workshop was structured around the texts of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin amongst other philosophers’ concerns with technology. The mode of this workshop was primarily lecture-based followed by discussions. These conversations pushed students to think beyond instrumental notions of technology and develop a deeper understanding and its primacy in terms of art practice. The discussions opened up the following ideas amongst others: ‘Aura’ in work of art, ‘Aestheticisation of Politics’ , ‘Politicisation of Aesthetics’, ‘enframing’, language as a technology and how it enframes the way we think, how caste operates as a technology in the Indian context. Apart from the lecture sessions also sat through different screenings – which ranged from Hannah Gadsby's Nanette to an episode from a sci-fi series, a documentary on the Helvetica font and a TED talk about the significance of language in thinking. Also, they collectively engaged in ‘meme’ making using photocopied images which resulted in interesting memes about the conditions of Faculty of Art and their ongoing protests against the administration regarding the complete lack of basic infrastructure like classrooms and toilet facilities at the faculty. The recent floods worsened the conditions. These works were later put up around the canteen area for the public to view. All these exercises also helped them to expand their textual understanding around art and technology into practice taking shape in different formats and mediums.

The ‘Technologies and/ of Art’ workshop was developed by Santhosh Sadanand, Art Historian and Associate Professor at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar Universtiy of Delhi, Delhi.