THE STATE(s) OF THE INTERNET is a series of conversations that reflect international artistic practices that do not understand the physical and the digital as opposition. However, these practices are happening against the backgrounds of entirely different constitutions of the internet. By discussing these differences THE STATE(s) OF THE INTERNET thinks of the discourses of postcoloniality and digitalization as simultaneous.
The initial conversation in this series is discussing The States of the Internet in South Asia. Together with the interdisciplinary artist Amitesh Grover, who recently developed a cybertheatre piece on the disappearance of authors in India, the series will unpack the particularities of nettheatre in the South Asian region. There the Internet is quite often a lesser restricted space compared to physical places of assembly. We will ask what this fact implies for central concepts of (political) aesthetics like liveness, presence, copresence etc?
This conversation invited Gob Squad Collective and an archivist, Venkat Srinivasan of National Centre for Biological Studies, to look at the multi-layered nature of archives and archival objects. Are objects deemed to be found? Is affordance a key element between objects, its finders and the archive? This talk offers a complex look at the digital object, the archive, and the performance playing out within digital sites and temporalities.