Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology

SYNCHRONISATIONS was an international think tank probing the future of art and design academies and hosted by Srishti from March 21-April 4, 2004 at Vishtar, an artists’ village on the outskirts of Bangalore.

“Synchronisations” WAS the first major event of Future Academy, an international research collective that includes art colleges in the United Kingdom and experimental studio labs and architectural foundations in Bangalore, Mumbai and Dakar, Senegal.

Ms Geetha Narayanan, Director, Srishti WAS the Project Director and Research Scholar for “Synchronisations” and Dr Clementine Deliss, a Paris-based artist, the curator.

The think-tank consisted of 60 people from over 14 nations. Forty were students of art, design, film and new media, and architecture. They could interact with professional artists, architects, filmmakers, urban planners, social scientists and faculty from international art colleges.

The participants, having hypothesised on the future of art and design education, then broke into smaller groups and visited four sites - Coorg, Pondicherry, Hampi and Hospet. They returned to create presentations which were made before a select audience and the media at Opus, Bangalore, on the evening of April 4, 2004.

“Synchronisations” was the keyword used by students of Srishti to signify how their generation “thinks in beat” across continents. The project reflects the increasingly global constitution of the contemporary art and design college.

“Synchronisations” involved participants from Senegal, UK, Ireland, South Africa, Spain, Greece, Norway, Sweden, Holland, France, Germany, Austria, China, India and Japan. It was a microcosm of future global communities of artists, designers and cultural engineers who combine physical and virtual mobility with a growing awareness of socio-political, economic and civic responsibilities.

The think tank aimed at investigating communal associations, forms of citizenship, global currencies, urban and rural territories and wide-ranging aesthetic practices. Emerging from the discussions and deliberations were a series of observations, proposals and recommendations to help identify the way forward in the arts and associated industries in the context of both local needs and international communications.

With “Synchronisations”, a platform was created for an exceptional and culturally diverse group of young artists, designers, urban planners and filmmakers from across the world to come to Bangalore and engage in action-research. The objective is to produce a conceptual blueprint for the future of the arts and of institutions that engage with art and design education.

The think tank began with group presentations by the participants from Edinburgh, Chelsea, Senegal, Japan and India, respectively. These presentations addressed different aspects of the notion of a “future academy” like economics, mobility, modes of production, etc.

Following five days of presentations and intensive discussions, the participants split into four groups and dispersed in four directions on March 26 to do “case studies” of Hampi-Vidyanagar, Pondicherry, Hospet-Belur-Halebede and Coorg. The objective was to co-relate projected ideas and perspectives with sites and situations.

Returning from the sites on March 31, the participants moved into sifting the visual and other accumulated data and production mode in preparation for the Open House on April 4 where their findings were presented using multimedia, performance and other modes of art and communication to a select audience.

“Synchronisations” also experimented with on-going media documentation of the event and “case studies” with the objective of continuity through publications, films and a collective data bank.

The international artists and faculty involved with the project included Pierre Leguillon, an artist and curator from Paris, Torstein Nybo, a photographer and director of the Media 19 collective Oslo/London, Christos Papoulias, an architect from Athens, Greece and an expert on Hampi, Cedric Vincent, an artist and anthropologist from Paris, Noe Mendelle, head of the Film Department at the Edinburgh College of Art, Shelagh Klueit, head of the Fine Arts programme at the Chelsea College of Art and Design and Shekhar Krishnan, a social scientist from Mumbai.

There were five participants from Media Centre de Dakar and Ecole Nationale des Arts, Senegal. The other student participants came from Edinburgh College of Art, Chelsea College of Art and Design, Kamala Raheja Vidhyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies, Mumbai and Srishti.