Mindscape In Cyberspace

Park Street Jn., 2004
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Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, always amuses me, with her vibrancies, colors, lives, ever-changing moods and of course with her warmth. I was born and brought up there; felt her presence around me through my childhood, adolescence and my youth. Each node of the city has multiple images stored for me, multiple stories; each one reflecting various ages, various times of my life. Park Street was a place crowded with yellow taxis and traffic polices with white uniforms, as I used to see it when I was a kid. A kid from suburb, who came to visit a fair or an event near Park Street, and stumbled upon the busy policemen, busy traffic of busy Park Street.

Exodus
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Since I was a kid, I have often witnessed hundreds and thousands of homeless, uprooted people, coming out of the dark caves of poverty and hunger, crossing the borders & the fences and walking towards a darker future, with their face glowing with meaningless hope. They know that they might not reach anywhere; still they wish to continue their journey, their Exodus, for a better home, a better world. In this image, I have tried to capture, the endless, meaningless journey of homeless people, crossing borders and checkposts, hiding in the darkness of cloudy nights, and being threatened by their own transitory existence, for years.

Later, this image has been used as a supporting illustration, by Canadian Institute of International Affair (CIIA, Toronto), currently known as Canadian International Council (CIC), for the Autumn 2007 issue of their International Journal, along with few other works of mine. They have also featured my work ‘Rampage’ on the cover of this issue. Thanks to CIC and IJ.

Insomnia in red and white / Saturday 25th August 2007 6.22 AM
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My MacShot Project is a series of low-resolution unedited (except few basic built-in features in Mac Photobooth) photos of myself and other objects surrounding me and my MacBook, taken by the tiny inbuilt Web cam and PhotoBooth. In the beginning, the primary intention of My MacShot project was to capture few selected moments and feelings, involving me and my context, through the built-in web cam of my MacBook. They were visual expressions of few specific moments, sometimes accompanied by few lines of text and a date/time tag. Initially it was more focused towards the physicality of the webcam, the laptop and the operator (that is me), and their interactions and negotiations with their time - both physical and mental. It was more like a personal, as well as very much context-dependant photo-journal or something similar. But later, I got more interested to figure out how one can go beyond the physical limitations of in-built webcam of a MacBook.

As I started taking more and more snaps, often abstract, I started realizing the innumerable possibilities of this tiny in-built webcam and this simple photo-capture software called PhotoBooth. With simple features and functionalities, it allows you to turn usual objects, into amazing pieces of compositions!

I saw him .. the Green Monster .. with a bleeding heart! / Thursday 5 July 2007 20.54 PM
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• My MacShots: Selected MacShots

The second image (The Green Monster) is a close-up of my mobile screen, as captured by in-built Web Cam of MacBook