The Hydrogen Bond of the Communist Manifesto

2002

Multimedia installation involving interactive animation, and artist’s books

How can one revisit a canonical text in ways that can open up fresh ways of engaging with it? That was my primary concern with this project where I attempted to work with Marx and Engels’ seminal text of 1848, the Communist Manifesto. This project was exhibited and installed at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology during my third academic year there. The project addressed the notion of site specificity and tried to grapple with the vexed question of ‘political naiveté versus political radicalisation’ that often crop up in elite, urban institutes. A certain degree of pedagogical polemics was therefore an inevitable part of the project.

The main armature of the work was based on a ‘classic’ deconstructive reading of the text. I attempted to locate those precise points where the text begins to contradict itself. These points of contradiction were then treated as entry points for the reader to catch a glimpse of the manner in which the text privileges one set of meaning against a competing set of meanings. The work looked at these aspects through a set of three interactive animations. Each of them explored a particular set of semantic privileging that the text indulged in. For example, there was a set of animation that looked at the manner in which the urban is consistently valorised over the rural (“the idiocy of rural life”) while another set of animation explored the contradictions between collective action and private property.

These explorations were attempted with a stronger reliance on contemporary reference points that with the usual optics of theoretical humanities/political science. In many cases there was a deliberate blurring of historical reference frames that also cut across the distinctions between the ‘serious’ and the ‘frivolous’. Therefore for example, in an animation that dealt with the notion of privacy one would be confronted with password protected screens. Success in cracking the password allowed the users to get a peek into random selections from the agony aunt column in daily newspapers. Therefore, within the space of a single animation one could confront very diverse modalities and mentalities of privacy. The main set of animations was accompanied by a set of large prints and hand crafted artist’s books that amplified and worked with other aspects of the Communist Manifesto.