Ashok Sukumaran (India)

Ashok Sukumaran is an architect and media artist. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India, and an M.F.A. from the Department of Design/Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles (United States).

Sukumaran’s recent work deals with the intersection of human habitat and “embedded” technology and the physical terrain of digital media. In adopting the view that many new-media technologies are not fundamentally new, his projects imagine a “what could have been” scenario between the disciplines of interactive art, early and pre-cinema, and architecture. He is currently developing a series of works that deal with the intersection of wireless systems and the electrical grid. Site-related and public forms of mediation are a deep and growing interest in his practice.

His work has been exhibited internationally, and he is currently working on projects in San Jose (United States), Pasadena (United States), Lille (France), Bangalore (India), and Mumbai (India). Sukumaran’s work has received numerous awards, including, most recently, first prize in the UNESCO DigiArts Award 2005.

CAMP CV.

CAMP came together as a group in 2007, initially consisting of Shaina Anand (filmmaker and artist), Sanjay Bhangar (software programmer) and Ashok Sukumaran (architect and artist). By the time of setting up CAMP in Mumbai, the artists Anand and Sukumaran had already strong and well-recognized individual practices. Sukumaran had been awarded the first prize of the UNESCO digital arts award in 2006 and the prestigious Golden Nica of the Prix Ars Electronica the following year, 2007. He had lectured at venues such as the Tate Modern, and participated in the Singapore Biennial, 2006. Anand had done a series of well received projects with contemporary image media, and had exhibited at venues such as the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Serpentine Gallery London, Nottingham Contemporary, Cornerhouse Manchester, Khoj and Sarai New Delhi, Powerplant Toronto and more. CAMP’s reason to exist is that it produces and sustains long duration and sometimes large-scale artistic work. It combines film, video, installation, software, open-access archives and public programming with broad interests in technology, film and theory. Its projects over the past five years have shown how deep technical experimentation and artistic form can meet. Their work is closely tracing global phenomena: ships, CCTV, the emotional state of workers and guards, phone leaks,cinematic, digital and energetic media. That is does so with a real intimacy with the material, a committed politics, a care for the formal and experiential, and their utterly unique combination of skills is seen in the span of their activities and their mark on the global art world. Recent exhibitions include: Sharjah Biennial (2013), dOCUMENTA 13 (2012), Gwangju Biennial (2012), New Museum Triennial (2012). CAMP are co-initiators of the online footage archive http://pad.ma, and the newcinema archive http://indiancine.ma. (Their recent feature-length experimental documentary ’From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf’ was awarded the Jury mention at Festival International de Cinema, Marseille and has been screened at BFI London Film Festival, DocLisboa, the Viennale, among others.)