Anisha Baid

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Productions will create a video game that investigates into expressions of corporate culture and gendered labour as manifested on the computer interface. Anisha Baid is the Coordinator for this project.

Anisha Baid is a new media artist based in Kolkata. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Experimental Media Art from the Srishti Institute of Arts, Design and Technology in Bangalore. She has been a curatorial consultant for the National Institute of Advanced Studies and assistant curator at the Serendipity Arts Festival. She is currently part of the editorial team at PIX Journal of Photography. Her papers have been published in many journals and she has presented on photography in various forums. Given her experience she is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

Over the past few years, Anisha’s inquiry has been focused on the ideas surrounding the computer interface. She has been exploring her own relationship with her computer - its hardware and software. An ‘interface’ is the ‘layer of contact’ between human beings and interactive machines. It is defined by the function of seamless representation of computer processes and outputs to human users. As such, our present interface has a long history that often intersected with our imagination of computer technology in science fiction. The interface is also deeply gendered and largely designed for the male user. For instance, a personal secretary’s role is mostly seen as a female role in offices and the same has been assimilated and redefined by the computer interface through virtual assistants such as Cortana, Alexa, Siri that have traditionally been female voices. In this project, Anisha is keenly interested in this intersection of corporate culture, gendered labour and the interface.

This project is inspired by the genre of ‘Fumblecore’ games, which construct gameplay by inducing unintuitive game mechanics and bodily controls between the player and the game characters. These games defamiliarise the body as one expects it to be represented on the screen, as well as the ways one expects to control these representations through the physical body itself. In this project, Anisha will create a browser-based video game that will displace the user’s consciousness into that of a computer. Using a set of very simple game mechanics, the game will induce a poetic and reflective state of activating the machine and being on the computer interface, thereby countering the almost automatic response that commercial interface design is teaching us, conditioning us with.

The project will take into account investigations into the realities of who makes these systems, where they come from and how they design virtual worlds that house an extensively diverse population. Further, the project will also ask what constitutes labour or work on the computer, explore the hegemonic bodily relations to the machine and create ways of subverting these relationships.

In this project, Anisha will situate some of the mechanics or possible actions of the game in the act of making music as a form of writing. The possibility of the keyboard transforming into a piano will be explored to create a certain overlap of writing language and musical notes at the same time. Another idea that will be explored is to work with the shape and form of a laptop computer which forms an L when viewed from the side. The human body, sitting on a chair and working on the computer also takes the form of an L. This posture of sitting on a desk and working on a screen has become an increasingly dominant position of work that has resulted in various bodily dysfunctions as well as a shift in our own perceptions of what the body is, what it can do and what it is for. This presents an overarching idea that our bodies are merely machines that we need to maintain in order to keep the brain functioning smoothly.

The game will also take the form of a physical installation, as an expanded gameplay experience. This will include a modified workstation with a table, chair, keyboard and mouse, set-up to create an absurd relationality between these objects, along with a projection mapping of the game onto the table’s surface. The project will involve collaborations with a game designer and a website developer.

Anisha’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be a download of the website comprising the game along with the URL, the process documentation of creating the game, and still and video documentation of the physical installation. 

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it artistically investigates into the dynamic and evolving relationship between the human body and technology, mediated through a corporatised gendered experience.          

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is supported by Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.