Lecture notes from a presentation at NIAS, Bangalore.
At the Bangalore Space and Culture Symposium, Oct 1, 2007.
( key images and links inserted)

Notes from Down Below:

 

This is the logo of the Central Potato Reseach Institute, Shimla, circa 1990. Shimla is where I grew up, and where my father worked for three decades as a "potato scientist", as a biochemist and plant physiologist dealing with potato crop. He also designed this logo, by the way, and both he and I are quite proud of that fact.  
You will notice though (even those of us who are not designers) that the potato itself in the logo is in a strange and quite radical location, almost floating in space - certainly not stuck in the ground and covered in mud. It is a potato with some aspirations: perhaps to modern abstraction... maybe on its way to a certain universal appeal.

This is a screen grab from CPRI's current website. Somewhere in the 90's CPRI decided that the original potato in my father's design was too abstract, and someone added three casually-placed "eyes". This newly anthropomorphic logo is now the official version, being replicated in print as well as web material.

For me, the logo and its modification is interesting because it speaks of the deeply ambivalent relationship of the scientific community working with potato, to the "image" of the potato tuber itself. That is, its depiction as humanly desirable, edible food. This is maybe similiar in other agricultural research, especially in fruits, etc., where the question of visible vs."cultural" vs. nutritional vs. economic appeal is continually being renegotiated, via the marketplace.

In the late 1980's, Pepsi Foods entered India (this is before the entry of pepsi cola) with the Lays brand of potato chips.  In the product advertising, (unlike in the advertising for say Cadbury fruit and nut chocolates) the potato as a unitary object is never seen. What is visible is a landscape of flying "ruffles", and Mr. Saif Ali Khan (in 2006) or other well-paid endorser.

This, then, is high-pop potato culture, the branded and blowdried end of what my father and other people had been working with for decades. Of course, there are other potato cultures, for example in places where potato was a staple food, such as Ireland in the 18th century, Germany between the wars, in Russian vodka, and now globally as a source of industrial starch. But potato wafers are youthful and zesty abstractions, favoured by preity zinta (who also grew up in the neighbourhood of this himalayan potato history).

During and after the onslaught of potato chips , the CPRI attempted to enter the broader culture of potato in atleast two ways:

1.They installed an exhibition, a "potato musuem" on their grounds. I visited this museum recently, and while it has fascinating information, I can safely say that it is not a popular tourist attraction in the making.

2. They attempted to enter the broader culture of food, and food markets,  through the creation of all kinds of potato substitutions. That is, where potato is substituted for other grains, often distributed in dry-mix form in stark packages marked "potato cake", or "potato halwa", and so on. They also researched and published an potato recipe-book, some selections from which are here:

Potato bread
Potato pizza
Potato pudding
Potato rava idli
Potato cake
Potato pie
Potato pastry
Potato soya papad
Potato cookies
Potato jamun
Potato halwa
Potato dal payasam
Potato custard

( from "Potato a Wholesome Food".
Some recipies in collaboration with the food research institute, mysore.)

Now some of these alt-potato foods were quite interesting, others were barely edible, and so on. I know because scientist's families were often guniea pigs for these experiments.

Despite all good intentions,  it is clear that this government institution's shot at a broader potato culture didn't go very far, especially compared to the chips people. The reason for this, perhaps obvious, is that the institution was fixated on "potato" culture, whereas the other guys were into dimples and sex appeal and Spanish dancing and all these other things.
In other words, Pepsi was not talking about origins, but about targets: markets, audiences.
The CPRI was focused on the potato itself, as a kind of technological fetish object, ofcourse, for good scientific and moral reasons.

My point is this: I am afraid that many of the discussions around "space" in this room are a bit like the potato from this story.  

In order to look at a broad question of potato culture (and not to be naïve of centralised, state-managed trajectory of its development as a crop), we have to be able to let go, atleast a little bit, of the potato itself. Consider the potato, take a deep breath, let a little of the rest of the world in, before we say "culture".

To not stretch this metaphor further, let me put this argument in a different way, as a question.

When we talk of a culture for space, where do we imagine this culture resides? Where is space culture located? Where will audiences find it?  I mean, will it be on television, in art galleries, in schools, in kitchens, on the internet, in space instituitions... or must it be in space itself? How much does the "truth" of a genuine out-of-the world experience have to do with the palatability of a space art?
This question of location is key, I think, in thinking about space. Because Space is here being dealt not as a techno-cultural vector alone, but as a place we seem to want to go to.

To explore this question of the institutional or otherwise "location" of space culture, I want to briefly sketch out some images from another location, the underground.

In 1992, Rosalind Williams, a professor at MIT, wrote a book, Notes on the Underground. Here she talks about the underground also as a kind of virtuality, an artificial space. In her introduction, Williams places the underground as the first completely man-made environment. This is then a location for human curiousity, but mediated constantly by man-made artificiality.  Williams writes:
                                                                                                                
"In the 1800's you could gather a paradoxical attitude towards the accessibility and representability of hidden truth: the closer one got to it by digging deeper under the surface, the farther one was displaced from it by ever-expanding surfaces of artificial mediation."

Looking high and low.

Nadar, the bigamous photographer.

http://www.translucency.com/frede/parisproject/corpses1789_1900.html

Gaspar-Felix Tournachon, or Nadar as he is also known, took in the year 1858  the first aerial photographs from his hot-air balloon. In 1862 he expanded his experiments into the underground realm. "After experimenting in his studio with magnesium as a source of light, he descended into the Paris catacombs to produce the first photographs ever taken on location in artificial light. Two years later, after further refining his technique of electrical lighting, Nadar descended again, this time to photograph the Parisian sewer system."

A double-edged exploration of the limits of human habitat seems to be underway... Jules Verne writes "Off on a Comet" and "The Underground City" almost at the same time, around 1877. The developing sensibilities of a sub-urban underground are reflected in modern writing on the city, for example Lewis Mumford's.

But the title Notes from the Underground is much more famous as a novel by Dostoevsky. Here the underground is a political/ psychological underground, not just a physical one.

From wikipedia: "Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld, but meaning something more like Basement Memoirs in Russian) is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is considered by many to be the world's first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersberg."

The underground man from Dostoevsky became a common literary and then cinematic trope, from Emir Kusturica's Underground, set in Belgrade, to Gary Alan Walcow's  film in the same year, Notes from the Underground, which adapts  Dostoevsky's script to California. It is also noted as having directly influenced Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver character.

All this is reflected in  real underground habitats, the undergrounds in which Jews were hidden, all over Europe, the other undergrounds from which the resistances got their name (In english. the French name maquis refers to the scrub forest, thanks x)  But also the underground of Hitler's bunker, and other bunkers. A double-sided underground of safety, and of tactical retreat from the world.

In India, the word has resonances from the emergency, when the term he / she has gone underground was quite familiar in leftist circles for example.

Then there is the underworld, such the Bombay underworld, which derives its usage in English from Hades, the lower world, the world of crime and subhuman life, below the threshold of normally lived experience. This dimension of the underground echoes in many mythologies, as both the profane (nag-lok, pataal) and less often the sacred underground.

I spent some time a few years ago with the Ahmedabad-based architect B.V. Doshi, whose concern at the time was to adapt elements of cave temple architecture to modern(ist) buildings. Having come from a distinct Corbusian tradition, including pilotis and such earth-leaving architectures, this seemed to be an interesting inversion. Husain-Doshi Gufa (gufa= cave), a collaboration wih the painter M.F. Husain was a project he had already built, but year or so after my visit it "was objected to" by right-wing Hindu elements in Gujarat, and so now is just called Amdavad ni Gufa.

There is thus a vast array of underground stories, including the more recent metaphors of dungeons in cyberspace, etc. and a history that I dont want to simplify further... i will end with this comparison:

the London Underground, an early underground infrastructure, with a somewhat dull cultural history of about 150 years.

the Asian Underground, a powerful fiction involving a few brit-asian dj's and the london press' fascination with brown cultural production, lasted about 5 years.

So, if youll forgive my shallow and indiscrimate use of the word underground all over here, the question is, how much of all this actually depends on materially entering the underground, or ever did? Clearly this is a really rich and complex space, but I dont see any artists picking up spades to have a go at it, and as far as I can see, and no one is lining up cultural collaborations with the Dhanbad School of Mines. Why is this?  
Because:
1. We don't always have to take the underground, or space, literally.
2. On the other hand, Space is where the money is. And because mining is mostly, a dirty and poverty-struck business.

Now, we could claim in our own defence, that we are at a different stage with the underground than with the space program, that the model of excavation, as an intellectual pursuit had its heyday in the 1800's, as Williams writes. That the space we are talking about is not a physical location, but a kind of time, a techno/social vector. Then the question is what is the relative value at this time, to attempt to re-form space culture: as popular culture, science fiction, or a critical discourse around space? For me, space culture is as much zero-gravity as it is space invaders (the game) which is still found everywhere in kiosks in small-town india. We return in this way to the question of where space culture may be located, both physically and in time.

Overall, my sense of it is that cultural beginnings marked by "collaborations" with state agencies are dodgy. There is very mixed history of "new media" art collaborations with large technology companies, including EAT's sony pavilion, artists working long-term with xerox parc, in the media lab at MIT, and also in residencies with technology companies, as I myself recently did.
The risk in this scenario, of artists and others working in extreme conditions of power, also is that what Roger Malina has just called soft collaboration can actually be the hard one, while his hard ones (that involve a material/ technical/ actual collaboration) can be very soft, politically speaking.
Rather than attempting a kind of intimate relationship with a power far, greater than your own, perhaps it is useful, and I am attempting a positive contribution here, to maintain a kind of tactical distance. Which is also, clearly, a form of doing business, as good as anything can be in this extremely hierarchical context. One of these forms is called a contract: you get your money, you do your stuff, and you leave, and you try and avoid getting into moral dungeons or ICBM's with it. A lot of us do this actually, keep a job despite a boss we would hardly get intimate with. An example of this would be to formulate a strategy for EDUSAT (india's underused educational satellite) independent of other broader claims to "space culture".

A tactical distance as opposed to intimacy as an objective is interesting to me, because it offers protection, anonymity sometimes, and also gives you the most important ability to say no, while engaging with environments where major human/ technology decisions are being made. (Another way to see this is as a third option to the revolution vs. reform question, via a tactical use of capitalism).

I would like to say here that my interest in all this is not just theoretical, and actually I am interested in possibilities of organizing, making things, getting and exceeding permissions, and other things that artists do. I would like to show you video from a small "work", which deals explicitly, and perhaps literally with ideas of distance, insulation and the act of refusal, or blockage.

Video, from the project
http://www.recurrencies.com/test/project.php?pid=2

This is part of an ongoing series of very simple electrical prototypes, except that these prototypes exceed the logic of a singular product, and stretch the concept of who owns and inhabits what.

I would love to show you more work, but they don't really fit into any extra-terrestial definition of space, and so I will stop here.
To recap and to clarify I would say that I am not against doing art or anything else in space, or anywhere else, and nor I am against the term "space culture". I am interested in a very expanded sense of the word culture here, for which we need to find many spaces, between and across what is basically an elite kind of tourism (artists in space), and the production of cheap promo material for government space agencies. In these negotiations and redistributions lies the metaphysics of "space culture".

___________________

Thanks to:

Geetha Narayanan, Rob La Frenais.