Varsha Bhide

OSA’s at Cubbon Park Metro station. 

Bombe Sambhrama (TOY’s Story) 

Contact printing: when a photographic negative is placed in contact with a photosensitive paper, light is shown briefly through the negative and then the paper is developed to reveal the final print.

In the 17th century there was a child born at the castle Frankenstein named johan Conrad Dippel. And Dippel went on to become an alchemist. He wanted to create a universal remedy, an elixir of life. 

He stirred together all kinds of animal skin horns and all sorts of unsavory things into what he called Dippel’s oil. Dippel shared his lab with a die maker, one day this die maker was cooking up brilliant red hue. But he ran out of his key ingredient. He reaches into the cabinet and pulls out the Dippel’s oil and adds it and stirs it instead of scarlet pigment he was looking for he gets a deep blue. It was vivid and became instantly popular. 

The Prussian army took it up to die their uniform.

Art objects are conceived as sensuous symbolism constituting a medium. But the symbolism is not concretized in terms of its physical structure. It is an image with the sensory residue which is externalized artistic creation not complete in itself; it acquires completion only in the imaginative process that it generates. The process of imagination lives only in the imaginative fulfillment of the beholder.

Six white cylindrical objects each 10 feet tall rotates when approached and come alive with the heart beat. A multimedia installation that becomes the architecture of the place it inhabits, in this case a commercial shopping mall. The installation creates an opening for the viewer to find resonance with the datum of life.

Working of the installation

The installation contained six white cylindrical objects each of which was connected with motion sensors. When movement was detected they would rotate. Rotation was a rendition for the pumping action of the heart. It would play the sound of heat beat from inside the cylindrical objects; the sound would last only till it sensed the motion of the spectator. Six cylindrical objects were placed in semicircle formation.

“Dhak Dhak karnelaga” a famous bollywood song, articulates heart beat.

Hold your palm on your chest, cancel out all the noises around you and the sound that you hear is unique and that sound is called differently in over 80 other languages.  In this project I explored the concept of Onomatopoeia.

Onomatopoeia is a word that phonetically imitates, resembles or suggests the source of the sound that it describes.

Pronunciation of the word imitates the sound; “du-dunk du-dunk karne laga” in Swedish means the same as Dhak Dhak in Hindi. Eighty stickers bearing onomatopoeia of heart beat were placed for a probable intervention providing an opening for the viewer to interact with the installation.

“Viewers picked up the stickers and walked around the objects and stuck the stickers wherever they heard the sound of onomatopoeia of heart beat printed on the sticker”.  

Recording of my heartbeat-

The sound of heat beat playing inside the objects was recorded by me. It is my own heartbeat, quoting index of self. It was recorded with the help of a stethoscope head and a condenser microphone, after a lot of trial and error I was able to get a proper recording which was later processed in software called Audacity.

Onomatopoeia heart beat video-

A video playing continuously in a loop was kept on the pedestal. It contained altered sound of heart beat according to it onomatopoeic pronunciations.