Noam Toran: Accessories for lonely men

http://noamtoran.com/NT2009/projects/accessories-for-lonely-men

Very intriguing.

The memory radio: exhibit at JAAGA shanti nagar, Bangalore

Concept note:

24 Sep 1995, Plague Outbreak, Surat

                                             
                                         

This piece consists of a radio and a set of 3 pictures. The viewer is supposed to turn the knob on the radio and tune to different memories that i have used to tell the story of how the plague affected my ancestors and me.

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Some reviews: 

"Intriguing and effective as a storytelling tool, i like the mix of the family narrrative with a public instrument such as the radio"

"Great work! I really liked the interface.The radio sets a great mood and the tuner just creates that mystery that prepares the listener for whatever he/she is about to hear"

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The memory radio project- beginnings.

Im in the process of hacking on of those old transistor radios that i remember my grandma used to have. i want to make it a memory radio , the content of which im figuring out as i go. i like the form, and the idea of tuning in to the memory, and the sound of the static.

ive begun playing around with an arduino board, which is electronics prototyping platform, and have kindof figured out the code. the idea is to play my own mp3 sounds with the turning of the transistor knob. im using a potentiometer for this purpose.

i will post the code and a video soon.

The year of my birth

Right now im in a phase of researching what was happening in india when i was just born, the year 1991.

after some researching and long phone conversations with my parents in delhi, i found that rajiv gandhi, the prime minister of india at that time, was assassinated in chennai. i would have been a 3 month old baby then.

what interests me is how at one point in time, there are so many things going on around and so many stories are being created. some large, some small,some known, some unknown, all fitting into their own frames of view, whether large or small. 

3 months after i was born, i was probably sitting on a chair crying for my mother to come, at the same time, an iconic figure in indian history was lying lifeless in a pile of bones and blood. 

i sometimes try and imagine what must be happening at this moment. as i write this blog post, what events are happening which i have no clue about?

as i write this line, thousands of stories are being created , and it feels like many of them will just pass into a vast sea of memories never to be known again.and some will be known by everyone. 

its always nice to hear stories in retrospect, i guess thats what makes them a story.

but there are so many of them around me, right now, at this moment.

Time puncture: first exhibition at srishti.

the first exhibition, where i exhibited "babuji's funeral" turned out to be success. for the first exhibition as a group, it was nice to see how everyone had put up very different kinds of work.and it was an interesting experience working with the Museum and gallery practices class.

personally, i learnt a few things by watching people interact with my exhibit.
i felt i relied too much on the concept note, and that maybe the work would fall apart without the concept note.not that i wanted to go for this, but in the struggle to disaggregate, i realised i got a little bit caught up with the idea of fragmentation.and i fragmented without the bass narrative being too strong. which might have made bits of the work seem too open, maybe even random to some viewers.

for the next work, i will try and make the base of my work. the basic narrative clear and strong. and at the same time will try and fragment and acheive and interesting balance,which allows different experiences, yet communicates the content loosely.

also, this has got me thinking about the idea of abstraction. Why fragment? why abstract?
although i have realised to some extent what these things do to the narrative, the work opens up and in some sense becomes more experiential and looser, in a way allowing different entry points for different viewers.
at the same time, i want to read up more and study this idea and how it has been applied in art forms throughout history.
future posts on this subject soon.