Look Before You Leap
Anisha Baid (2024)
Excavating moments from the history of Silicon Valley techno-capitalism, this project contrasts these moments with memories and anecdotes of computer work from the artist’s life in metropolitan India to poke holes in this globalizing ideological force. This body of sculptural works is a lament for the relentless logic of innovation that consumes all ideological resistance to its influence. The work seeks to expose the stuttering and shaky ground on which technological realities establish themselves as muscle memory in everybody from the global south, to the centers of the Empire. Messaging and forms usurped from popular tech oligarchies are re-presented together as capitalist gimmicks. Mass-produced readymades, intertwined with nostalgic recreations, point to Sianne Ngai’s theory of the gimmick as “capitalism’s most successful aesthetic category and its biggest embarrassment and structural problem”. The gimmick multiplies in the representation of outdated metaphors of a universal landscape, and through artist-made ‘products’ that fail to generate sufficient desire for their consumption.
The central piece is a foldout table that is a partial replica of a table designed and installed by the artist’s father in her family home in Kolkata, India. Over the twenty-five years, it has moved to multiple apartments and been used sparingly, remaining as a picture on the wall for the rest of its time. The title derives from text that used to be on top of the frontal image that has since faded away through years of sun exposure. This modular piece of furniture, designed to switch between being a surface of work to an image surface—between window and desk—references the skeuomorph of the desktop. The desktop metaphor, created in the Silicon Valley of the 1980s has gone on to change the very notion of desk work —from the horizontal plane of the hand to the vertical one of the eyes. The digital landscape spills out of the table onto the space of the exhibition, the interface is around us. This object exists in two states and will periodically be opened and closed throughout the exhibition, opening to reveal a false shelf and closing to become a picture on the wall.
This project was made possible with support from FRFF Grant #2024-007. Additional images can be found here.