Since its founding in 2007, the Mumbai-based collaborative studio CAMP has used surveillance, TV networks, and digital archives to examine how we move through and record the world. In addition to their film and video projects, the wildly prolific studio runs a rooftop cinema in Mumbai and maintains several online video archives, including the largest digital archive of Indian film.
CAMP’s first major US museum exhibition is on view now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through July 20th and includes three video projects spanning two decades of work. The exhibit’s three films repurposed private television sets into interactive neighborhood portrayals, collected cellphone footage recorded by sailors navigating the Indian Ocean, and reimagined how a CCTV camera could be utilized for exploration rather than control. In one film, CAMP collected cellphone videos that sailors shared at ports via bluetooth; in another, passersby on street level control a surveillance camera 35 stories above.
I chatted with two of CAMP’s founders, Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran, about the importance of maintaining an open digital archive, the slippery definition of piracy, and how footage that never makes it into a finished film is often the most illuminating.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your film, From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, offers a portrait of sailors navigating the Indian Ocean, using cellphone videos to document their journeys and daily lives. Can you talk about how that project came to be and how this partnership with the sailors began?
Ashok Sukumaran: Around the global financial crisis, in 2009, we were walking around the city of Sharjah in the UAE. Sharjah is a creek city, like Dubai. Before oil was discovered, the creeks were the main city center focus. And these boats were these kind of weird, out-of-time wooden ships, and many of them were going to Somali ports. So, we asked them, “How come there were no issues with pirates?” Because everything we were hearing about Somalia at that time was about piracy. They said, “No, no, there’s a difference between going to the Somali town carrying everything they need and driving past it with a ton of oil.”
Shaina Anand: Almost all of these giant wooden boats were built in these twin towns in the Gulf of Kutch, in Gujarat, and they were massive. They were 800–2,000-ton giant wooden crafts.
AS: There’s a kind of language of the port. The Iranians, the UAE folks, the Somali, and of course, Indians and Pakistanis speak a kind of common language, which is close to a Hindustani mix of Farsi and Urdu. So, we were able to talk to everyone, to some extent, and we discovered a kind of music video genre that was really inspiring. This was the 2000s, with early Nokia phones, and sailors would shoot video and add music to it. Then their memory cards would run out [and they’d get deleted]. Some of the videos were 100 by 200 pixels.
SA: It was really important to us to try to trace the genealogy of the cellphone video, and it obviously was changing so fast. [The videos were] 10 frames a second, or 13 frames a second, in odd, square formats. It was rapidly changing.
For us, what was striking was that this image emerged in the middle of nowhere, out at sea, when a brethren boat or a comrade boat was filming on a phone. When our film had its festival run at the National Theatre in London, one of the film programmers came and told me, “It gives us such joy to see those images on the best screen in London.” And it gave us the same joy, too. That there is an equality, then.
Many people misread this “low-res image” and [call it] “a poor image,” and we’re like, that is not what it is at all.
How were the videos originally transferred and shared among sailors?
SA: It was a very physical process because these were not found on the internet. We were physically sitting down with people and saying, “What’s on your phone? Can I have a look at it? What did you film?” These [videos] were exchanged over Bluetooth, so they were not uploaded to YouTube, but they were literally transferred by putting the phones together.
AS: [When the boats] anchor for a bit at these smaller islands along the Gulf of Aden or Gulf of Persia, they’re still always in pairs or threes. They travel together for safety. That’s also the time for leisure and piping in those songs.
There’s something sweet about this moment of being bored at sea and using that space to create something.
SA: In a lot of our work, you see this idea that the subject of the film is usually behind the camera. They’re usually running the thing, and they are looking out at whatever interests them. At sea, you have a lot of time, even though it’s busy when it’s loading and unloading. But at sea, a lot of people are basically hanging out and taking pictures of the things that they can see. Then the music adds the emotional tenor. All the music in the film was found with the video; we didn’t add any music ourselves.
AS: And then if your phone has 2GB memory, that’s the ephemera bit. The video gets deleted, but it’s found on another boat on someone else’s phone.
SA: And within these communities, the videos are quite traceable because the boats are known. There are a thousand boats, but people would instantly recognize, “That’s so and so.” Even by looking at the shape of the boat in a 100-pixel video, they would know which boat it was.
You talked a little bit about how these videos were really ephemeral; they got erased very quickly. So much of your work seems to be about a commitment to maintaining an archive.
AS: We set up CAMP in 2007, with our collaborators who were lawyers and coders and cinephiles, and then, all of us together, good friends. We set up Pad.ma, our first online archive, and the lawyers were working around copyright law and trying to challenge them legally, pushing fair use. We didn’t want to valorize piracy, but we realized how, for countries in Asia, piracy was vital.
You didn’t even think of [buying software from] Microsoft. You bought the parts of a computer with help from the person selling them, saying, “Okay, so much RAM, this motherboard,” and so on, and then loaded what you wanted.
SA: The whole Indian tech sector was built on piracy, or what’s called piracy. People were not able to pay the fees. With Pad.ma, we basically initiated this idea of a footage archive or a collection of material that was not films, but things that were shot by people during film projects that never made it into the cut. For political reasons, for economic reasons, for the reasons that the films were only 30 or 60 minutes long and they had filmed for years, all those kinds of things. The idea was that Pad.ma was a footage archive that allowed you to deeply access that material.
So it’s an archive of scraps — the things around the edges that maybe weren’t shown elsewhere.
SA: Yeah, but here, the scraps are 20 times the size of the finished thing.
AS: I think that’s the important thing. You had 100 hours of footage for a 60-minute film. That was really the reason for building a non-state archive, and we’re the custodians and collaborators who think the 99 hours may be more important. It’s not those old remnant scraps.
It’s the other way around.
AS: It’s the other way around. I mean, you have a one-hour interview, and two minutes might make it into a film.
SA: You had all these examples of European avant-garde filmmakers coming to India making films and then doing these edits of what they thought they were seeing. But the footage is saying much more than their particular edit at the time. It can be very revealing of what was actually going on and how they filmed.
So the archives contain a huge amount of data.
SA: I mean, we have committed to that. We raised money from various sources for the projects. Indiancine.ma, which is a sister project, that’s like the whole of Indian cinema as a metadata archive. AS: There were magical things in 2008 on the platform. One was that the timeline had cut detection. So, you can actually go to a cut just by using your left and right arrow keys. And you don’t have that even in [Adobe] Premiere. You could also densely annotate. So you have researchers working, you have activists, you have film scholars, and they may take from the archive. But in that process, they’ve given back their expertise or their views of the archive.
Can you talk more about your work with participatory filmmaking?
AS: On one level, what had been occupying my head space was this critique of how documentary images are taken, or why this relationship between subject, author, and technology is so dumb.
I would keep saying, “look at the image,” and we can say a white guy filmed it, or we can know this really important Indian filmmaker filmed it, or you can say a top feminist filmmaker filmed it, or a queer person filmed it or a person from that community. But something’s a bit off in that form as well. Not just [in terms of] who’s speaking for who and all of that.
Another of your projects in the exhibit, Khirkeeyaan, which created video portals between neighbors and community centers using CCTV, seems like a place where the subject has a lot of authority over their image.
AS: Between 2005 and 2006, CCTV cameras started to proliferate all over. And they were cheap. So, the electronic market where we’d go to buy computer stuff now had become a CCTV market.
It was $10 for those static cameras. You could get that quad box, like a four-channel mixer. They were everywhere really fast: the grocery store, the dive bar, the beauty salon, the abortion clinic. Wherever I went, I was seeing these tiny things.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
SA: When you put the camera on top of the TV and you allow the two systems to meet, you can just look into the television, and then that’s part of the cable television network. By default, these systems are kind of oppositional. One is a broadcast system, or one is a sucking and one is a closed thing, and if you join them together, they start to talk to each other or—
Download and upload simultaneously.
AS: Exactly, which was the key property of video. That there was feedback. It was immediate.
SA: It was live, and unlike film, you don’t have to process it. They were ambient. They would go on for 24 hours. You were able to say that your household TV is now a portal.
AS: The key thing was that this wasn’t the internet. The cables were all 100 meters each. For a long time, until it got replaced by dish antennas, coaxial cable just used to snake across our cities. The cable would come to your house from the window sill, where the coax would be wrapped around, and there’d be a little booster. It would go from neighborhood to neighborhood, building to building, terrace to terrace. [With Khirkeeyaan], the network was neighborly, but these neighbors were meeting each other for the first time.
Was there anything that kind of surprised you about the way that this network was used?
AS: What always surprises me, and continues to, is that when you set up your own kind of collaboration with the subjects, and then you exit, you’re not asking those leading questions of, “Tell me about your life,” or “Which village do you come from?” And poetry happens. I think, what was very affirmative for me, was just the confidence with which people sat and looked at their TV sets. You sit and look at your TV set all the time, but the TV set now had a hole in it, and it was looking back at you.
Another of your videos in the show, Bombay Tilts Down, uses a CCTV camera. Can you talk more about your work utilizing surveillance?
SA: CCTV, in a way, changes how we behave. It sort of infects, depending on who is watching us and how.
In Bombay Tilts Down, it was the simple idea that this gaze of the camera is already there. In the city, there are 5,000 of exactly the same kind of camera, and probably many more.
They’re all at least 4K, and now they’re 8K, but they are robotic controllable cameras that are designed to do facial recognition at a distance. Instead of being a guard, waiting for something to happen, we used it to film the city. And the range is incredible; it goes way beyond the property line of the thing it’s trying to protect. You can see 15 kilometers away with it, from the 35th floor.
So you installed the camera yourself.
SA: This one, yes. The people you see in Bombay Tilts Down are looking up at the camera because people could see the stream downstairs, and some of them were moving the camera around, calling the shots.
