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## build / browse (2013)

by Ranjit Kandalgaonkar

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Build/Browse is the online interface of the 'Recycled Ecologies' project that allows an element of play for the user to interact, explore, and develop an ecological, aesthetic, and political approach to bazaars using objects extracted from their habitual surroundings.

Tags: canvas editor Database game Interactive play web-based website

###### Full Description

This project aspires to create a new imagination around the potential energies of these objects by creating an interactive digital platform in which objects are twisted and turned to meet the vectors of other objects, and so form new combinations of functions, form, and matter.

Build - The database housed in this drop down menu of objects will be artifacts of 'reduced' importance or those of a second-hand nature that will function as data .This data will contribute towards creating a new ethics of recycling said historical objects scattered across various bazaars in London, and objects found/created in Mumbai’s Chor Bazaar by the resident merchants and artisans there or disposed off by the general populace.

Participants on the platform will be able to ‘recycle’ and ‘recombine’ these objects by creating new functional forms and potential histories by connecting two or more objects on the platform .Some of the memorabilia of these local ecologies globally networked have been accessed on site, bought, viewed, documented, experienced or perceived based on the uniqueness of the "production" or "history" of the object and the communities through which they circulate.

The platform will allow people to interact virtually with this history of material ecologies through the objects depicted in two dimensional format by the artist.

Browse - In the form of a blog, "browse" is the ongoing documentation of the project available online including audio-visual media, photographic documentation, drawings, sound, text and processes encountered. These include site visits to Chor bazaar- Mumbai, conversations with stall owners, visual documentation-diagramming of Chor bazaar, visiting the major open air markets in London, and building a comparative framework to engage with the parallels between market practices in the two cities and its associated material flows. This was the broad framework attempted as "field work" during the residency.

What are the values and meanings assigned to the assemblages created by the game users of Build? If relations of value in the bazaar are disrupted and reconnected through the de-contextualization of the interface, can a new set of interconnections give rise to new value? Does this re-purposing alter the system of meanings that seem to stabilize these image-objects and can new meanings emerge through this process? As one of our interlocutors put it, "perhaps the objects become the signs of another possible grammar, a visual one, but not only…a new language?! Maybe soon they will be able to tell their own story…"

This platform hopefully offers that visually, in a democratic way, taking it out of the rarefied realm of the solitary artist creating assemblages.

###### Work metadata

- Year Created: 2013
- Submitted to ArtBase: Saturday Sep 28th, 2013
- Original Url: http://buildbrowse.com/
- Work Credits:
  - Ranjit Kandalgaonkar,
  - Amit Rai,
  - Karen Menezes,
  - Sanjay Bhangar,
  - Macgregor Tech,

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###### Artist Statement

A Haptic Archive of Material and Symbolic Flows:

'Recycled Ecologies' is a start of a visual archive of objects found in open air markets testament to the circulation of its material flows, images, habits, practices of barter and of alternative currencies, and cash.

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