An Indian artist duo is creating an emotional map of cities by mixing memories and colours

Artists Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra are attempting a “large information design”, or an “emographic”, to map the emotions of various cities, with their latest interactive artwork Memoir Bar.

Here’s how it works.

Visitors write a memory on a piece of paper, then tick which of the six main emotions of love, sadness, happiness, fear, excitement and anger describe the memory best. Next, they shred the paper so no one can read their private memory. Helpers at Memoir Bar tell them the colours assigned by the artists to the emotions they felt in the shared memory. For example, if their memory was about love and sadness, they get the colours white and blue. The other colours are yellow, black, green and red.

Next, they get to mix the colours of their emotions as well as the shredded memory into cement to make a tile. The tile is tagged with their name and left to dry for eight hours. The completed tiles go into a grid. Eventually, there will be a different grid for each city Memoir Bar travels through, bearing the emotional signatures of hundreds of residents.

At Chatterjee & Lal art gallery in South Mumbai, where Thukral and Tagra piloted the project on July 14-15, close to 400 people shared their memories.

“No two tiles are the same – each person who makes a tile creates a different marbling effect,” said Tagra. “The shredded paper is mixed with the cement so it becomes visible when the cement dries, but you can’t read the memory anymore.”

Tagra explains that the idea is twofold: it helps the individual to “unload”. Once the secret is out, they can move on with their lives. For the artists, the idea is to take the exhibition to different cities, and make a sort of emotional map of various locations ahead of the Dubai Design Week 2016, where Memoir Bar will be displayed at the Indian pavilion. The design week is scheduled for October. “We are trying to finalise a location for New Delhi next,” said Tagra.

This is not the first time Thukral and Tagra have made an interactive art piece. Their last work was a card-and-dice game called Walk of Life, based on the historical Ganjifa cards.

First developed for a show at the Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, Thukral and Tagra turned Walk of Life into a board game for up to 10 players at Of Games III, a residency at experimental art space Khoj International Artists Association in Delhi. The game took about 45 minutes to complete. Despite the long duration of play, visitors queued up to participate. Tagra says the time visitors spend engaging with an artwork is a large part of what attracts him to interactive works.

Interactive art is any kind of artwork that invites, even requires, audience participation. In India, Pors and Rao consistently, and successfully, produce interactive art. Globally, there is a staggering wealth of ideas and artworks that have built interactivity into their design. Artists like Charlotte Davies, Jeffrey Shaw and Maurice Benayoun have been pushing the boundaries of virtual reality and digital-based interactive art.

Pooja Sood, director of experimental art space Khoj International Artists’ Association in Delhi, says that depending on how you look at it, interactive art dates back to the 1990s, when computers made digital art possible, or the BC years. “We have been doing it for more than 10 years at Khoj,” said Sood. “But we have always been at the edge of things. What’s happening now is that interactive art is becoming mainstream [in India].” She cites the example of Indian artist Shilpa Gupta’s Shadow series.

In 2006-’07, Gupta launched a three-part series which used sensors, video and computer simulation to make visitors part of her installation. A camera recorded visitors as they entered the exhibition space and projected their shadows on to the screen where they interacted with other shadows – of people and objects. The third part in the Shadow series is perhaps the most powerful of the set – even as visitors attempt to put aside the “objects” that are thrown at them, things pile up quickly and the visitors’ own shadows drown in the barrage.

“For visitors, it is a bit of fun,” said Sood.

Still, art insiders are cautious about using the term interactive art.

“Interactive is just a term,” said Sood. “It could describe digital or physical art. Anything that engages people is interactive. [In that sense] community art and public art are interactive… A videogame can also be [interactive] art, because you are interacting with an interface.”

Mortimer Chatterjee of Chatterjee & Lal, which has been showing Thukral and Tagra’s work for the last eight years, agrees. “All art is interactive,” he said. “It’s not like there is painting, sculpture and then there is interactive. Interaction doesn’t mean anything in and of itself.” What changes from one artwork to another, he explains, is the degree to which the artist wants to privilege that interaction. “It’s the quality of the art that makes the interaction interesting or not. [In Memoir Bar] the level of agency [given to the audience] is very high. They [the audience] felt in control [of the process].”

Chatterjee suggests describing Memoir Bar as a “site-specific installation that uses audience participation” instead of interactive art. “The term interactive flattens the experience,” he said. “Thukral and Tagra’s Memoir Bar has lots of ramifications.”

One of these “ramifications”, says Chatterjee, is the project’s association with Bharat Floorings and Tiles, a pre-Independence Mumbai institution. “We [Chatterjee & Lal] are in a 150-year-old building ourselves,” he said. “[In Mumbai, the work is also about] what happens when an audience in 2016 deals with a century-old process. The process will be the same the other cities, but the site-specific context of the artwork will differ.”

However curators and gallerists might choose to call it, interactive art exerts a powerful pull. Chatterjee says close to 400 people showed up for Memoir Bar over the two days. Though the demographic was much the same as the usual art-loving crowd, he says, such numbers are unusual for shows during monsoon.

It would be presumptuous to draw a direct correlation, but the pull of interactivity in art today might have something to do with the way we live. Social media and 24x7 connectivity have altered the way we experience art, among other things, says Sood. Increasingly, viewers want to become participants in a scene. Works like Memoir Bar allow visitors room to co-create, to share a memory and make one at the same time.