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.
CAMPâs 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 exhibitâs 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 CAMPâs founders, Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran, about the importance of maintaining an open digital archive, the slippery definition of piracy, and how footage t …
