City of Cine

City of Cine; City of Signs

This CD-ROM project is a collaborative, cross-disciplinary, theoretical and artistic documentation of the hand-painted advertisements for the cinema industry and local political parties that dominate the urban landscape of Chennai, located in the southern state of Tamilnadu, India. The project undertakes an experimental ethnography to create a dense layering of visual, aural and textual information which speaks to the ephemeral, visually compelling nature of these publicity images. The CD-ROM medium parallels the environmental context of the images that is packed with visual and aural stimuli. Multiple perspectives on the topic - historical, artistic and political - inflect the material differently. Two intersecting modes of navigation represent the integration of academic and artistic endeavors: a text-driven, indexical path and an image-driven, intuitive path.

Preminda Jacob (Associate Professor, Art History and Theory) and Colin Ives (Assistant Professor, Imaging and Digital Art) in collaboration with the IRC, received a grant from UMBC’s Designated Research Initiative Fund 1999-2000 which enabled use of the Center’s facilities and provided internship stipends for two undergraduate Visual Arts students. In addition, the Department of Visual Arts provided a graduate student with a half-time research assistantship for the academic year 1999-2000 to collaborate on the project.

Production Notes