Part of a 2 day seminar in New Delhi, these drawings reflect how information is captured through drawing out the words being heard in pictorial , text form.

The First Speaker

The information is in the form of a lecture. Words are being spoken by the speaker and a projector projects images, sound, video, text alongside. The talk is around Emoji’s.

I am left questioning the nature of an Emoji, its power as a symbol, to be used on more than 1 billion phones in the world, a design versus the ability to just draw out an emotion of the moment. Could it be, that if 1 billion people with the phones would have 1 billion different drawings of the same emoticon ?

The Second Speaker

In this presentation of a video work and then a session of question and answers, leads to comparing the physical mark making on a paper versus computer programming. The programming as hear during the question answer session is generative, glitch art. The Speaker mentions something about degenerative, about functioning on its own.

How do machines function by themselves ? And what energy is being used, consumed in this act ?

I tried to draw out the video as it played. As i could see the layers of its making. And got lost in the talk about time in the waves and the time on the island. And the island as a concept, as an experience I am imagining. Since I have never been on an island. I have never been stranded.

But the Speaker, the author of the work clarifies that we are not going to an island but are on One.

The Third Speaker

The third speaker’s visual imagery, videos of an installation where people are enacting as Immigrant officers at an imagined Check-point become drawings. I am able to draw out of full scene, the object of my interest. Its like cutting out something from a whole.

It’s only when i draw myself bowing down with arrows pointing on my head with CONFIRMATION written, do i recall an experience of my life with the Speaker. So drawing allows you see information and add on your memory experience to form answers, to things which you might be thinking.

The Fourth Speaker

My perception to see things changed in this talk. The experience was thinking of a river to draw after seeing google’s map on the top right and drawing out the lines of a flowing river after knowing about – Open Street Map. which is drawn in the top left.

In one case, i draw a line of the river. which is not the river but a line of the flow of the river.  In the second case, as i drew i felt i am floating between being few thousand feet above the river and at the height of 36,000 kilometers of a Satellite. This made it seem that while thinking of the river, i would not have the sense of what is a physical distance.

The Fifth speaker

During this presentation, which was a performance lecture, i could see the difference between, the change in nature of a presentation and how that changed the way i would draw. The speed at which information is being shared, the amount of information being shared, the way the speed of drawing balances with the speakers.

You do confront some basic problems in drawing. Such as –

Is this what is being said ?

did the drawing come close to what is being said ? Not as an answer but a level of satisfaction of the mental space between what is being seen, heard and what gets drawn in the form of marks on paper.

The Sixth Speaker

The last speakers sketch, as i look at it now, as i write, i realise, it is partial of what was being said, partial of what happened in that moment. It makes me question – how do we view the residue of something ? As it is not a complete illustration of the past event, but notes on the event, like Annotation.

Concluding thoughts:

Drawing out a Lecture is an added media tool. It is like using  a technology which lets you change something, like someone shared – Its a change in dimension which the Shaman lets you experience.