Sanskriti Chattopadhyay

Sanskriti Chattopadhyay has a diploma in direction and screenplay from the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. She is currently completing her PhD from Manipal University and is based in Kolkata. Through this project, she intends to explore digital consciousness.

Sanskriti believes that we have been devoured by net-consciousness without actually being aware of it. We live in a world of hyper-visibility where AI, cookies, location, IP address and other such elements have rewired our world. For instance, before we go on to complete a sentence in Google Search it has done it for us - information is provided before we even ask for it. This has created a situation where people have stopped thinking for themselves and have become enslaved by the internet. She provokes whether it is time to take a pause, a moment away from the all-seeing eye of the internet, in order to gain a degree of control over our own lives and privacy.

Sanskriti’s project will imagine and explore fictional and often seemingly simplistic ways of becoming invisible from digital consciousness. Arranged like an online prospectus or tutorial, this project will address issues of identities, fake aliases, the overcrowding of information, mapping, objectification and erasure of the self. In a lighter vein, these very elements will also be used as tools to enable one to become invisible to the ever-present eye of the internet and overwhelm it. The structure of the tutorial will be direct, didactic and in the video format. It will use screen activity and audio recording software like the Open Broadcaster Software to record and establish a ‘subject’ that will be the invisible tutor.

The outcome will be this video tutorial. The grantee’s deliverables to IFA will be the documentation of the process and a copy of the video.

This grant is made possible under the special initiative 25x25, with support from lead donor Kshirsagar-Apte Foundation, and philanthropy partners, Titan Company Limited, Priya Paul, and Sethu Vaidyanathan.