Pleasure, Polyphony, and Networking in Agents of Ishq

Abstract


 
 
 
 Contemporary media ecologies offer online interactive practices opportunities to focus on social engagement with users by increasingly operating in collaborative and co-creative modes of production and circulation. This article focuses on an online multimedia bilingual (Hindi and English) project in the Indian context Agents of Ishq (2016) conceptualized by the documentary practitioner and artist, Paromita Vohra. In a country where the dominant narratives in mainstream media have primarily centred around sexual violence, the interactive audio-visual website features creative graphics, audio podcasts, first-person accounts with creative illustrations, Bollywood memes, GIFs-driven stories, photo essays, mixed media art, videos, poetry, prose around the themes of sex, love, choice, desire, gender, and freedom. The interface invites the user to explore, open up and listen to conversations around sex education, histories of desire, pleasure, sexual experiences, social and legal discussions on conscious agency and intimacy. The database-driven project draws on Indian popular culture, art and socio-cultural context to promote amongst its users and audience the ability to listen to and respect others’ complex lived sexualities. Vohra’s work acts as a context provider to the varied intimate and personal voices, authors, collective and performative, artistic forms engaging with each other towards a common objective of opening enabling, inclusive conversations between young Indians around diverse sexual cultures which are not solely instructive and normative. The non-linear echoes of these discussions can also be heard (and continue) over social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter. The project also intervenes in the real world through workshops on gender, sexuality and consent with different practitioners (researchers, doctors, educators, students) and organizations. Drawing on Wiehl’s proposal of Interventionist Networking Methodology, the article analyzes how the interactive project features a multiplicity of forms, representation and circulation which encompass personal accounts by the users, strategies of the practitioner and her collaborators, and challenges of engaging the target audience who belong to a multitude of heterogeneous cultural backgrounds and socio-economic classes. The digital world has offered people the chance and various ways to privately connect outside their immediate social spheres, in a way the everyday life may not. However, it has also gradually changed from a space of experimentation and plays to a space that reflects the normativity and pressures of the offline world. The article also calls attention to the dynamism between digital and physical spaces through this case study. It suggests how the polyphonic attributes of online interactive media can tap into it – creating art that respects the individuality of the human experience while acknowledging the multiple ways it may articulate itself.