Shaahkar Siddiquee
Five Million Incidents

About the Actant

Shaahkar works at the intersection of human behavior and technology. He involves himself extensively to chart design-led customer engagement strategies that brands deploy to interact with the new-age customer. 

Shaahkar joined Experiential Design Lab, a strategic design firm, in 2012 and has since worked on projects ranging from multi media immersive experience centres, to strategic design, designing  experiential retail strategy for brands.

Surface Tensions looks at mapping roads to keep a near-realtime log of all the potholes, bumps and other surface anomalies (of the mapped road). Once the relevant mapping is done, the idea is that that upon request, the data derived from the mapping exercise would be used to feed to an actuator installation that will simulate the physical feeling in the mind of the participant, of experiencing a surface anomaly while being at one location. Thereby experiencing the road conditions of far-mapped areas, something that one usually doesn't get to do. 

At certain intervals during the duration of the installation, certain performative possibilities that arise out of the collected data (possibly in real-time), could be explored. The exact flavour of these performances will be decided as and when the mapped data reveals itself.