Hi! I’m Mahesh Shantaram—a photographer and a 2023 candidate for an MFA Photography degree at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University.

Working as a courier for a major app-based food delivery platform in Bangalore, I explore the city nightly and keep a visual diary of encounters. In this gig-ified and game-ified world, the app is my photo editor: it tells me where to go and what I can expect to find there. Everything else is a gift or a curse within the span of a gig. Situating myself at this ecosystem’s most vulnerable layer, I earn a few rupees and the right to criticise it from within.

The City is a basket of concerns: workers working longer hours but barely making ends meet; women excluded from opportunities in a world of men; neocapitalism’s victory over socialist values; technology as an enabler of undemocratic practices. What structures allow for these oppressions to flourish? What can I make visible so that it would prompt the necessary conversations to be had? Bangalore’s food delivery ecosystem offers itself up as the perfect venue for this study.

For this session at Barcamp, I would like to present how I’m developing this social art work which will ultimately be realised through cutting-edge technology. I would love to open the discussion to the audience’s comments and critique.

• Type of talk: Open Discussion