Kolar Gold Fields: Encountering tourism through contemporary surveying and prototyping technologies

Abstract

In the wake of post-colonial theories within globalized economies, tourism industries have been redefined to accommodate ethically aware travelers. The thin line between well-intended interest in hosting communities and recapitalization of indigenous knowledge pledges for reinspection of motives and actions maintained by the post-tourist in consumption and production of local narratives. This thesis sets intersecting agencies and misunderstandings between the traveler and collaborators from Kolar Gold Fields (India), utilizing rapid prototyping as a method to expose class struggles and problematize their representations. The characterization of democratized 3D scanning and additive manufacturing processes as liberating technologies that disrupt social oppression is questioned through efforts to assemble relationships between artisans and narrators in positioning souvenir production as a political action. Finally, produced objects are situated in-between the collaborators and the traveler as a materialization of the uncertainties in their dialogs. Scanned, printed, and moulded gaps of missing information stand as shared experiences of skills and knowledge, rather than enforced normalization and capitalization of one gaze on top of the other.