Most video produced today isn’t meant to be seen—at least not by the eyes of a person. Whether shot by a surveillance camera, a driverless car, a drone, or a doorbell, this video without viewers could be considered alongside a set of intentional (one could say, artistic) techniques in filmmaking that in another era came to define “structural film.”

Meanwhile, an ever-growing digital archive of footage sits on servers, indexed but unwatched, as algorithms recalibrate the ways in which video data might be made legible. What does a structural approach mean today, when the structure of the moving image extends so far beyond the visual?

The artist Nikhil Vettukattil makes work for and against a culture attuned to such a surfeit of information. Tending toward limitless duration, Nikhil’s work—across video, sound, performance, and sculpture—sifts through and reorganizes the field of existing cultural production, bringing dissonant historical, political, and mass cultural moments to bear upon each other, and on the present.

His work Decade 2014 – 2023, 2024 distills roughly eighteen hours of news footage, music, lectures, and political speeches drawn from digital archives into a three-channel video montage that is reconfigured each time it’s shown. One version of the work can be freely shared over the BitTorrent protocol at this link (~60 GB): https://aaagit.org/decade/download/0.torrent

Focusing on perspectives from largely outside of the Anglo-American imperialist axis that came to define structural film in its nascent form, Nikhil presents a suite of moving image works in video, HTML5, and live processing by CAMP, Jan Gerber, kleines postfordistisches Drama, Pad.ma, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, and himself that can be seen to enact the legacy of structural film’s techniques, while positioning lived experience and social intervention as primary.

Nikhil Vettukattil (b. 1990, Bengaluru, IN) is an artist living and working in Oslo. They are part of The Institute for Scene Experiments, a parafictional institution that reflects on the film crew as a social form, exploring alternative modes of production and working conditions. Recent solo exhibitions include DECADE, AGIT, Berlin (2025) and Defund the Police, Arcadia Missa, London (2024). Forthcoming exhibitions include Four Dilations, MoMA PS1, New York, US and Figures of Fascism and Anti-Fascist Solidarity, Kaaitheater, Brussels, BE.

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