“There are a million ways for people to connect with each other online, but we still feel lonely,” says visual artist and technology entrepreneur K.K. Raghava. In a virtual world that’s bursting at its seams with new apps and websites to help us communicate faster and better, will yet another app draw us closer? An app with a difference certainly will, believes Raghava, who has just launched Flipsicle, a social app that “asks in words, and answers in photos”.
If an artist were to build a knowledge system, images would be his currency, states Raghava, and Flipsicle is his attempt at creating a visually more literate world that. “World over, photographs are considered units of absolute truth. But what if they were merely points of view, simply units of conversation and thought that came together to reveal subjective, not objective, truth?” Flipsicle thus offers users word prompts to which they answer in photographs. ‘Happiness’ for instance, could be replied to with photographs of chocolate souffle, feet sunk into beach sand washed by the sea, babies, or just a smile. “None of these is the absolute meaning of happiness, but just points of view of what happiness means to a particular person.” Flipsicle ties in with all of Raghava’s previous work that has always pushed the philosophy of multiple perspectives, “seeing the world through many eyes” as he puts it. In the recent past, he made news for ‘Pop-It’, an iPad app for children that introduced unconventional families to them through a game — if they shook the iPad, the child met a family with two fathers; another shake showed a family with one mother, and so on, thus broadening the stereotypical definition of a family. Earlier, Raghava had created art that was connected to the viewer through brain sensors and morphed itself according to their biofeedback. This pleasure in “celebrating bias” is something Raghava earned through his life’s journey after dropping out of school, learning by travelling, meeting different people and living in diverse circumstances. “My primary role as an artist is to be an explorer and an enquirer. All of this work that links art, technology and knowledge is my way of exploring the possibilities of visual language as communication.”
Raghava adds that Flipsicle was also born as a reaction to the two knowledge systems most prevalent in the world today — expert knowledge, which Raghava says is too biased to one person’s understanding, and crowd-sourced knowledge, where the truth that prevails is the one that “survives the edit war”, essentially, “the lowest common accepted bias survives”. In the Flipsicle world, Raghava says that content doesn’t thrive or die based on the judgement passed over it, rather it retains its worth by adding nuance to the topic it comes under. Thus, for Raghava and his wife Netra, who homeschool their three kids, Flipsicle was first thought of as a vision of alternate education that emphasised subjective truth.
After raising the capital to fund this venture, Raghava realised that few people even desire complex understandings of their world. “All we want are quick solutions. You won’t believe how lazy people are to push their boundaries of thought. The irony is that no one cares for empathy.” However, Raghava’s ‘aha’ moment came with the thought that while people may not care for abstract truths, they certainly care for how their friends view life. “People matter more than topics do. So, while they probably wouldn’t care for a hundred definitions of happiness, they want to know what happiness means to their friends.” Thus Flipsicle was morphed into a gamified app, launched first in Las Vegas, and most recently in India, at the INK conference in Mumbai. Just a few weeks old now, with a few thousand users world over, Flipsicle is an animal evolving into its own being, says Raghava. “How it survives, and the cultures it adopts, depends on the nature of people using it. What I can hope for is that it creates new ways of online behaviour, and presents a new way of knowing our world.” One that hopefully makes us a little less lonely, one photo-thought at a time.
