Radio Jena

Radio Jena
Single Channel Projection with sound
Duration: 4 minute 45 seconds
2009
Exhibited first at Bose Pacia, New York at the group show On Certainty, curated by Rit Premnath

KEYWORDS
+ G.W.F. Haeckel as the hypothetical hybrid of the philosopher and the naturalist

+ Hegel as the philosopher of teleology - History as the grand march of Reason

+ Haeckel’s obsession in locating ‘development’ in Darwinian evolution.

+ History written in/on the body or “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’

+ ‘Nazi’ evolution and creationist ‘science’: the difficulties of judging historical guilt

+ The Knowledge of Yoga: German Romantics and their Orientalist construction of a ‘spiritual’ India


First, let us look at some dates.

1831: In the winter of this year, while G.W.F. Hegel dies from cholera in the midst of delivering another version of his lectures that were later compiled as The Philosophy of History, the young Charles Darwin sets sail on a British surveying ship, HMS Beagle.

1859: Darwin publishes Origin of Species. In the same year, Friedrich Max Mueller, an Indologist chiefly remembered today as a ‘sympathetic’ interpreter of the spiritual glories of Indian civilisation, publishes A History of Ancient Indian Literature. This comprehensive survey of available information on the Vedic period was an instant success, generating multiple editions in close succession.

As we scan these parallel events, we should remind ourselves that such a presentation of synchronicity is never an innocent survey of facts and always seem to imply a hidden causality. Hovering between factuality and imagination, is it in the nature of such hidden causalities that they insist on their translucence? Could we say that this translucence – perhaps a kind of foggy visibility - produces a reality that can always be contested but never conclusively falsified?

In juxtaposing two different, but potentially related, strands of historical context, Radio Jena attempts to reflect on the nature of historical causality. Our radio correspondent in this work, G.W.F. Haeckel is a hypothetical hybrid of the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and the influential mid nineteenth century naturalist and Darwinian ‘evangelist’ Ernst Haeckel. Radio Jena too is a fictive radio station, which nonetheless tries to foreground the importance of the city of Jena as an early hub of German Romantic thought. Although it was in Berlin that Hegel became a celebrity, he was based in Jena at one point, and for Haeckel, Jena was the city where he lived and worked for all his life.

The quotations from Hegel’s The Philosophy of History that are interspersed within the frames of Radio Jena are however real and untarnished by any imaginative intervention. Hegel, as we all know, is famous as the philosopher of teleology: he made ‘purposeful development’ one of the cornerstones of his philosophical system that was built around the notion of the grand march of History and Reason through increasingly developed states. This spectre of teleology casts its long shadow over Haeckel too, and in a very significant way.

While his enthusiastic championing of Darwinian evolution was an important factor in securing an increased public visibility for the radically new theory, Hackel laid far more emphasis on a certain anthropocentric idea of development in his interpretation of Darwin. While he asserted the validity of evolutionary mechanisms like variation and natural selection, evolution for Haeckel was also about the trajectory of development in the natural world – the grand march from amoeba to man. Today however, with the benefit of hindsight, we could possibly express our reservations about the supposed universality of this Haeckelian “man”.

Haeckel’s popular and controversial “biogenetic law” postulated that ‘the embryo of an advanced creature recapitulates the same morphological stages that the phylum went through in its evolutionary descent.’ According to this law, a human embryo, starts life as a simple single celled entity and then climbs through a succession of increasingly complex forms, each resembling the embryo of organisms that are correspondingly higher up the evolutionary tree: fish, salamander, tortoise, chick, pig, calf, rabbit and finally human.

Now, although it is an established fact that Haeckel’s theories were actively used by the Nazis to rationalise their own ghastly fascination with eugenics, in our present context, where the new anti-Darwinists, the proponents of creationist and Intelligent Design deliberately obfuscate the boundaries of science and non-science to significant public harm, we should be more nuanced in pronouncing our verdict of historical guilt. Contemporary Creationist and Intelligent Design literature routinely pick on Hackel’s indirect (or perhaps not so indirect?) connection with fascist Germany to ‘expose’ the dangerous moral darkness that infects the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm, while simultaneously glossing over their own alliance with fundamentalist politics.

In India, Hindu fundamentalists have been involved in popularising their own brand of chauvinist obfuscation. In their spurious conception of a monolithic, and non-syncretic ‘Hindu’ civilisation, cultural practices like Yoga, take on the mantle of a hallowed civilisational ‘tradition’. The fact that the contemporary form of Yoga, and the larger cultural discourse in which it is often invoked, including its increased global visibility, have more to do with the Orientalist legacy of the colonial encounter, than with any supposed authenticity of an unchanging tradition, is of course conveniently forgotten. The consolidated Hinduism, which emerged as a result of this colonial encounter, was actually significantly influenced by the German Romantic movement and its obsession in graphing a civilisational teleology for Europe. In their enthusiasm for the ‘Aryan antiquity’ of India as a potential source for a second ‘Renaissance’ of European thought, philosophers and philologists like J.G. Herder, Friedrich Schlegel and later Friedrich Max Mueller, were all involved in the Orientalist construction of Indian civilisation as the spiritual childhood of Europe.

Cultural constructs however have an uncanny longevity. Therefore it comes as no surprise that the stereotype of ‘spiritual’ India still enjoys a wide currency and gets routinely deployed, not only by Hindu fundamentalists but also by the flickering confections crafted by the global entertainment machine.

Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Upstate New York

Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Upstate New York
Dimensions: Variable
Media: Video documentation of public performance, Interactive ‘Micro-Seminar; Artist’s Books, Digital Prints
Acknowledgment: Art Omi International Artists Residency, Max Goldfarb, Ross Willows, Moon Choi
Year: 2008

KEYWORDS
+ postcoloniality and the politics of knowledge
+ the third world intellectual in the first world academy
+ ‘theory’ and ‘practice’: a false binary?
+ the problematic relationship of the intellectual with violent protest
+ Edward Said, Subaltern Studies and Indian historiography

The title of this work, references the Indian historian Ranajit Guha’s landmark 1983 book, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. The text on the banners are the chapter titles of Guha’s book and are also the ‘elementary aspects’ as theorised by Guha. The peasant and tribal insurgencies that Guha researches all occurred in the earlier part of the British colonial presence in India and it significantly predates the more organised and nationalised anti-colonial struggle of the 1920s. The words ‘organised’ and ‘nationalised’ can be read here as markers of bourgeoisie liberal politics which had the middle classes as its power base, markedly different from peasant constituency of the insurgencies.

This book has been remarkably influential in the larger academic discipline of post-colonial studies and has inspired a generation of South Asian as well as Latin American scholars. Guha was also the intellectual founder of the groundbreaking and influential Subaltern Studies Group - a collective of historians committed to rewriting the history of colonial India from the distinct and separate point of view of the masses. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India can be read as the foundational manifesto for the Subaltern Studies Group.

Edward Said, the renowned scholar and professor of literature at the Columbia University who died in 2003,was a highly influential figure in the field of post-colonial studies. Said had also introduced Guha and his colleagues work to the American academic audience.
Apart from the fundamentally political nature of his scholarship, particularly his seminal work on Orientalism, Said as a Christian-born Palestinian Arab and an émigré intellectual, was also an eloquent and impassioned advocate of the Palestinian cause.

The rock-throwing gesture of the performance refers to the iconic and controversial photograph of him hurling stones, along with a throng of people, at the barbed-wire fence separating Lebanon from Israel – the act was a symbolic ‘celebration’ of the Israeli withdrawal from the area in July 2000. The performance took place close to the lunch area at the Art Omi studios. It was performed for approximately 15 minutes during lunch hours. I started close to the banners and gradually backed up to the lunch tables.

Post performance, and in continuation of the work, I set up an informal ‘micro-seminar’ on Ranajit Guha and Indian historiography. The mock-didactic setting was just a ploy to initiate interaction and discussion. For this micro-seminar I had also prepared a set of mock-samizdat-handout style typographic posters that make up an ultra-condensed version of Guha’s book.

The Gaussian Blur of a Carnot Cycle

The Gaussian Blur of a Carnot Cycle
spoken word performance, Chalk-board, Calcium Carbonate, Temporary Drawings
2008

This spoken word performance was an interactive exploration in the imaginative hinterland of science. Through a series of whimsical question and answer sessions that borrowed from the pedagogic tropes of the classroom even as it blurred the boundaries between ‘proven’ fact and ‘false’ extrapolations, the performance attempted to foreground a different framework for engaging with scientific practice – a framework that is more aware of the interconnections between diverse bodies of knowledge. This was performed at Version Bêta, 2008, the digital biennial organised by the Centre for Contemporary Images, Geneva.

The Tautology of Typology

The Tautology of Typology
Digital Prints, Single Channel Projection, Wall Drawing
Dimensions Variable
2008
Exhibited first at Bombay Art Gallery in third_life, a group show curated by Gitanjali Dang

KEYWORDS
+ contradictions of language
+ patterns of cognition
+ the dynamics of classification
+ scientific diagrams
+ information visualization
+ representations of complexity
+ the empty promise of ‘comprehension’?

The primary impulse in this body of work can be summarised by the mock-formulation stated below. For convenience, let us call it the Cantordust Conjecture or CC.

We propose that,
Logos = Typos . . . . . . . . (1)
It follows from (1) then,
Typology = Logos Logos = Typos Typos
Typology then displays a circular repetition.
Therefore,
it is a Tautology.

CC argues that all acts of (human) knowledge (Logos) are ultimately acts of classification and concerned with the construction of the relevant typology (Typos). Drawing from the etymology of the English suffix, “-logy” – widely used in naming various disciplines like anthropology or geology - Logos here is used to indicate formalised bodies of knowledge.

CC could also be read as a self-reflexive comment on the oscillation between difference and sameness in human cognition: while we can perceive a given thing in its specificity only when we can decipher the contours that separate it from other things, it’s also true that if each and every thing were irreducible in its specificity with a complete lack of shared characteristics with any other thing, then the sheer sensorial overload could bring the cognitive mechanism to a halt. However, the foregrounding of ‘cognition’ here should not be read as a valorisation of any ‘empirical’ experience divorced from the mediations of language.

Index of Debt

Index of Debt
Single Channel Projection with Sound
2008 (conceptualized during a residency at Gasworks, London and then exhibited at KHOJ Six Degrees of Separation curated by Pooja Sood and Analytical Engine at Bose Pacia Kolkata curated by Heidi Fichtner)

KEYWORDS
+ circuits of capital and scholarly production
+ the contingencies of cultural work
+ communities of practitioners
+ the fiction of scholarly “objectivity”?

Index of Debt tries to open up, albeit in a slightly tangential manner, questions around circuits of capital and conditions that enable artistic production. Is there a way to bypass questions of “pure” and “impure” money and engage with specific contexts that instantiate the globalised nature of contemporary cultural production? In thinking about ‘infrastructural enablement’ and conditions of production could one point to the parallels between contemporary art and academic scholarship?

In the video we encounter a set of unusual index cards - that wonderful pre-digital innovation in information management and a crucial ‘technology’ for the scholar/researcher. In this case, the colour and the surface graphics of these index cards mimic international currency notes. The texts printed on them are extracts from the Acknowledgment section culled from a wide range of recent, academic books in South Asian Studies. The choice of this particular academic (sub)-discipline is of course not co-incidental as the contemporary career of South Asian Studies, particularly in the international academic context raises important questions around the political implications of knowledge production, agency and representation. The video essentially consists in a slow paced viewing of these cards that allow the viewer to minutely scan them even as she takes in the surfeit of place and people names: points in the globalised network of institutions and academics.

The audio the plays along with this video is an assemblage of extracts from an extensive interview with Robert Loder and Alessio Antoniolli of Gasworks, London and Triangle Arts Trust. The interview focused on the institutional history of Triangle and the way Triangle has visualized its role in the context of facilitating artistic practice in non-western, non-metropolitan contexts. I conducted the interview during my 3 months residency at Gasworks. At one level, I read the interview as a starting point in thinking critically about institutional histories. And at another level, could it be possibly read as my own “Acknowledgment Section”?

Shouting Needham from the Rooftops

Shouting Needham from the Rooftops
A Sound Thought Experiment
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Single Channel Video, Sound Performance, Calligraphy, Chinese-English-Bengali Translation,
Linguistic-Religious Confusion
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
2008 (initiated during a residency at Gasworks, London and exhibited later in a solo show at Gallery SKE, Bangalore)

Keywords:
+ A Bengali speaking person in London: Indian or Bangladeshi?
+ Bengali = Bangladeshi = Islamic ?
+ Is the Islamic prayer call a ‘sound pollution’ in Western cities?
+ British Marxism and China: interconnected histories
+ Popularity of Chinese Literature in Indian communist states

The final form of this work assumes the shape of a video that integrates the audio documentation of a spoken word performance done in London (March, 2008) with an uneven scrolling shot of Bengali calligraphic text.
The performance essentially involved me shouting out extracts from volume 5 of “Science and Civilisation in China”, part of Joseph Needham’s monumental, multi-volume survey of ancient Chinese science.

The extracts that I shouted out were however the Bengali translation of Needham’s text. I positioned myself on the streets of Vauxhall, a south London neighbourhood, and intermittently shouted out these extracts at times that roughly coincided with the Islamic call for prayer. These ‘shout-outs’ were recorded from various points in the neighbourhood. A collage of these audio recordings formed the sound track for the video.

The visual in the video was a long scrolling shot of a calligraphic text that was a Bengali transliteration of a newspaper headline about ‘safety fears’ over an important Bangladeshi festival that’s held every spring in East London. The newspaper was a London based English language daily, published by and for the local Bangladeshi community. The calligraphic style was a reference to the conspicuously celebratory exhibition of Chinese Design that had been put up at around the same time by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Taking the misreading of Bengali as only a ‘Islamic’ language as its starting point, the work reflects on the politics of language and ‘otherness’ and the ambivalent histories of nation-state making in South Asia. In its delineation of the interconnected histories of this region, it revisits the intellectual legacy of the British Marxist scientist turned historian of science, Joseph Needham and his engagement with history of ancient and medieval Chinese science. Joseph Needham (1900-1995) was a British biologist who is remembered today for his encyclopaedic work on the history of ancient and medieval Chinese Science and its significant achievements in chemistry, metallurgy, printing and other areas. Needham was also a Marxist and an active supporter of Chinese Communism. In the photograph above he is seen with Zhou Enlai, a leading figure in the Chinese Communist Party, who played a major role in the Chinese Revolution and later in the conduct of China’s foreign relations.

Laughing in a Sine Curve

Laughing in a Sine Curve
Medium: Single Channel video projection with sound
Duration: 4 min 52 sec
Date: 2008

The work is an attempt to physically perform/emote the Sine Curve.This trigonometric graph shaped like a continuous wavy line is elementary and also fundamental to our scientific understanding of natural processes. In expressing the curve as a sequence of continuous transformations between paroxysms of laughter and
crying the work is attempt to think critically about the limits of analytic models in comprehending the complexity of real world processes while reflecting on the increasing prevalence to use those very models.

A sine curve is the graph of the trigonometric variable sin(x). Simply put, it is a wavy line,which is highly regular and is periodically ascending and descending. The sine wave or sinusoid is a function that occurs often in mathematics, physics, signal processing, audition, electrical engineering, and many other fields.

The Problem of Distribution

Bose Einstein Chapters:Part 01 Distribution
Medium: Single Channel video projection
Duration: 6 min 42 sec
Date: 2007

The social history of early twentieth-century science research in India informs the overall framework of the multi-part work, Bose Einstein Chapters. Over four parts, the work attempts to explore the collaboration between Albert Einstein and the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose in the field of quantum mechanics. This work was conceptualised and produced during a Pro Helvetia India funded residency at Bern, Switzerland. As part of the research I had also explored the Bern patent office archives, where Einstein had spent the years leading upto his work on Relativity. (1905)

Partition 01_Distribution, the first part in the series, tries to explore, through the narrative device of a visual fable, the concept of distribution. Bose’s 1924 paper succeed in deriving Planck's radiation law – the fundamental starting point of quantum theory formulated in 1900 – purely from the considerations of quantum theory and statistical mechanics, without taking recourse to classical electrodynamics. Bose’s paper was based on an innovative, statistical understanding of the problem of distribution, within the context of particles and energy levels.

Though Bose was convinced about the importance of his work, he couldn’t get this particular paper published. He was then a reader in Physics at the Dhaka University (currently in Bangladesh) and from Dhaka he wrote to Einstein requesting him to have a look at his paper. Bose also suggested Einstein to arrange for its publication if he found the paper sufficiently relevant. Einstein did in fact recognize the importance of Bose’s work and got the paper published in Zeitschrift für Physik, one of the leading journals of the day, after having translated it himself. Einstein soon extended Bose’s work and the Bose Einstein Statistics emerged from this scientific exchange.

Today, Bose Einstein Statistics, along with Fermi Dirac Statistics, is part of the fundamental framework of Quantum Mechanics. Particles that obey Bose Einstein Statistics are called Bosons and those that obey Fermi Dirac Statistics are called Fermions. The elusive Higgs particle, strongly believed to be responsible for giving other particles mass, is a boson. And of course, there is the Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC), an entirely new state of matter where at temperatures just a few hundred billionths of a degree above absolute zero (−273.15 °C), individual atoms condense into a “superatom” which then behaves as a single entity. Part 03 of Bose Einstein Chapters will focus on BEC and the associated concepts of “coherence” and “condensation”.

The Mahalanobis Distance between 'Pure' and 'Applied' Science

Summation [pH]n1 to [pH]n2
Dimensions: Variable
Media: Single Channel Projection, 4 Monitors, Sound
Acknowledgment: Dr. Ramakrishna Ramaswamy (JNU, New Delhi) and Dr. M. K. Panigrahi (I.I.T Kharagpur)
Year: 2007


This work is part of my ongoing project on the social history of science research in colonial India. This particular work was initiated during the KHOJ Arts and Science Residency in 2007.
Through short narrative video pieces and an animation that ‘explains’ an ironic scientific experiment around Raman Spectroscopy, this work attempted to trace the longer history of the apparent dichotomy between pure and applied science. The specific historical context it addresses centres broadly around these two markers: the foundation of one of the first independently managed science research institutes in colonial India - Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Calcutta in 1876 - and C.V Raman’s research on light scattering in the same institute in the early decades of the 20th century function. However, the work is not conceptualised as an authentic narration of factual, documentary material but rather a continuous play between ‘real’ history and fictional constructs.

When Dr. Mahendralal Sircar wanted to set up a pure science research institute in the 1860s in Calcutta, it met with stiff opposition from a prominent section of the Indian bourgeoisie and landed gentry. They felt that given India’s ‘backwardness’ a pure science research institute would be a waste of money. Many of them supported the Institute of Technical Training that was proposed by the India League. Dr. Sircar was eventually successful in setting up his institute and in the 1920s C.V Raman did his Nobel (1930) winning work there. The Raman Effect was seen as incontrovertible proof of the still relatively new Quantum Theory. However even then the practical implications of the work in molecular spectroscopy was immediately recognized.

And now, in our present times, there are questionable - and therefore always couched in the language of efficiency and practicality - suggestions of installing portable Raman spectrometers at airports for a quick detection of dissolved explosives in fluid substances. The ‘pure’/’applied’ or the theoretical/experimental dichotomy gets another interesting facet from Raman’s own aversion to theoretical physics that made extended use of abstract mathematical formulations. In one of his public lectures we therefore hear him speak about the physiological basis of the light quanta and how in appropriate conditions the human eye can be trained to perceive the light quanta. This embodied and ‘empirical’ introduction of the quanta is interesting, given that the early popular expositions of quantum theory generally highlighted its abstract and counter-intuitive nature.

The Deictic Garland

Some views of the 3 channel installation

The Deictic Garland
2007
3 channel video projection

Dysfunction, particularly technological dysfunction, is an interesting moment for me, as it offers us a glimpse into the underlying texture of dynamic relations - a complex web of technological artefacts and social practices surrounding them - that mark the presence of technology in our contemporary times.
Though a foregrounding of dysfunction is sometimes equated with a Luddite position, I share no such retrograde utopia. Neither do I see myself as an evangelist of new technology. So, my engagement with technology then is that of critical engagement. In this work, the trope of dysfunction has been carried over into multiple contexts - from servers and routers to the organized practice of a particular discipline. The transient eddies of engagement and exchange that circulate along with more prominent and acknowledged conduits of interaction have always fascinated me. What happens when something or someone goes underground? How are new processes imagined into existence when one falls outside the visible gaze?

www.ebayaday.com

Part of the www.ebay.com page where my voice was up for auction

A section of the hand copied Bengali translation of the Communist Manifesto

www.ebayaday.com
2006
online interactive work with real objects
using the website www.ebay.com
Dimensions Variable

ebayaday was a month-long serial exhibit, that used eBay as a site - literally as well as conceptually. The project started at 9 a.m. PST, Dec. 1, 2006 and closed on January 1st, 2007. Though it is not possible to bid on the artworks anymore, one can still view them and their respective bidding histories on eBay or on the project site, www.ebayaday.com

Curated by Rebekah Modrak, Aaron Ahuvia and Zackery Denfeld, ebayaday invited 25 artists to produce work that would respond to the spaces and practices of eBay. For many of the artists, eBay became the very material of the work that actively deployed the format of the eBay listing - item for sale, descriptive text and imagery and placement within chosen categories – for its conceptual traction. The attempt was to challenge the idea that online auctions are primarily for the exchange of money for goods and to figure out ways in which the space of the auction could be opened up for further dialogue, debate and even resistance.

www.ebayaday.com started off with an original manuscript where an anonymous author had copied out the entire Bengali translation of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto by hand. Abhishek Hazra, one of the participating artists, later tried to unearth the identity of this dedicated communist–copyist. The results of his investigation are narrated in the small essay, “Up for Auction: A Devoted Communist’s Labour of Love” first published in Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers. In the other work, I offered up my voice for sale. The winning bidder could get recorded audio samples of my voice from which he would be free to do whatever he pleases as he would then own that ‘voice’.

Gallery of Fakes

This illustration was commissioned by World-Information City for the info-paper on Intellectual Property that was published in conjunction with the one-week programme of events addressing global issues of intellectual property and technology in conjunction with changing urban landscapes. Held at Bangalore from November 14 - 20, 2005 , World-Information City was a cooperative project of the Institute of New Culture Technologies/t0 (Vienna), Sarai CSDS (Delhi), Waag Society (Amsterdam), ALF (Bangalore), Mahiti (Bangalore) and local partners.

In connection with the programme at Bangalore, World-Information.Org released an info-paper on intellectual property and the city. The paper, produced with the financial assistance of UNESCO, brings together concise and to-the-point contributions on the politics of intellectual property and urban change.
The info-paper can be downloaded from here.

The illustration, framed as a fragment from a fake anthropological exhibition, started off as a response to ALF’s fascinating archive of Indian newspaper reports on ‘fakes’, increasingly a staple of the crime beat. Apart from the mandatory paranoia about fake CDs and DVDs these reports occasionally warn us about ‘fake nappies’ and ‘fake paint’ as well. So what I attempted here was to open up this space of the quotidian object even further to include some non-objects as well. For example, the fake dentures that are labelled “Fake Accent” is a clear reference to India’s BPO industry and its complex politics of impersonation.

The Hydrogen Bond of the Communist Manifesto

The Hydrogen Bond of the Communist Manifesto
2002
Multimedia installation involving interactive animation, and artist’s books

How can one revisit a canonical text in ways that can open up fresh ways of engaging with it? That was my primary concern in this project where I attempted to work with Marx and Engels’ seminal text of 1848, the Communist Manifesto. This project was exhibited and installed at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology when I was in my third year of studies there. The project addressed the notion of site specificity and tried to grapple with the vexed question of ‘political naiveté versus political radicalisation’ that often crop up in elite, urban institutes. A certain degree of pedagogical polemics was therefore an inevitable part of the project.

The main armature of the work was based on a ‘classic’ deconstructive reading of the text. I attempted to locate those precise points where the text begins to contradict itself. These points of contradiction were then treated as entry points for the reader to catch a glimpse of the manner in which the text privileges one set of meaning against a competing set of meanings. The work looked at these aspects through a set of three interactive animations. Each of them explored a particular set of semantic privileging that the text indulged in. For example, there was a set of animation that looked at the manner in which the urban is consistently valorised over the rural (“the idiocy of rural life”) while another set of animation explored the contradictions between collective action and private property.

These explorations were attempted with a stronger reliance on contemporary reference points that with the usual optics of theoretical humanities /political science. In many cases there was a deliberate blurring of historical reference frames that also cut across the distinctions between the ‘serious’ and the ‘frivolous’. Therefore for example, in an animation that dealt with the notion of privacy one would be confronted with password protected screens. Success in cracking the password allowed the users the to get a peek into random selections from the agony aunt column in daily newspapers. Therefore, within the space of a single animation one could confront very diverse modalities and mentalities of privacy. The main set of animations was accompanied by a set of large prints and hand crafted artist’s books that amplified and worked with other aspects of the Communist Manifesto.

A Given Rate of Dweposition

Dweposit
2006
A Short Animated Narrative
Single Channel Projection
5min 50sec

This work was done at the KHOJ International Artist’s workshop in Kolkata, 2006. The workshop took as its site an old zamidarbari (landlord’s mansion) in Baruipur, a place close to southern extension of Kolkata. Dweposit, the animated narrative that I worked on was my response to this particular site and its politics. The zamidarbari seems to occupy an important place in the popular Bengali imagination as a site of ‘traditional Bengali culture’. Articulated as a site of memory, the zamidarbari and its network of architectural spaces typically associated with specific rituals and festivities, repeatedly surface in films, TV serials, advertisements, literature and music as the very embodiment of tradition. But as we all know, tradition is always an ambiguous and contested terrain: the purported timelessness of tradition is often a political ‘invention’ of a very specific nature.
My way of engaging with the Chaudhuri Bari was to try and scrape through this patina of ‘traditional culture’ and look at other recalcitrant artefacts of history. In fact, what interested me more in the Chadhuri Bari site was the large expanse of land that surrounds the actual house. The animated narrative that I present here started evolving from this point. One could possibly view Dweposit as an allegorical take on the “land question”. From the Permanent Settlement of 1793 that chalked out the basic legal framework of landed property in colonial Bengal to the tribals who are rendered landless by the postcolonial state obsessed with a flawed vision of ‘progress’, land and its ownership remains a crucially important node in the complex ramifications of power.

Codework: Animated Short in two parts

Random frames from Codework, an animated short in two parts

Codework
Animated short in two parts, single channel projection
6 min, 24 seconds
2006

This work was exhibited first in a group show, "Ghosts in the Machine and other Tales" curated by Pooja Sood at the Apeejay Media Gallery in New Delhi. In Codework I have looked at a very simple piece of PHP (a scripting language widely deployed on the internet) code that enables a user to subscribe or unsubscribe to a mailing list. Through two small narratives, I formulate speculative scenarios to attempt an expanded annotation of this code. Though the code at hand is the primary focus, I also try to tentatively reflect on some of the larger implications for our cognitive understanding of the world around us. At a fundamental level Codework then is an invitation to engage with the technologies of software that undergrid the practices of our everyday life: sending and receiving e-mail, using search engines to ferret out information, sharing mp3 playlists, etc.

But the question of engagement here is not exhausted by mere didacticism. Engagement here would also include negotiating the contours of one’s imaginative universe and refusing to view these technological processes as mere instrumentality. An engagement becomes that much more poorer if it defers the lyrical and the whimsical for the instrumental and the efficacious. As a visual artist who is interested in science and technology, it is also about being able to stake a claim for the legitimacy of a plural mode of engagement with a discourse that is framed by a highly technical language: solving encryption algorithms oneself cannot be the only way of engaging with the mechanics of secure communication on the internet. Codework then looks at code tangentially, and in attempting to refigure it through narratives and images that allegorically amplify the very structure of its formal logic, seeks to find fresh ways of engagement.

Some fables on the Unstable Oscillation of Uniformity

The clay is specially treated so that it remains pliant and responsive for over a month.

With the matrix in the car, Chitralekha drives down to all the galleries in the itinerary and displays the matrix as her only exhibit.

Diving deep down into the river, Kujjhatika ferrets out the sturdiest pillar of the bridge.

This work was shown in a solo show at Gallery SKE, Bangalore. The show comprised of a set of 6 large prints (4feet by 3feet, 4 feet by 3 feet, Ultraviolet Ink on Composite Aluminium Panels) a looped projection and a small sound piece.The following is an extract from the concept note for the show.

I am interested in exploring a particular conceptual trajectory through the narrative device of the fable. Fables interest me, as they set in motion an interesting tension between the grainy-ness of the particular and the fuzzy smear of the general. Also because of their short narrative duration, they allow for a certain compaction of ideas while simultaneously retaining a porosity of interpretation. I should clarify that these specific attributes of fables have perhaps more to do with my subjective – perhaps even idiosyncratic – 'take' on fables than with any widely agreed definition of their narrative function. One could see this project as a reflection on the processes that stitch together the fabric of our reality - a reality that navigates both the 'small voice' of the everyday and the larger theoretical structures we create, to grasp the nature of lived experience. I am aware that a dichotomous formulation of 'theory' and 'experience' is deeply problematic. I cite this example merely to give an idea of the tensions and movements I am interested in.

In this show, I have explored the conceptual trajectories of "Oscillation", "Instability", "Uniformity", and “Travel” through four short, eponymously-titled micro-narratives/fables. I am aware that each trajectory is packed with multiple, and often contradictory, layers of meaning. Within the fable/micro-narrative, I have therefore tried to delineate a particular context that throws into relief a certain set of meanings and resonances. In physical terms, each micro-narrative is created as a sequence of still images with accompanying text. The set of five micro-narratives will be installed as a projection within the gallery. This will be accompanied by a set of 6 large scale prints and a sound installation.

How do I locate this body of work? I am interested in using the language of graphic design and typography to explore a terrain that is conceptually exciting. However, this conceptual exploration is not at the expense of formal/visual exuberance. In fact, the attempt is to arrive at an exuberance that is not merely vacuous or celebratory. I have borrowed from a whole range of visual and theoretical work, that do not easily fit the categories of high art or conventional academic disciplines. Technology, or rather the critical mediation of technology, also remains a central preoccupation in my work.