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.