I chuckled at my state, as I was writing a reflective essay for a course that is invested in thinking of the importance and implications of technology and how it has become a part and parcel of our everyday with a keyboard and mouse that are not working. Without it I cannot function, a body part, an extension without which I fail to do any activity. I, as of now, wouldn’t call it something that was absolutely necessary for me to understand the importance of technology and the rate at which we are being mechanized. But, perhaps someday I shall look back and think of it as an important learning curve.
At the start of this semester, there were a few things running in my head with a blinking priority- notification light

• One, to practice and do more work, with my hands and not just with my head.
• Keep time for exploring with material

This time around, I thought I should spend more time in the term 2 course trying to explore what can be done since I have found it difficult to understand processing 3. It wasn't something I could see as a material up until the start of my third semester. This was in lieu of the fact that I can manage my time better this time around. I can then devote time to build on my work as a research practice.  Like always, I was deeply invested in the idea of practice as research and kept trying to find ways to achieve that. I wanted to engage with my material through trial and error, considering what my material has been for the last two semesters; Objects, spaces and memory as material. Meanwhile, I also remember going back to an old chat from a friend who had advised me not to read to make work out of it. “Read for the love of reading and the book itself” I have now understood this is extremely difficult to come by these days. With all this in mind, I had decided that I’ll dedicate this semester to working with my hands. Although, to my dismay, out of the three practice electives that I had applied for, I was only given a place in one. One of them did not have enough space and the other only offered 2 credits without an option to audit. The elective that I took up was ‘Learning to see’ and the course was interested in looking at the river, specifically the Yamuna River.



       I was so excited to see the Yamuna upstream, I kept taking screenshots 3 I was so excited to see the Yamuna upstream, I kept taking screenshots 4





As the semester progressed, I got interested in the idea of traces- that which is left behind; the residue. I think a lot of that came from having sat in the TEDM classes and the discussions we have had on ‘control’ in relation to the Jurassic Park movie and eventually speaking of an all-seeing eye responsible for your code of conduct and one’s movement in space.

Midway through our course, we had a trip to the Feroz-Shah Kotla where I happened to interact with the bats that stay there. Having read Anand Vivek Taneja’s ‘Jinnealogy’ where he speaks about the djinns of Feroz-Shah Kotla, my interaction with the bats was layered. Around this time, I was thinking of the invisible a lot; that which we cannot see in our every-day but is omnipresent. I was thinking of such spaces that allow the invisible to exist. During this process, I thought of recording what we can’t hear; ‘Bat Sounds’.

Soon after I had recorded these sounds from Feroz-Shah Kotla and had come back from the trip at Renuka ji dam site where I saw bats again, we had a discussion about formants in a spectrogram visualization of audio. I caught myself thinking of formants and what gets left behind; the residue or traces.

We had a workshop which was mainly focussed on the very idea of documentation of work and a way to think through it. On discussing my work with Peter Rosel, he pointed out that photos have a sense of ambiguity, unlike my drawings. He said he was pulled towards it and it was followed by an instantaneous sense to dissociate. He asked me to go ahead and click more pictures like these and because around that time we happened to be also discussing about me growing mould he had also asked me to document mould that I  find on my way. This is about the time when I understood a bit about thinking through doing. It was also around this time that I had found the word ‘patch’, while documenting the fleeting. I only realise now what my pictures and recordings were trying to bring about, were formants, of documenting the residue, barely imagined.

While in my learning to see course, when working on the river, these thoughts kept coming back; A river which was invisible from our imagination. All of this showed up in my drawing and the way I depicted the river. During the trip and even in Delhi, the only way I have interacted with the river is mostly through a map. In the process of this, this is what I ended up making. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ajZ0vsBBV4



As our semester proceeded we were introduced to purr data, an open source coding platform to work with multimedia and "interactive computer music". This proved to be a major point in the learning of this course as processing didn't really help me think through my work but somewhere purr data helped me vocalise my thoughts better. It vocalised the ambiguity that I preferred in my work and the visual nature and quality of it helped me think through the form of the program itself.
During this time I was intently looking at the work of Moonis Ahmed Shah, Stelarc, Charles Offeh, Forensic Architecture, Allan Sekula and Mary Maggic by Mary Tsang which were coupled with watching a video series called the Nature of Code(genetic algorithm simulation) by Daniel Shiffman invested in the idea of creating a space that draws off of today, but is fictive in nature. When i was looking at others and how they engaged with purr data the feeling of getting left behind was strong again. At one point, it was like we were using a lot of functions and formulas to get a desired value or signal. During which, we also made a synthesizer that looked like a ship producing different sounds.





I recall speaking about the kind of sensibility all of this is producing. One which is going through various links, threads and cables. Stopping at various intervals and checkpoints that look like they're processing the data or signals, running through various counters, boxes and sliders that compute and understand and it's either producing a sine wave or giving off a sound through oscillating. Everything is constantly being regulated and monitored. How a signal or data is recorded, which helps to control and giving a value that is 'true' to the factors and functions that we're feeding the program.

This was also the time when we were supposed to think about our public art practice. I had visited a mela during Dussehra where some of friends and I watched a performance where we saw this person asking his donkey performer some questions(who and where) and the donkey answers by walking to a particular person in the crowd. We also saw people taking pictures in photo booths that were decorated with flowers, soap bubbles and different scenic views.


We somehow happened to start talking about how the future machines in melas do the same thing or how a photo booth can place someone in a different setting and place/space, everytime. They either tell us about a possible future or sometimes take us to a future that we aren't really familiar with. A set of questions asked followed by a ticket or paper that says, what awaits in your near future. When a lot of information is extracted from an individual, we infer that there must be some truth to the telling. As at that time i was heavily influenced by works of Moonis and Forensic Architecture, it seemed apt to me to try and build a contraption that enables such an interaction; where one is regulated by data. One artists' collective, where it's invested in evidence building and the other artist's work where we are only under the impression that a kind of evidence(information) is being taken into consideration to create a fictional truth; yet both being a kind of truth telling.







Algorithms have become a daily experience and part of our daily life. Usernames, passwords, hashtags etc are the examples where the public ignorant of technological black box is engaging with one end of the algorithm. What happens when the modern self is reduced to a data entry, an empirical ‘self’. Data is utilitarian in nature; it is used for influencing people or surveillance and control. In view of this, we tried to build a machine that functions on a fictional archive to give a fictional/mythical future.Our machine isn't interested in the data of an individual but would ask mundane questions which are of no interest to the state. The experience of future is an altered algorithmic experience.
Andrea Chung, Eduardo R Miranda(bio-computer music), Anna Dumitriu, Ana Mendieta helped me think a little harder about what a world that i could create. Donna Haraway and Tim Ingold too have been a constant reminder of and to my work. In a day where I'm at least looking at work from at least 20 different people on my social media feed, it is difficult to pick out someone that has influenced my work greatly. 
Coming back to my work that i have been doing now, it seems rather odd for me to jump to conclusions on the conceptual basis of it. I have come to realise that, concept will find its way through one's engagement with the/a material. Coming with a background in Art History my training has always told me that there's thought put into all and any kind of work but what i think i realise now is that doing can be a way of thinking. 

As a mode of thinking through practice, i have taken up drawing on a book about the formation of Bangladesh. In this book I'll be drawing, cutting , pasting, doing collage, overwriting, scribbling etc. Now, I have even started using my left hand to draw and sketch everything on it and plan to do this till the end of next semester. These collages will be done by using scans and photographs of my photographs and objects respectively. This abstracting will be a start at looking at my practice and build through it.





References:

Taneja, Anand V, Jinnealogy

Ingold, Tim, Culture on the ground

Haraway, Donna, The Harway Reader

Sekula, Allan, Reading an Archive

Chun, Wendy, Enduring Ephemeral

Groys, Boris, Art in the Age of Biopolitics

Sanathanan, T, How to draw Histories

Taussig, Michael, I swear, I saw this