1/9/24, 3:42 pm - Nithya: "The anxiety of films like Host, then, is twofold: They concern themselves not only with how the self’s natural multiplicity has been heightened and exaggerated by digital extension, but by how this allows for “back-flow” from the digital realm — so that it’s not clear precisely which fragments of the self are “natural” and which are a result of contamination by technology. The portal works both ways." - Is It My Body, by Lauren Collee
DATES
- SUN 29 September
Available On Demand
- SUN 29 September
Experience Notes
The sequence of these messages will be randomly re-ordered on every visit or refresh of this page, enabling the autonomy of the ‘reader’ to engage through free association.
pinch/zoom/scroll/hover gestures at notions of sensation (embodied/internal) and perception (external/expressed) through a range of exchanges between Nithya (based in Sydney) and Vishal (based in Bengaluru). It is a piece of networked writing reflecting the conditions of the collaboration itself, across text, audio (voice notes) and videos/gifs. Fractured, asynchronous, simultaneous and stretched across time/space/internet bandwidth, the writing draws from a lineage of net.art and hypertext.
Through portals of subtext and context, we traverse themes of personal rituals of mourning, sonic and visual witnessing of communal rites, and the post-ritualistic affect of memory and remembrance. We invite you, the reader, to talk back to the works in BLEED – editing, annotating, unpacking, delving – as you collide with the artists’ ideas through your senses.
- WRITERS
Nithya Nagarajan
Vishal Kumaraswamy
with
DIGITAL DEVELOPER
Daniel Reid
- pinch/zoom/scroll/hover is commissioned and produced by Campbelltown Arts Centre as part of BLEED 2024.
BLEED (Biennial Live Event in the Everyday Digital) was conceived by Campbelltown City Council through Campbelltown Arts Centre, and The City of Melbourne through Arts House. BLEED 2024 is produced and presented by Campbelltown Arts Centre, Arts House, and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in partnership with Treasure Hill Artist Village.
Messages
1/9/24, 3:03 pm - Nithya: Do you go back to Ravani much?
1/9/24, 3:06 pm - Nithya: The web as a museum of surfaces is such an interesting way to put it. It is the internet that taught me about the politics of citation, not academia. The ability to pursue citation as a feminist politic and praxis to really understand the magnitude of the interconnectedness and interdependence of us and the cosmos, and combat the egotistical and individual pursuit of the 'original idea' as worthy or even indeed possible
1/9/24, 3:45 pm - Nithya: Unrelated, but this piece on the history of the emoji: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/apr/30/emoticon-emoji-text-ii-ascii/
29/8/24, 10:14 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: A crystallised naturalization of the technologies of production of subjects
1/9/24, 3:47 pm - Nithya:
28/8/24, 12:15 am - Vishal Kumaraswamy: To treat the web page as ‘the Internet as a foundational experience’
29/8/24, 10:17 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/paul-preciado-on-binaries-barbie-and-adapting-virginia-woolf-for-the-screen?
29/8/24, 10:13 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: perceiving a voice amplified leave a physical space is
a miracle into ash
a miracle into earth
27/8/24, 10:07 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: and it’s why I was interested in the premise of what we could perhaps realise within the webpage space of BLEED Echo
19/9/24, 6:46 pm - Nithya:
29/8/24, 10:10 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: as being amplified is also a miracle
27/8/24, 10:08 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: because gestures are so commonplace today in the mediated world that something as innocuous as a finger touching glass charged by electrical particles can impact the entire construct of this world as we know it
28/8/24, 12:16 am - Vishal Kumaraswamy: I like that they’re not directly interlinked
29/8/24, 10:10 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: but also that perceiving a voice
1/9/24, 3:35 pm - Nithya: There are obviously sinister effects of the internet, but I think for communities in particular that have typically been affected by lack of access to education or indeed been kept out of certain knowledge systems because of the cultural gatekeeping, the web is a portal. It definitely was an illuminating 'coming of age' experience for me to grow up in the years of the early internet
1/9/24, 3:39 pm - Nithya: You know my parents ran a Sify iway cafe for a while? I manned the reception desk for a while :P
27/8/24, 10:12 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: to invite someone to gesture consciously, gentle with intention, tender with curiosity and to wonder ‘can the glass turn to cotton?’ soft but resilient, filled with life and easily morphing into other forms when nudged
27/8/24, 10:05 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: and it’s in realising that my father’s community buries those who have passed and not cremating was the first time I consciously remember feeling othered
29/8/24, 9:59 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: and going extremely out of context, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the comedian jerrod Carmichael but I watched his special Rothaniel in 2022. It’s a searing look into the function of comedy as a methodology of active practice for processing the world. His podcast episode with Rick Rubin is one of my favourite, a three hour meandering chat about all things life, love, grief, et al. Jerrod is a spectacularly honest & radically present voice
27/8/24, 10:19 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: something that I strongly feel is lost in interacting with the web today, the over familiarity isn’t always fun but nudging someone towards a pause or a slower condition of reading one web page, just the one - horizontally, diagonally, scrolling up and down or sideways, zooming in and out
1/9/24, 5:05 pm - Nithya: in a mystical sense
14/8/24, 6:47 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: but they all kind of agree to keep it’s location a secret
19/9/24, 7:08 pm - Nithya: https://deafpower.me/
27/8/24, 10:18 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: and each 30 min slot was filled with thrills ranging from mundane sounds of the keyboard or wondering what the buttons on the monitor did to hearing everyone’s pings from MSN or Yahoo messengers
14/8/24, 6:46 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: There’s these conversations about looking for, finding and then hiding the location of the world’s oldest tree
29/8/24, 10:16 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy:
1/9/24, 5:05 pm - Nithya: But also the very existence of a 'secret' as the conditions that create the fertile grounds for a seeker
27/8/24, 10:21 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: and having it be a temporal experience that may get lost in the web traffic and internet noise of the day
29/8/24, 10:01 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: That early internet experience was sort of the first moment I started to perceive my own autonomy or the agency to imagine my own autonomy
28/8/24, 12:15 am - Vishal Kumaraswamy: it’s like two divergent strands of thought
1/9/24, 3:37 pm - Nithya: Similarly, it was where I learnt to understand, express and practice desire particularly from the female gaze and outside of what was afforded to me in relatively traditional socio-cultural contexts, the arena through which I could bridge the gap between what was being taught to me within the Bharatanatyam class and what I was allowed to express with autonomy/license
14/8/24, 6:44 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: and how sometimes going back to a commonly understood point of origin/taxonomy of meaning can perhaps illustrate other ways of approaching something
27/8/24, 10:03 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: and your mention of burial brought back a conversation I’d had with my dad when I was in Darwin about how the people seem familiar, there’s a sense of somehow belonging to the earth and that that earth was the earth of Ravani my father’s village or of everywhere the caste community I come from were chased or forcibly relocated to. We were also mourning the number of people we had lost during the pandemic and the conversation frequently returned to how contentious burial space was even in 2022
19/9/24, 6:56 pm - Nithya: https://www.entersultanasreality.com/
22/8/24, 6:21 am - Nithya:
27/8/24, 10:21 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: but for five/three/seven/twelve minutes - pause
19/9/24, 6:50 pm - Nithya:
21/8/24, 11:55 am - Nithya: I remember honestly being so confounded by this, having grown up with the contemporary imagination of cremation, whether natural or electric and being reduced to ash. Who even gets to be ash, why and at what cost?
29/8/24, 10:00 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: And in an interview with esquire, he says this beautiful line ‘I think your voice being amplified is a miracle’
3/9/2024, 9:45 am - Vishal Kumaraswamy:
29/8/24, 9:59 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy:
1/9/24, 5:16 pm - Nithya: There's a really great essay by Elliot R. Wolfson on Concealing the Concealment, I'll try and find it for you
27/8/24, 10:00 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: of course I’d come straight from Darwin where being within a universe of meaning was so commonplace, so home-like for me. That the dark brown, nearly red earth, the trees and plants all reminding me of rural karnataka, like the air was filled with the scent of a familiarity that was so surprising to me. I’m always glad the first time my feet landed on the continent of Australia was in Darwin because of how un-alien like I felt walking through there
21/8/24, 11:53 am - Nithya: I often think of the time before my beloved paati, my grandma, passed. I had this hallucination almost that I could see the world through her eyes and it was calling me toward a bright white light. The next morning my parents called and said she's on her death bed. I will never forgive Australian immigration processes because the hold up from getting clearance to travel meant she passed before I boarded the flight. Yet, I was so glad to have made it. And much to my surprise, she was buried, not cremated
1/9/24, 3:09 pm - Nithya: Medea, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1969)
14/8/24, 6:49 pm - Nithya: what other secrets are you keeping from me? :(
29/8/24, 10:29 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy:
14/8/24, 6:43 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: I’ve been thinking a lot about the networked condition, especially after seeing the rest of the BLEED program unfold
29/8/24, 10:10 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: and to perceive a voice as an embodied experience is also some sort of miracle
27/8/24, 10:06 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: that this form of mourning/grieving/honouring was wrong
20/9/24, 11:32 am - Nithya: https://ismatu.substack.com/p/youve-been-traumatized-into-hating
1/9/24, 5:01 pm - Nithya: I think of what are you saying about secrecy in the context of amulets and talismans too
19/9/24, 6:43 pm - Nithya:
27/8/24, 10:17 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy:
14/8/24, 6:47 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: https://www.discoverwildlife.com/plant-facts/trees/oldest-tree-in-world
29/8/24, 10:13 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: left turn
28/8/24, 12:15 am - Vishal Kumaraswamy: and it got me thinking of a few things; 1. that secrecy here supposedly is for the greater good. 2. there is a general lack of agency of all parties involved: people of these regions, the trees themselves, but also adherence to a specific brand of secrecy. 3. What is that condition of the perception of secrecy but is actually just another vocabulary that is removed from a kind of language we’re not aware of. Especially with regards to cultural practices/traditions?
28/8/24, 12:16 am - Vishal Kumaraswamy: and make this really long thread back to secrets as a foundational experience of trust formation and trust being the foundation for carrying forward cultural memory & heritage
1/9/24, 5:02 pm - Nithya: Healing the self
1/9/24, 5:01 pm - Nithya: Protecting one from harm's way
1/9/24, 5:01 pm - Nithya: That they not only shield the person in custodianship of the knowledge, but they also guide them
27/8/24, 10:17 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: but the webpage as if it is a single viewing experience. My earliest material memories of the internet are less about the websites I could visit like Encylopaedia Britannica or Alta Vista or Ask Jeeves but of a special portal viewing place like ‘Cyber Java’ the first cybercafe close to my house. At 10 it was the most radically life altering thing I could experience
19/9/24, 7:03 pm - Nithya:
28/8/24, 12:15 am - Vishal Kumaraswamy: And I got distracted here
19/9/24, 6:40 pm - Nithya:
28/8/24, 12:16 am - Vishal Kumaraswamy: But can be parallel lines
27/8/24, 10:13 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: I think a lot about the surfaces of engagement, and the web as a museum of surfaces
19/9/24, 7:29 pm - Nithya:
29/8/24, 10:15 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a60341676/jerrod-carmichael-reality-show-profile-2024/
27/8/24, 10:07 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: and I sit with that often in all the ways a gesture is employed to other someone/something/the thing that is but we deny it is so
1/9/24, 3:02 pm - Nithya: Gosh I remember you sharing this with me so distinctly, and what a sharp turn arriving into Naarm would have been from that profoundly grounding experience
29/8/24, 10:14 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy:
1/9/24, 3:42 pm - Nithya: Here:
14/8/24, 6:51 pm - Nithya:
27/8/24, 9:57 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: I remember so clearly you telling me this on my first trip to Melbourne and how much of our time together then was learning about each other’s histories, family & social conditions, where we come from, where we are or hope to be and how we want to move; forward or laterally
21/8/24, 11:52 am - Nithya: Sorry for the gag. This is beautiful. When we were at the outset of this collaboration, we were talking I think about the intimacy and relationship to ritual, and the access to vernacular and embodied knowledges, but also how something lingers in your body
14/8/24, 6:47 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: some say it’s in California, others say it maybe in Patagonia
27/8/24, 10:18 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: and that is a foundational museum of digital experience for me
19/9/24, 7:13 pm - Nithya: https://offsite.westspace.org.au/work/imprints-on-the-unseeable-space/
19/9/24, 7:10 pm - Nithya:
29/8/24, 10:00 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: And I’ve used it as a chant of some kind
29/8/24, 10:14 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: Preciado in one paragraph summarising contemporary artistic concerns as a response to a question