Written Commission: pinch/zoom/scroll/hoverNithya Nagarajan and Vishal Kumaraswamy

Echo

  • DATES

    • SUN 29 September
      Available On Demand

  • 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.

Messages

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

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, 7:29 pm - Nithya:

29/8/24, 10:10 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: as being amplified is also a miracle

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

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

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

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

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?

14/8/24, 6:49 pm - Nithya: what other secrets are you keeping from me? :(

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

27/8/24, 10:21 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: but for five/three/seven/twelve minutes - pause

1/9/24, 3:03 pm - Nithya: Do you go back to Ravani much?

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, 10:21 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, 10:14 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: Preciado in one paragraph summarising contemporary artistic concerns as a response to a question

19/9/24, 6:50 pm - Nithya:

3/9/2024, 9:45 am - Vishal Kumaraswamy:

A chart titled “The Psychedelic Experience” with axes labelled "Perception", "Oceanic Boundlessness" and "Self-Disintegration". The chart plots the effects of four psychedelic substances: "LSD", "Psilocybin", "MDMA", and "Ketamine". Each substance is represented by a different colored line that extends outwards in varying degrees along the axes to indicate the intensity of each effect. Under the "Perception" category the effects range from "elementary imagery", "complex imagery", "audio-visual synesthesia", "changed meaning of percepts", in the "Oceanic Boundlessness" category there is, "insightfulness", "experience of unity", "spiritual experience", "blissful state", and the "Self-Disintegration" category includes "anxiety", "impaired control and cognition" and "disembodiment".

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

19/9/24, 6:43 pm - Nithya:

29/8/24, 10:00 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: And I’ve used it as a chant of some kind

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

28/8/24, 12:15 am - Vishal Kumaraswamy: And I got distracted here

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

14/8/24, 6:47 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: but they all kind of agree to keep it’s location a secret

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

29/8/24, 10:14 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy:

Screenshot of white text on a black background: PRECIADO: It's not a question of diversity of gender, but it's a question of power. That's really important. What are the bodies that in a particular society have the right to define the conditions under which they are represented? Sometimes people think of these as categories. But they're not. Gender is not a category. It's a practice, a social practice that is done and constructed through an accumulation of hundreds of thousands of social techniques. Language is one. Visual representation is another. For instance, photography, historically, then cinema. Passports are another one, and money. That's why, for me, there are not so many differences between philosophy and cinema. Some people are like, "Wow, you were doing books, and now you're making a film.” But the questions are not so different. because in reality, for me, a society is basically a crystallized naturalization of the technologies of production of subjects, which we don't see as techniques anymore.

22/8/24, 6:21 am - Nithya:

Screencap of white text on black background: 'Beneath all the prose and the argument, an essay is a public. The best essays build a public through process and form, driven from creative impulse to address a social problem... The best scholarship and the most invigorated publics have this in common: They channel massive amounts of creativity. Into relationships. Into methods. Into networks. Into discourse.' Tressie McMillan Cottom's newsletter essaying discovered in Alice Song's introduction to Year of the Tiger)

28/8/24, 12:15 am - Vishal Kumaraswamy: To treat the web page as ‘the Internet as a foundational experience’

27/8/24, 10:17 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy:

A three-dimensional, green wireframe hand protrudes from a vintage computer monitor, and a human hand interacts with it by touching its fingertips, causing a visual effect of multicolored lines emanating from the point of contact.

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

29/8/24, 10:29 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy:

Video description:A looping cartoon animation of an arrow marked ‘INFORMATION’ beaming rays towards a person’s brain.

28/8/24, 12:16 am - Vishal Kumaraswamy: I like that they’re not directly interlinked

14/8/24, 6:47 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: some say it’s in California, others say it maybe in Patagonia

1/9/24, 3:42 pm - Nithya: Here:

1/9/24, 5:02 pm - Nithya: Healing the self

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, 3:37 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

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

28/8/24, 12:16 am - Vishal Kumaraswamy: But can be parallel lines

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

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

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?

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

19/9/24, 6:40 pm - Nithya:

1/9/24, 3:09 pm - Nithya: Medea, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1969)

Screenshot from the movie Medea (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969). A woman in a field with the caption "Where must I stand to hear your voice?"

29/8/24, 10:13 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: left turn

1/9/24, 5:05 pm - Nithya: in a mystical sense

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, 10:13 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: I think a lot about the surfaces of engagement, and the web as a museum of surfaces

19/9/24, 7:10 pm - Nithya:

19/9/24, 6:46 pm - Nithya:

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

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

28/8/24, 12:15 am - Vishal Kumaraswamy: it’s like two divergent strands of thought

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

29/8/24, 10:10 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: but also that perceiving a voice

29/8/24, 10:14 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: A crystallised naturalization of the technologies of production of subjects

27/8/24, 10:06 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: that this form of mourning/grieving/honouring was wrong

1/9/24, 3:47 pm - Nithya:

The computer tree shows the evolution of electronic digital computers. The automatic computing and data processing industry is a direct outgrowth of research, sponsored by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, which produced the ENIAC, the world's first electronic digital computer. This industry has grown to a multi-billion dollar activity that has penetrated every profession and trade in government, business, industry, and education. In the accompanying graphical representation of the computer tree the trunk rests on the ENIAC. The serial computers, represented by EDVAC, and the parallel computers, represented by the ORDVAC, are shown as separate limbs. This separation tends to distinguish the business computers on the left limb from the scientific computers on the right limb. The computers which were developed specifically to meet military needs are shown on the center limb. Manufacturers have entered the electronic computer field at different times, shown as various branches. Only university and government sponsored computers are shown along the limbs. The radial distance from the ENIAC is an approximate indication of the year each computer was developed, constructed, or placed in operation.

1/9/24, 5:01 pm - Nithya: Protecting one from harm's way

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

19/9/24, 7:03 pm - Nithya:

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’

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, 10:16 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy:

14/8/24, 6:51 pm - Nithya:

A grey and white cat with green eyes is lying inside an open folder on a desk, looking directly at the camera. The background shows a computer monitor with an unclear image on the screen and some items scattered around the desk. The image includes overlaid text in meme-style font that reads ‘IM IN UR FOLDUR KERUPTIN YR FILEZ'".

27/8/24, 10:18 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy: and that is a foundational museum of digital experience for me

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

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

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

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

29/8/24, 9:59 pm - Vishal Kumaraswamy:

Screenshot of white text on a black background: "I'm considering, well, what am I saying to you?" he says. "Why should it matter? Why should you listen?” Carmichael wants to put on a good show because he believes performance is a revelation. When he was three years old, his mother worked as an usher at a church in North Carolina. After the services, Carmichael would ask her to hold him up to the microphone so he could hear his voice on the loudspeaker. “I think your voice being amplified,” he says, “is a miracle."
Acknowledgement of Country
Arts House, Campbelltown Arts Centre and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands we live and work on, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung, Dharawal, and Whadjuk Noongar peoples. We extend our respects to their Elders past and present. We extend this acknowledgment to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander audiences and communities, and First Nations peoples globally.