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A Sharp, Lingering Underneath; or, Od(d)ontology
With contributions from Big Fat Bao, Kunal Lokhande, and Tabitha Percy
A Sharp, Lingering Underneath; or, Od(d)ontology expands on a curious interface of two kinds of extraction at the cusp of the industrial revolution: that of the earth, with accelerated extraction predicated on logics of capitalism, and the extraction of the wisdom tooth. This interface, with the tooth as its fulcrum, allows for tracing multiple unravelings and speculations around technological emergences, image and imaginary in the age of the dig, material surpluses, and the underground.
In this zeitgeist, the Dalit body, relegated to a metaphorical Underground through Brahma’s body within Brahmanical cosmogyny, returns to the Underground in a literal sense, as the mine worker.
Precision and speed become necessary qualia. Extraction becomes artistic method. Terrifying volumes that linger underneath the earth and/or our jaw present themselves as sharp, everyday maladies. Odontology and Odd Ontologies coalesce into one another, forming a techno-extractivist nightmare.
Taking the sharp lingering underneath as a symptom, me and my anti-caste avarna collaborators embarked on speculative exercises on how to rid ourselves off of it, how to invert the topological violence of the caste order as it gets reduplicated within the condition, and how to deflate the metaphorology of the dig that has come to govern the totality of our being. What follows is a meditation on numerous technological interfaces: the scientific diagram, the user manual, the architectural 3D rendering of space, the first person shooter game, and the colouring book- to plot escape routes and opaque preconditions.
Architectures of the Inside Out
3D Architectural video on loop
What could an architectural motion that proceeds from the inside outward look like, instead of from the outside to in, as is the norm? What could a spatial organization that emulates the wisdom tooth be?
Architect-artist Tabitha Percy and I tried to come up with artistic strategies to visualise the same. The mise en abyme like 3D rendered video is a byproduct of such thinking.
Hollow Earth Colouring Book
Colouring Book
A colouring book which juxtaposes the topological speculations of the Hollow Earth theory, and a theory of the residual within the digital image that I developed a decade ago.
Scopic-Vision-Violence-Venn-Diagram
Archival Images, Cyanotypes on Paper
Collected from a vast range of sources between the 17th and 19th Century, and including journals, research papers, treatises on the ‘Hollow Earth’ theory, and theoretical discussions around the usage of the scientific diagram itself. These collages trace a paradigm shift where the scientific diagram moves from being an illustration of how the natural order works to creation of tools that can render the natural world transparent and extractible. This genealogy is where the birth of the ‘scopic vision’ occurs, wherein, it becomes impossible to look at anything scientifically, without attuning the subject away from its opaque, irreducible state.
The collages are rendered out as cyanotype prints, which were central to making rapid reduplicability a factor in the propagation of the blueprint.
Cyanotype prints were produced with assistance from Sidhartha SN.
Scrolled so far you have reached the underground
Looped text on LED ticker board
scrolled so far you have reached the underground. scrolled so far you have reached the underground.
The Undig Machine part I
Foldable User’s Manual
What could an Undig machine look like? How would it interface with real world technicity?
Me and Bao, a graphic designer, initiated a sprawling conversation around the nature of the user manual, how it is a unique artifact of consumerist economy, how it promises access and provides alienation, how it is an introductory text to scientific language.
We developed a product manual for one undig machine, the Rexhume Ch45m. What does it do? How does it work?
Peruse the manual and find out!
The Undig Machine part II
Game Design Sketches, Simulated Gaming Experience
Game designer Kunal Lokhande and I have started building a “first person shooter” game in which ‘anti-weapons’ collapse space and undig the generated map instead of expanding into it. The first person shooter is an ultra-modern, near-perfect rendition of ‘scopic vision’ that begins with the cyanotypes. What we wish to build are instruments that fill the in-game space, instead of carving a (metaphorical, but also often literal) tunnel within it. Conceiving these anti-weapons entailed material research into what the ‘ammo’ of each such instrument may look like. What materials congeal quickly and produce immense volume, but can also be carried as a viable, mobile tool? What available extractionist science do we have ready at hand, to provide lucid reversal?
The user experience we have created features sketches, a frame narrative, and three ‘anti-weapons’ that aid in the undig.
