Ali Akbar Mehta is a transmedia artist, curator, researcher, and writer, creating immersive and interactive archives on the crossovers of culture, technology, and knowledge. He experiments with new archival logics that depart from institutional and coloniality-driven legacy-archiving, investigating narratives from conflict zones and power structures, and offering countermeasures to everyday experiences of violence, conflict, and trauma.

These archives, as open-source, antifascist, decolonial ‘knowledge systems,’ mirror and challenge contemporary realities to foreground overlooked bodies, data, networks, and ecologies. They generate conceptualizations of how narratives of history, memory, and identity may be mapped to make visible hegemonic power relations and silenced historical materialism. Such archival mappings—drawings, paintings, new media works, net-based projects, poems, essays, theoretical texts, and performances both of bodies and networks—create knowledge systems that outline a vibrant new political public sphere.

His current project purgatory Edit is an archival project shaped as a user-generated montage-based cinematic experience that highlights long-term and deliberate methods through which digital technologies enforce subliminal visual manipulation, sensory overload, data fatigue, psychological reaction, and ideological numbness.