Powers of 4

As a child, two hobbies had always remained central to my life: reading encyclopedias and making magic tricks. Magic, on one hand, has always been a subject that fascinated me: books on card tricks, wands, math-a-magic—you name it. That feeling of awe when the prestige of a trick is unveiled, when the magician appears to defy the limits of what is possible in this material realm, is incomparable.

On the other hand, the thick, dense volumes of encyclopedias are what kickstarted my obsession with two threads of lifelong pursuit: troubling problems and the power of human imagination to envision transformative new ways of living and being in this world. Perhaps that’s why I don’t like calling myself anything specific, so as to cage myself to a particular set of problems, a particular path in life, and most dangerously, a particular way of looking at the world.

Now these two threads converge upon a singular point of intersection: the nature of “media,” a fairly confusing term and a common point of contention. It’s hard to define what exactly “media” entails. Even the people at the MIT Media Lab struggle with an exact definition! But that ambiguity regarding the loose borders of media’s definition allows us to play around with our perspective on it.

I take the starting thread of that definition to be the Nyaya Atomic school in Indian Philosophy, which can provide a reasonable perspective on it. The Nyaya categorized five distinct elements:

• Air 🜁, the particulate of microscopic scale
• Water 🜃, the flow of energy in gradients
• Earth 🜄, the territory of habitation
• Fire/Plasma 🜂, the luminance of the cosmos
• Akaasha or Aether ○, the all-pervasive invisible substance that grounds the universe and gives rise to the other elements

I take “Media” to be most similar to this last one, being a literal definition of “that which is in between,” and which in and of itself can be redefined in many forms. Media is the consistent aether of information that acts as the base material of the universe. For now, I think a set of 4 is most sufficient, being simple enough to get started right away as well as comprehensive enough to warrant serious work.

Four lines across four realms:

The original rich-gold matrix provides us with an interesting intersection of four distinct disciplines:

• Art 🜂, the creation of subjective universes
• Science 🜁, the sieving of true order from chaos
• Technology 🜃, the construction of flows of information and energy
• Design 🜄, the mapping of symbolic spaces

These disciplines are time-tested, each with their own specific histories, outlooks, and perspectives on how the world works. Yet as the world looks on to confront hyperscaled crises never seen before in the history of the human species, these silos that the disciplines find themselves in bear a crisis of overspecialization, unable to climb out and look at the world differently when that perspective is needed most.

• Contemporary Art has largely become a bourgeois affair, using words and concepts no one understands except this increasingly tighter network of gallery owners and academicians. The social role of art and artist is now something alien to the general public, caught in a web of increasingly confusing forms of expression
• Publishing Model Science has become prey to the “problem of models”, where social symbols and paradigms have exerted a gravitational pull on scientist’s resistance to new ways of looking at the world. Ideas such as “survival of the fittest” has held evolution, genetics and biology overall back by decades.
• Silicon Valley has not effectively resolved the “innovators dilemma”. Companies struggle to innovate, find new usecases for said technology, or even effectively use their own technology. Speed is largely outpacing rigour, “move fast and break things” has become the norm. Smaller firms are regularly running circle around tech giants.
• Design Thinking is least of all ready for the “wicked problems” of the 21st century, with many of these problems posing serious questions to the validity of its western, individualist consumer model. Design, despite hollow claims of “empathy”, has only widened the gap between the rich and the poor while also feeding into the increasingly predatory tendencies of the existing system.

However, despite the picture being grim, all hope is not lost. Four new disciplines are starting to crystallize, each a culmination of and a counterforce to its parent:

• New Media Art ○:A new form of contemporary art that is a product of our information age. New Media Artists create art that uses various kinds of media to critique existing systems, comment on technology and above all question the current model of contemporary art in our present time.
• Complexity Science ○: Complexity Scientists are at the vanguard of a new shift in the way science has been historically done in western societies, moving from all encompassing universal truths to grey-area models, objective realities to subjective perceptions as well as the focus of scientific enterprise on the new questions of networks, scale and self-organization that life on Earth poses to human understanding.
• Creative Technology ○: Creative technologists work on building rough proof-of-concept demos intended to showcase the potential of a new form of technology/media. In doing so, creative technologists shift their focus away from the talk and emphasize a culture of making things that prove their results.
• Computational Designers ○: Computational designers, being the offspring of the discipline of architecture that has long since been understood to be a wicked problem, now possess the power to tackle new interfaces, sectors and affordances that previous generations of designers were incapable of tackling. With AI, Xr and sensors being regular tools in their toolboxes, computational designers are a living embodiment of the new weapons we possess to tackle humanity’s most pressing issues.

As someone who ponders these developments, I believe certain questions are worth asking and investigating:

• Question 1: “What constitutes an Indian media theory and practice?”
• Question 2: “What does a postcapitalist media theory and practice entail?”
• Question 3: “How can media inspire new ways of thinking and doing?”
• Question 4: “How can the four disciplines learn from each other?”

Question 1: “What constitutes an indigenous media theory and practice?”

Modern India, like most of its brethren in the global south, is a society tantalized by its own spell, because it repeatedly emphasizes the richness of a culture it scarcely cares to understand, and additionally bears little resemblance to. There’s a lot of very convincing evidence that ancient India across all its social classes was a completely different society, and although fragments of that thinking remain, it's now overcome by multiple cultural hangovers, mostly the influence of British Victorian Era sentiments as well as modern American Neoliberal capitalism. This is a consequence of Colonialism, where the colonial subject has been dispossed of their unique persepctives to be replaced with that of the colonial master's.

As a designer, I’ve found the idea of “Indian design” strange, because almost all practices, references, and ideas are 1:1 copies of the Western model, a model whose cracks are beginning to show in recent years. Therefore, the idea of an “Indian media theory” to me proves to be of great interest, for in recent years I’ve found that certain aspects of this lost Indian understanding of existence have proven immensely useful to my own practice. If it can be useful to me, it can be useful to others as well. Doing so, however, requires that a 'theory of indigenous media practice' be developed, whereby dispossessed minorities can begin the project of escaping the black hole of the "culture industry"

The biggest problem with understanding neo-colonialism today is that unlike the European era of subjugated peoples in Asia, Latin America and Africa, neocolonialism rides the tail of capitalism, operating at multiple scales of systemic manipulation, whereby indigenous perspective is stripped away by the subject's own consent and desire through the power of media. Counterforce cannot be established by insidious "decolonization" practices whereby the oppressor class seeks to escape the crisis they themselves created by tapping into the histories of their subjects, but through through the means of "indegenization", whereby manufactured subjects break free from their programming through their historical practices and 'rewild' their spaces. The neocolonial project has always been a universal story throughout history, where the "children of light" try to enslave and liberate (read: subjugate) the "offspring of darkness". That is a story that must be opposed and dismantled at every scale at which it occurs.

How does a minority retain its humanity? How does a minority break their shackles of thought, imposed via the control of information by shadow neocolonial actors?

Question 2:“What does a postcapitalist media theory and practice entail?”

It’s no surprise that the greatest achievements of all four disciplines preceded the capitalist condition, except for design. We have more people working in an ever connected manner with access to information than ever before, yet somehow the state of decay in art, science, design and technology is obvious. Even more important is the fact that capitalism is directly opposed to the sustenance of spaceship earth, and considering the 2020 pandemic, it’s pretty obvious who is going to win that battle. The contributions of philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Deleuze+Guattari, Mark Fisher, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Serres, Georges Bataille and more build towards a rigorous understanding of our society in this new age, and as a result they form a crucial resource to informing the four disciplines towards adaptation. Critiquing our systems at a distance from capitalism allows us to respond to important questions in a far more objective, effective sense.

My time in college was spent with a deep sense of frustration and social alienation. Frustration I could not put into words, frustration of being unable to relate to a social situation. And how could I relate?

How could I relate to getting a premier internship baselessly because your dad had a friend there, when I was scrounging for any internship that aligned with my desire to follow my dreams?

How could I relate to you purchasing a macbook, ipad pro and new iphone all in the span of mere months, when I struggled working a 996 with no days off just to afford a 60k laptop?

How could I relate to you partying in the bourgeois dancefloors of high end clubs, booking 900 rupees cabs to get back, when I was praying for a bus at 11 pm in the night to get back home from my research internship, something I had to do to fund my graduate school education?

How could I relate to that simple sense of security you had, because your parents could drop another 45,00,000 like it was nothing to send you to another country, when mine had to sell ancestral land to pay for a meager step forward for my dreams, and nothing left for it?

How could I relate to the fact that you could afford the many soothing substances and sponsored therapists to comfort your many inner wounds, when I was bleeding out mentally with no recourse? I couldn’t even afford to get the help I needed.

How could I relate to the many parties, club nights and roadtrips you could take, shelling out 20-40k at a single section, when I was taking up multiple internships and jobs in college, all for a shot at some sense of security post 4 years culiminating in physical and mental burnout?

No. I can’t relate. And honestly, seeing the difference between the working class and the 1%, I really don’t want to either.

I was frustrated by years of struggle, unable to fully digest the implications of my socioeconomic class. My education only proved to me that the performative moral antics and politics of upperclass liberals, based in an understanding out of touch with reality, cannot produce anything truly transformative: because doing so threatens the limit of capital upon which their luxuries and flights of fancy rest. I am not a perfect person, but the recontextualization of my background proves the scope for real transformative reform of this neoliberal paradigm, outside of which lies true societal progress for all those who struggle today.

Question 3. :“How can media inspire new ways of thinking and doing?”

“We need reasons to believe in this world”, writes Gilles Deleuze in his book Desert Islands. Yet the modern world seems to be empty of these reasons, disenchanted, in fact, of the childlike state of wonder we were born into. A certain image of what it means to be an artist, scientist, technologist and designer has taken parasitic hold, now proving to be incredibly dangerous to the progress of these disciplines. But if media can make us doomscroll, then media can also bring us enlightenment. This a proposition put forth by Gene Youngblood in "Expanded Cinema", whereby Chardin's Noosphere brings artists ( who he claims to be a design scientist) the possibility to achieve new heights of cultural and spiritual emancipation. How may we find, and become, these reasons to believe in this world? How do we break from the hegemony of the past in order to saturate the potential of our future? How do we build a foundation for an Earth and People yet to come?

Question 4. :“How can the four disciplines learn from each other?”

Foucault has gone to great lengths to make us understand that the boundaries between disciplines is largely an illusion, and history has proven him right. A few examples:

1. Generative design has largely been taken from Engineering research.
2. The inspiration to detect cancer cells with dye came from textile design
3. Houdini, a 3d art software, was actually the work of scientific research in dynamic fluid systems.
4. Scientists at TidMarsh use new media art tools like Unity and Unreal Engine to create digital twins of ecosystems, enabling new shifts in ecological monitoring and preservation

Four types, four interfaces, four scales of transformation:

Picking the correct problems is more important than getting the right answer, which is why I’ve narrowed my lifelong search to four critical sites where action is necessary:

• Immersive Media 🜂: Media that envelop us sensorially and interact with us spatially. XR (augmented and virtual reality), spatial audio, responsive environments, ubiquitous computing are all examples of immersive media. The radical spiritual potential of immersive media is of deep interest, particularly it's propensity to induce cosmic cognitive affects of planetary scale.
• Synthetic Media 🜄: : Media that are generated by intelligent computer processes such as ML and AI are also of interest. Deepfakes, AI music, Generative design in architecture and computational protein/ nanomaterial design are all examples of “synthetic media”. I like using this word because not only does it sound cooler and is more conceptually and representatively accurate, but also because I absolutely despise the word “genAI”
• Object-Oriented Media 🜁: This is my spin on “object based media”, and I choose to define it as the “the application of computational properties and procedures such as object oriented programming to the various forms of media in our lives”. Computer music, Shader writing, interactive narratives (Black Mirror’s “bandersnatch”episode) and Synthetic biology (the creation of new types of organisms via genetic manipulation) all count as object oriented media. The idea that computers can build things by just assembling tiny bits and pieces repeatedly in new directions is very profound, especially when we apply those ideas to media like image, music, video and new materials themselves.
• Moist Media 🜃: Roy Ascott’s 1 pager is the only definition of moist media that I have, and probably the only one I need. Moist media is defined as the intersection of biological, silicate and digital media, whereby living structures such as fungi, cell tissue and permacultures may be interacted with via electronic and digital means. Synthetic biology is already a moist media discipline and is considerably easier for computer scientists/embedded systems engineers to pick up than biologists themselves. In fact, one of the most basic tasks for anyone attempting to build synthetic organisms is to build a simple oscillator and pulse gate via genetic circuits

We can also view these media in terms of scale (Individual 🜃, Societal 🜄, Microscopic 🜁, Macrocosmic 🜂) and interfacing (Visual 🜄, Auditory 🜂, Haptic 🜁, Neural 🜃). In doing so, the scope of the kind of work we can do with said media broadens massively outside narrow commerical, especially in terms of how we can transform the ways we as a species think as well as the ways we make.

All of this is from the perspective of an amateur, who may be recognized by certain elements as “overstepping his bounds.” To them, I will quote a line from one of Felix Guattari’s essays:

“To follow so many speakers on the theme of society, the responsibility of individuals, militants, groups and so on creates a certain inhibition. It is a minefield, with questioners hidden in fortified dugouts waiting to attack you: What right has he to speak? What business is it of his? What is he getting at?
And professional academics are there too, to recall you to modesty, and systematically to restrict any approach to these problems that is remotely ambitious”

There will always be critics who dog on you for asking the right questions, because that is how their power based in the current order of things is maintained. Many a time I’ve picked the wrong fight and wrong hill to die on, but this time, with a wiser, calmer understanding of my place in the world, I believe that though I'm still stumbling in my path of the pursuit of knowledge, I’m finally starting to ask the right questions.