Monstrosity and Ontology

Monstrosity problematizes becoming. Monsters have been within me and my ecologies for so long, as an immigrant child learning English in Flushing, New York, in my filmi dreams co-evolving with the pirated Hindi and Bengali VHS library spawned by my mother’s VCR, in the desiring conjunctions of friends and lovers, in the improvised fairytales between [...]

Biopower and Marketing

“Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, capturing [added by the authors], communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.” Dhruv Grewal and Michael Levy, Marketing (London: McGraw-Hill, 2008) i Let us begin with a refrain developed in [...]

The Value of Affect: Perception and Media in India today

reticulation 9.6 copy Abstract: This essay aims to diagram the set of connectivities (or “system of relations”) developing in business outsourcing affective, communicative labor and the value-adding digital image in contemporary Hindi-Urdu cinema. What emerges is a resonant set of nested temporalities constituting a new media assemblage. Throughout, I draw on a set of analyses [...]

Distributed Networks: On Security, Terror, Mobility and Other Sensations

This lecture is based on research conducted in Delhi-NCR and Mumbai on mobile phone cultures over the past nine months. This research has focused on changing patterns of use emerging from shifts in relations of power between government, network providers, content producers, value added companies, and communities of active users across urban and rural space. [...]

Mumbai photos

Udaipur, Bangalore, Mumbai photos

More Composite Photos

This video is a montage of the images with their digital “originals.” I think the video helps defetishize the images, that is it makes the compositing processes a little more palpable. Changing the level of detail changes the sharpness of the color transitions. The processes involved in perception traversing these gradients is what I have [...]

Composite Photos

These photos seem to me to have come together quite by chance, but then they also emerged from patterns of behavior and forms of style, against the backdrop of flows of people, traffic, capital, information. In India today these patterns are emerging through a new ecology of sensation. But I make no claim for these [...]

This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present.

But is simultaneity presence? Situating the event of becoming in the experience, perception, and volatility of simultaneous co-functioning (heterochrony), simultaneity eludes, exceeds the present.

Burn Completely

The semester is over. I’m burnt out, but not completely. I’ve tried to present to my students this semester a pragmatics of media assemblages (in an undergrad and grad course called Introduction to Media Assemblage Theory). Not what it means, but what one can do in and through media. What we are becoming through media, [...]