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 [...]

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 [...]

The Value-Added Image: Media Assemblages as Ecologies of Sensation

It is not right to say that the cinematographic image is in the present. What is in the present is what the image ‘represents’, but not the image itself, which, in cinema as in painting, is never to be confused with what it represents. The image itself is the system of the relationships between its [...]

Race and Colorism in Bollywood

Delanda talks movingly, yes movingly–what to do about Delanda’s style? there must be an untimely experience here as well–of the virtual; he writes, “The modelling process begins with a choice of manifold to use as a state space. Then from experimental observations of a system’s changes in time, that is, from actual series of states [...]

Toward a History of Media Assemblages

Let’s begin with Helen! What is a history of media assemblages/ecologies?  Take the example of race and colorism in Hindi-Urdu Cinema. This is a draft of a paper I delivered at the Duke University Public Policy Institute in a “Work in Progress” conference held jointly with UNC.               The analysis of cinema becoming media suggests to [...]