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

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 [...]

On Social Viscosities: diagramming the flows of mobile media in India

Sensation and its ecologies get us beyond the pleasure-agency / consumption-docility binary that characterizes radical political thought today. This is simply because sensation is not the synthesis of the dialectic, it is not involved ontologically in dialectics at all. Sensation involves the creative mixing of the virtual and the actual. Deleuze writes, “sensation has no [...]

Urbz Mashup Mumbai

Nul Bazaar for Urbz Mashup: Edward Talkies, Dhobi Talab, Kalbadevi, Mumbai: Be Like Water / Edward Talkies (Kalbadevi, Mumbai)

Memory, Sensation, Duration in Contemporary Media Assemblages in India

I am attempting to think through the implications for media assmeblage analysis of the connection that Bergson makes between the body and duration. This is an excerpt from an article I recently wrote. It may appear in South Asian Culture and History. The main point here for the purposes of this paper, is that Office [...]

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 [...]

Cell phone networks and Ecologies of Sensation

What is the relation between cell phone practice and perception? This is both a deeply cultural issue and a question of the body understood transculturally (but very much historically!). What would it mean to analyze cell phone practice, media pedagogies (institutions, and flow gradients), capitalizations, and value added schemes as a cultural and transcultural phenomenon [...]

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 [...]