The Ancestral Pantheon of Telematic Egos

Let’s talk about images.

If you look at the coupled-frame sTRIP beside this text, the first thing you’ll notice is some kind of remote symmetry, maybe even continuity. The man in the little monitor on the left is Professor Ashoke kr. Datta, one of the earliest voices of India’s computer engineering (back in the 50s!) and father of Anirban Datta – who directed the documentary which the shot belongs to, In for Motion On the right-hand monitor (apparently a regular TV) we have Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who turned to philosophical alchemy after discovering and synthesizing LSD in 1943; this shot belongs to Gambling, Gods and LSD by Peter Mettler, one of the Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Top 10.

Both of the talking-head, split-screen windows are surrounded by what we can define as emerging inner-structural elements. These components are messy and discrete on the left, arranged and serial on the right: their only (but crucial) shared function is the possibility to be endlessly rearranged, recombined and thus rediscovered as a whole. The professor’s cathodic alter-ego is overlooking a bunch of hard-drives and integrated circuits; alphabetical components of his job and of all digitally-derived technologies - including the video camera used to create this very image. The psychedelic master’s simulacrum is instead standing close to a grid of trembling post-its; each one a film’s topic note, so that the group becomes a metaphor for the director’s stream of consciousness or the editor’s choices - as well as a reference to the analogical device involved in this case, the 35mm celluloid.

Now, let’s go a little bit deeper into our two mirrored sources.

In for Motion is a short, evocative, essay-like documentary; an attempt to analyze contemporary India, where Information Technologies are spreading quicker than anywhere else in Asia. Shifting virtual identities, online poetry collectives and chat-based relationships are on the one side, call centre-oriented businesses and de-located software companies - using qualified but very cheap local labourers - on the other. Everything appears so new, pervasive and a bit unusual for a country that almost completely skipped the Industrial Revolution. But we should try to raise the veil and look further (as the Hindu doctrine also suggests). What if the so called third-eye, the circle of karma and the multiple arms of Kalì (just to quote some of the most common stereotypes related to Indian religiosity) were stunning telematical prophecies of webcams, hypertextual interfaces and multi-tasking? After all, nothing is closer to the state of our 2.0 days (real-time interactivity, millions of brains simultaneously cooperating on an intangible platform) than the concept of Brahman (literally “the immanent and transcendent reality which is the Divine Ground of all Matter and to which all the Souls belong”).

“Man is a pleasure-seeking machine”, states a heroin-addict in God, Gambling and LSD. From Las Vegas zombie-players to fanatic evangelists in a forgotten American airport, Mettler’s film is a 3 hour travelogue, desperately searching for divinity and/or happiness in the ordinary alienation of the western society. Then, just before the unexpected final, here’s the twist: a relaxed brainstorming in the peaceful Switzerland, homeland of the director and of the hallucinogen’s father - reflecting on chemistry and joy while being reflected himself by a screen. In the final chapter, smiling, exotic people worship multilayered divinities deeply rooted in nature. We’re in India, where you don’t need to go LOOKING FOR something “extra”. After all, you’re a harmonic slice of a breathing universe: you’re simply LOOKING - and the picture contains you, too.

Albert Figurt