It is a truth now universally acknowledged, not least in recent articles in The Guardian and the BBC that the extinction of plants spells “bad news for all species,” and is being rapidly exacerbated by human destruction of the natural world. According to Dr Rob Salguero-Gómez from the University of Oxford, plants provide us with “food, shade and construction materials,” as well as “‘ecosystem services’ such as carbon fixation, oxygen creation, and even improvement in human mental health through enjoying green spaces.”

With the irreplaceable role of plants in our lives and surroundings, it is no surprise that artists have continually depicted the botanical world for both aesthetic and documentation purposes. Poised between art and science, botanical art has both aesthetic and utilitarian value. In India, this genre is largely associated with the Kampani (Company) school of painting, a naturalistic Indo-European style that became prevalent in the late 18th century when the East India Company sought to document the flora of the country. But depictions of plants go back much further in Indian art history, and were seen “on temple walls, pottery designs, motifs on woven carpets and embroidered textiles, […] illustrated folios from medieval manuscripts of Hindu epics,” and detailed in highly stylised forms in miniature art.

It is not only plants that face extinction. In Marg magazine’s recent issue (December 2018 – March 2019) titled Ars Botanica: The Weight of a Petal, historian and curator Sita Reddy says, “Today, with botanical art disappearing by the archive, and trees, forests or entire ecosystems at the whim of a malicious executive order, it seems more urgent than ever to compile some of these dispersed art historical resources. To refigure the botanical archive.”

While Marg drew attention to the rich, vibrant and largely unacknowledged history of botanical art in India, this essay seeks to explore the work of three contemporary Indian women artists who use plants as a motif, medium and metaphor to comment on issues of both personal and global significance. Belonging to a generation that has been educated in various sciences, the “diversity of interest [of these artists] allows for an exploration of the transcultural through the lens of the sciences, which function in a “universalist” sense wherever science is practiced – even if context favors one direction over another.” Incorporating but looking beyond aspects such as documentation and revival, the artists explore the botanical as an inquiry and a recreation of memories, reminding us of the value of our ecosystems and why we should be concerned about their loss.

In the ‘90s India witnessed a tectonic shift when erstwhile finance minister Manmohan Singh’s liberalization policies transitioned India into a free market economy, with increased foreign direct investment. The percolation of technology seeped through the country’s (primarily urban) landscape, with internet being made publicly available in 1995 (Mint 2015) and 4G in 2010 (Ghosh and Mishra 2015). In this period, the influx of the internet through social networks, websites, online streaming services, and the e-commerce industry revolutionized how we travelled, communicated, shopped, consumed culture, and of course, made art.

This article is a condensation of my written and oral interviews with 11 Indian contemporary artists whose art practices were initiated in the ‘90s. This temporal sub-set of artists aids a sharper study about the “before” and “after”, providing a glimpse into the impact of liberalization on their practices. The scope of my query attempts to understand how the growth of access to information, social media platforms which changed the quality of information shared, rapid developments in technology like film, audio and video projection, affected art practices before and after this internet boom. The essay is not concerned with “technology in art” broadly, but specifically on the impact technology has had on existing art practices of that time.

Aar Paar, which took place simultaneously in Mumbai and Karachi in 2000 and 2002[1], included ten artists from each city who developed single colour works which were exchanged across the two countries via email, to be printed locally and inserted into public spaces (Mulji 2000)

“Our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge”.

— Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”, Environmental Humanities

“But there is another reason why, from the writer’s point of view, it would serve no purpose to approach them in that way: because to treat them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling—which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time”.

— Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement

The recently concluded retrospective on Mrinalini Mukherjee at the Met Breuer has revived dormant debates: Was Mukherjee isolated or cosmopolitan?; Is this elevation of craft to high art, tapestries to sculptures? Scholarship by Tania Guha, Victoria Lynn and Grant Watson has explored how such conceptual dichotomies are ill-suited to understanding Mukherjee’s labour, which reveals a deliberate dialectics of thought and form.

Given the retrospective and the accompanied attention to Mukherjee’s practice has coincided with the articulation of substantive civic concern with climate change—it is tempting to ask if the works present ways of thinking on urgent questions of ecology and the state of our planetary futures. This essay is concerned as much with the formal content of Mukherjee’s art as with the question of what it means to engage with these works amidst a growing public discourse on climate change.

The silver screen—from the liquidated remains of the celluloid of cinema’s past—beckons us to consider the archival form through a slew of concerns that inform related fields of art and conservation. Celluloid film was the original vessel for photography and cinema; a living, breathing medium—one that deteriorates with every viewing.

Celluloid is almost organic through its wear, similar to an aging body. This decay is familiar to us, in how it mirrors the human condition of an omnipresent interplay between life and death, use and futility. Paradoxically, it is decay that determines how we assign the organic. Melting celluloid into silver was a common enough practice in India, since the 60s and 70s, which is telling in how we have valued our filmic, and ultimately, artistic and cultural heritage—from industry to institution.

The traditional form of the archive involves the imposition of overriding structures and systems of classification for organisation and ultimately, knowledge production. The archive seeks to be external to the object-form. However, there is an existential crisis, inextricably linked to the form of the archive; by its very nature the archive is self-defeating to its purpose, as it seeks to document experience(s) of the whole, to represent. French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida posited the archive as fueled and sustained, by the death drive, the Freudian bug that exists within nature and the human psyche, of the destructive drive to return to a state before the fact of birth. Vice versa, the death drive is said to be anarchic and refusing archivisation, inducing forgetfulness, gaps in memory and ultimately, destruction of its own traces—according to Derrida, it “devours it even before producing it on the outside”, a constant tension concurrent.

Derrida says that the consequence of the need for an external for an archive to exist, is “what permits and conditions archivisation” is that we will “never find anything other than what exposes to destruction.” There, the archive only works against itself.

Observed through the finitudes we experience and perceive, creates the archival impulse. Derrida characterised the archival impulse as a “fever” or perhaps more accurately, “feverish”, to express the erratic energy, a compulsivity, that directs itself towards achieving a “completeness”, to command and structure, and ultimately consume, by defining the whole.

Walter Benjamin spoke of a “foreboding” of an age where the impulse to collect only grows expontentially. The digital as form is a priori, in and of itself, an archival form–self-referential in nature. This in itself becomes the ultimate archival form in one sense, where it is alive as a repository and an interpretive space, that film scholar, Ashish Rajadhyaksha posits as the archive.

The digital form is seen as the truly archival image, according to cultural theorist, Okwui Enweazor. The digital file and form is its own archivisation, not relying on an external, i.e. separate from itself. With the fact of digital bootlegging, the digital file constantly undergoes replication and decentralised distribution, from institute/company to a worldwide userbase. The digital file exists in the multiples, against the singular source in analogue, and distribution networks are such that they are difficult to wipe out, being replicated ad infinitum. This becomes an interesting dimension, as it essentially has the capacity to resuscitate lost and endangered film material. Benjamin, in his canonical text “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, emphasises the shift through the reproducible image, as not only technical or indexical, but temporal. This is where I propose the consideration of the digital file as cyborg body—one that corrupts at random and is aligned with the chaos of the inorganic. The digital can be endlessly replicated in theory, not requiring re-production. The almost primitive nature of digital distribution challenges and circumvents established channels of distribution in the “material” aspect, and the very form of the archive itself.

With the digital age, came the subsequent decentralisation of information, and subsequently film, creating networks of peer-to-peer sharing and communities that rallied to archive. This was easier to achieve in the digital form through torrenting, online streaming, peer-to-peer filesharing (remember MediaFire?) and other forms of digital bootlegging and hoarding. The early 2000s to mid-2010s was the era of digital accumulation. This was until the final blow to the global network of web piracy, in 2014, when the PirateBay headquarters, and subsequently other major sites were raided and servers seized.

These forms of dissemination allowed for rich repositories – personal in form – and restricted to thousands of hard drives across the world – a strange digital utopia. Of especially music and film, they served well especially, previously having been bound tightly by the distribution channels. Now through platforms like Mubi and Criterion Channel are now building archives of restored and rare films, for past and contemporary, though again limited by distribution channels and licenses—titles vary from country to country.

Preservation of films in the Indian context shows us a haphazard body of uneven preservation and conservation, where value is not met with the archival impulse. Beyond institutionalisation of our collective cinematic body, beyond internationally recognised directors like Satyajit Ray and Mani Kaul (whose films have been painstakingly restored, but at the same time, original material has faced decay and loss) and Bollywood, how do we keep attempts to preserve and circulate film alive? The Bazaar method of conservation refers to the material, unstructured, unorganised systems of circulation that exist in a decentralised form, which Rajadhyaksha talks about. He mentions the original print of Kannada actor Rajkumar’s first film Bedara Kannappa, that was thought to be lost, but was eventually found being regularly screened at a temple in Old Delhi, with the copy attained from Chor Bazaar. This seemingly antithetical form of conservation, that takes from the un-organised modes of circulation and eventual discard, presents a chaotic, almost anarchic form of consumption outside of the institutional space. These are fugitive responses to national and subsequently global knowledge suprastructures.

The Bazaar Conservation method, as termed by Rajadhyaksha, subverts the singularity of authorial intention in film conservation strategy. As with the expensive process of digitisation, there are constant questions that arise of value and the “canon” in Indian (and to extend, world) cinema, and the parameters to be drawn around what is to be salvaged for future generations and cultural history at large, and what we can “allow” to deteriorate and eventually disappear. The English word “archive” is traced to have been in use from early 17th century onwards, but its verb form has only been dated back to the late 19th century, which could lend an insight into the evolving form of the archive, and our conception of it, from simply meaning “public” or government records. Rajadhyaksha speaks of the archive not only as a repository, but also an “interpreative space”, i.e. a site for the production of knowledge.

The late PK Nair, obsessive film archivist and former director of National Film Archives of India, Pune, shared an anecdote in the documentary film Celluloid Man, of instances where Russian films, celluloid at the time, would be sent to the NFAI in exchange for Indian films the reel cases harbouring secret exchanges between the institutes and countries, a fugitive strategy of conservation, beyond established international (and legal) systems of trade. He would be fondly remembered by students at FTII for the open screenings, where he’d freely show films from the archive. This is commendable in relation to what Rajadhyaksha says about the Bazaar method. Beyond this, he is said to have singlehandedly spearheaded the mission of Indian film conservation at NFAI (to the extent of seemingly disrupting his own private life at times). Such strategies in play produce disruptions to the organising systems of power. In the digital age, the figure of the collector and archivist is shifting—presenting a “chaos of memories” in unorganised collections over several hard drives, as P.P Sneha, digital humanities scholar, writes.

In contrast, “prearchiving” in anticipation, according to Derrida, becomes an archival violence, where overriding structures are imposed, falsely, beforehand. This is opposed to “allowing” the archive to grow “organically”, unorganised. This is where he draws on notions of archival violence. The pre-emptive nature of this imposes an institutional violence in a underlying expectation of hierarchical considerations. The archival problem arises here—where does the outside (of the archive) commence?

The fast-evolving nature of technologies, paired with their past forced obsolescence, made the format of video up until the digital, unreliable. Problems range from preservation of analogue material that already exists, to interpreting, tagging, categorising and allocating other forms of signifiers so as to assure a future of the organised digital archive. Another problem being battled is the exponential increase in storage required for a present that is digitally conscious/self-aware. Archival digital material also needs to be in good condition in order to assure good digital copies that will continue to mark the file(s).

Even with the digital, we lament the quick random deaths of files, vastly different from the wear and tear of the celluloid body, to a erratic, random corruption of files. This chaotic impulse of the digital to destroy itself, so to speak, can be seen in comparison to the preservation of celluloid and other analogue forms of data storage. Digital film also needs constant restoration wherein there lies the problem of expense, again, along with suitable knowledge, skill, and strategies in consignation.

The Getty Research Institute uses a digital preservation software, that generates a “checksum”, which they compare to a fingerprint of a file, or a unique code, where a numerical value is assigned based on the weight of the file, which they intermittently use to compare and generate constantly, to prevent from decay, and restore from a backup copy. Though the backup copy is an infinite archival process as well, backup copies distributed across various servers hints at some hope.

The route to conservation and preservation lies outside of the institutional superstructures of knowledge-to-peer is a radical shift from the global scale of things, where the “local” becomes the antidote.

In May 1942, Japan dropped the first bomb on Imphal, the capital of the then Princely state of Manipur. The second bomb followed within the week. The Allied British campaign against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was bolstered by the military, industrial and financial facilitation provided by colonized India.1 The subcontinent served as a base for American operations in support of China, both Allied Nations as well. The Second World War—which was accompanied by heinous events like the Holocaust, orchestrated famines and the novelty of nuclear weapons in combat—resulted in the defeat of the Axis powers and marked the beginning of the Atomic Age.

While the residents of Imphal were fleeing their homes, refugees from Japanese-conquered Burma and the retreating soldiers of the British Indian Army were streaming through Manipur en route to Dimapur and Silchar, in what comprised the territory of Assam then. Imphal, being on the frontline of the British-colonised India and the Japanese-colonised Burma, found itself in a precarious predicament. It witnessed a surge in construction of airfields and army bases by the Allies who claimed air superiority in the Burma Theater. After the area was completely cut-off by land, the Allies used their privilege to provide supplies to their troops by air for months on end, while the Japanese soldiers stranded in the area gradually perished. The Battle of Imphal and the Battle of Kohima became turning points in the “South-East Asian Theater of World War II” and the campaign against the Allied Forces. The Japanese Army, which had formed a minor alliance with the Azad Hind Fauj or the Indian National Army under Subhash Chandra Bose, planned on conquering the Indian mainland and cutting off the supply route to China. This mission was named “Operation U-Go.” But the relentless monsoon proved to be a hindrance in the replenishment of supplies, forestalling the Japanese attack. The consequent starvation resulted in the Japanese defeat by the British Indian Army. Had the operation succeeded, the Allies would have faced a devastating blow and history would have taken a different route towards the present day.

Ex Natura July – October 2019

In 2010, Rohini Devasher stood atop Mount Saraswati to peer into an infinite cosmos at the Indian Astronomical Observatory in Ladakh. Devasher’s journey to significant astronomical sites was part of her artistic investigation into the world above the stratosphere, and the communities on ground—amateur and expert—that study it. Using varied techniques, artists in Southeast Asia are exploring lifeworlds that lie beyond the naked eye, and simultaneously, engaging with popular ideas of evolution, ecology, and difference.

The early concomitance of art with new technologies in shaping the visual representation of the physical world has been well-documented, from the detailed illustrations of plant cells in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) to Edward Whymper’s engraving of a mountaineering feat in the Ascent of the Rothorn (1871). Art has served a descriptive function, constructing detailed pictorial representations of natural phenomenon that aspired to depict the ‘real’ with utmost accuracy, a narrative function, enforcing the foundations of modernity, science, and progress, and an evidentiary function, reinforcing the factuality of science.

Artists have also turned a critical gaze to this function of recording—questioning the objectivity ascribed to visual representations. Artists practicing in Southeast Asia have used various mediums to explore these developments, and interpret the natural world. Rejecting a dominantly visual apperception, artists are building poly-sensuous experiences that seek to capture the many ways we feel, think, inhabit and relate to the physical world. Performance and new media installation are bringing forth the political and social processes which shape collective beliefs about technological development. Their practices build new material conventions—drawing from elements and phenomenon such as wind, rain, fossil, and fire—and explore processes of birth and decay hidden in deep, geological time, unraveling the structures and forms which shape the physical and the digital world. The rise of robotic and algorithmic art incorporating artificial intelligence, posits the vision of a post-human horizon, where the organic and the machinic morph and mutate into cyborgic/algorithmic art.

For the upcoming issue of Write Art Connect: Ex Natura, we invite submissions that probe what resides in the interstices of art, technology, and science. We understand technology to imply both pre-analogous and digital, to emergent modes, and welcome writings on various lines of enquiry drawing from disciplines across performance, visual, culinary, video, and film arts. Please submit brief outlines not exceeding 200 words to [email protected] latest by 31 May 2019.