Kaushal Sapre
Cobra Coil/Disorientation Diagram, 5th May 2014/1993/1964/DeepTime
Many years ago, I visited a place called Usgalimal in the western ghats of India in order to see the pre-historic petroglyphs discovered here in 1993. These rock carvings have been dated to around 6000-8000 years ago, belonging to the mesolithic-to-neolithic turn in the subcontinent, a period which according to archeologists marks the tail-end of a slow and eventful shift from a nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life to an agrarian milieu. After a fateful encounter with a sunbathing king cobra who ceremoniously moved along to let us pass further inside the tropical forest, we arrived at a rusty weathered signpost put up by the Archeological Survey of India to mark the site. On a red laterite riverbed that gets submerged in the Kushawati waters every monsoon, there are about a hundred carved inscriptions — images of humans, dogs, bisons and other animals, one depicting the ribcage and innards of a bull, one of a mother and a child connected by an umbilical cord. But the one that struck me with the most force and lodged itself in my memory, was one of the few unrecognizable carvings on the riverbed. It was almost circular in shape but for an opening on one end, and almost five feet in diameter, so that one could comfortably curl up and lay down upon it. The red laterite stone was meticulously carved with precision tools of the time. The circular boundary folded in upon itself in undulating concentric spirals that seemed to delineate an inward path towards a center that ended in a lopsided question mark. The grooves of the spiral grew slightly wider as they grew inward, almost giving an impression of a multi-limbed figure at its center. Others disagreed. Was it depicting an astronomical phenomenon, or perhaps a whirlpool observed in the water, or a coiling serpent, or a peacock spreading its feathers to make a giant fan?
A few months later to my amazement, the same figure hurtled towards me from the cover page of a book of short stories by the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges. The particular edition was published in the United States in 1964, and it seemed to have no plausible connection with the mysterious abstract form I had encountered on the riverbed a few months ago. But it was beyond doubt that they were both the same thing. Seeing it in black and white on the familiar computer screen immediately made it so much easier to recognize it for what it really was. Like an old friend it brought back memories of afternoons spent carefully tracing lines on paper trying to find the right path through the mazes printed on the back pages of newspapers. It was a labyrinth.
After that I started seeing labyrinths everywhere…
The indeterminacy between words and things, meaning and matter, and their relationship with memory and its exteriorisation is at the core of the Usgalimal artefact. The ancient labyrinthine form carved on the riverbed could be more productively read not as a mimetic representational object, but one whose meaning is embedded in its technical relationship with its world — as a symbol to trap spirits, a diagram of force fields, a battle formation, a disorientation machine, a mnemonic device, a ritual totem or an apparatus of magic. Yuk Hui would call such objects cosmotechnical, in the sense that they mediate the unification of the cosmic order and the moral order of a milieu through technical activity, whether craftmaking or artmaking. What kind of morality, which and whose cosmos, and how to unite them vary from one culture to another according to different dynamics, and in turn produce different conceptions of natural and unnatural, human and non-human, sacred and profane. In a civilisational sense, there hasn’t been one or two technics[1], but many cosmotechnics. The technological rupture of western modernity produces a particular conception of ‘nature’ as a standing reserve that is always available for measurement, extraction and optimisation. The Indian caste system can be situated within another cosmotechnics premised on a hierarchy of purity that differentially distributes the quality of being more or less than ‘human’. It would be fair to speculate that the Usgalimal inscriptions operate through a cosmotechnics of a third kind, whose distinctive logic might rest upon an immanent choreography of forces of river currents, stone, season, memory, spirit and orientation, and could be enacted through various technics of carving, walking, gathering, trapping, tracing, that bind movement to landscape and landscape to memory.
We are in the midst of a clash of cosmotechnics. From this dimension we can make claims over the stakes of contemporary artistic practices on life. We can argue for thinking as a materially oriented practice mediated through technical activity and recover the question of ethics that is embedded in all technical decisions. We can unearth the intimate relation between aesthetic, philosophical and technological thinking, and we can invent artistic practices that are not premised on representing something that already exists, but to act in the world, and to bring into a relation of proximity that which is otherwise kept far away.
Breathless Bird/Unknown Unknowns, 1657/1927/2019
The 1768 oil painting by Joseph Wright titled ‘An Experiment of a Bird in an Air Pump’ depicts a ‘natural philosopher’ performing one of Robert Boyle’s air pump experiments for an audience of mostly upper class onlookers. It is a highly theatrical composition, and Wright uses many techniques to depict the scientific subject of his work that were formerly reserved for religious scenography. The wild haired scientist towers over a lone bird trapped in a bulbous glass vessel. Wearing a dishevelled nightgown and an expression of reverie, he slowly removes the air from the apparatus with a vacuum pump. The objective of the experiment is to prove the reliance on air for the survival of living creatures, and the brutality of the conclusion seems to have left the audience in varied states of shock, disbelief and dismay that are amplified by the dramatic light of the lone candle lighting the scene. Some turn away, while others bear witness with stoic expressions. Light has a specific function in this composition — that of illumination of knowledge, or Enlightenment. The scientist’s gaze is dispassionate. He is not even observing the bird, but instead looks directly at us, the viewer outside the plane of the canvas. The painting stages a fundamental tenet about the nature of modern scientific knowledge — that it relies on technics that construct strict conditions of separation in order to produce phenomena as ‘objective’. With the advent of quantum mechanics in the early 20th Century, we reached a limit point of this construction, where the nature and arrangement of technics involved in setting up the experiment are themselves implicated in the kinds of conclusions that are obtained through them.
Quantum physics developed through a series of disagreements over the true ontological nature of light — not as a signifier for knowing, but as an enigma in itself. The so called ‘dual nature of light’, the fact that it manifests particle-like characteristics in one set of experimental conditions and wave-like characteristics in other circumstances, and the fact that the same kind of indeterminacy can be observed in matter as well, forces us to confront fundamental assumptions, such as the conditions of possibility of objectivity, the nature of measurement, the nature of nature and the relationship between discursive practices and the material world. In quantum physics, ‘coherence’ refers to the potential of phenomena to interfere with each other to produce quantum behaviour. That is, the state in which the wave-like properties of so-called particles manifest themselves. Quantum experiments try to produce conditions of coherence by denoising or incrementally excluding the world in order to make the system calculable in quantum terms. One may hear a conversation in a quantum optics lab about ‘preparing the light’ — stabilising it’s frequency and polarisation, eliminating random phase fluctuations and steering laser beams through precise paths made up of labyrinthine optical fibers. There may be concern about regulation of extreme temperatures, isolation of the apparatus from miniscule physical vibration and stray electromagnetic fields and the production of near-perfect vacuums. In the lab, taking a measurement with the least amount of disturbance to the system is often spoken of as an art. Objectivity is dynamically constructed as the result of what Karen Barad calls an ‘agential cut’ — a set of temporary localised boundary conditions that stabilise certain relations as measurable, nameable and knowable, while excluding others from the field of observation. The stakes of such cuts exceed the laboratory, as the boundaries they enact participate in the material reconfiguration of worlds. The task for the artistic experiment is to enact the agential cut in ways that could allow us to apprehend a plurality of coherences, treating them as the generative intrusion of a world that refuses isolation.
A key idea that would inform this work is the notion of ‘this-worldliness’. By ‘this-worldliness’, I wish to signal a particular outlook that is oriented towards the lived, material, relational conditions of this world. It argues for taking this world seriously, and proposes attention towards ordinary material life, infrastructure, embodiment and ecology. In that sense, the overall orientation of this proposition is a ‘mundane’ cosmotechnics, where mundane[2] could be understood as ‘belonging to this world’, along with all its inflections of banality and ordinariness. It refuses to apprehend quantum phenomena as abstract or imperceptible, but rather is interested in encountering a world that is always already profoundly strange and intimate at the same time. It is interested in how cosmic background radiation is detected in cathode ray television sets; or the fact that everyday connectivity is contingent upon the bending and diffraction of electromagnetic waves transmitted by WiFi routers through congested architectures of the city; or that weird interference patterns emerge between a cellphone tower and mobile phones on the street during a public protest. It apprehends aluminium mosquito nets as accidental Faraday cages, and optical fiber cables discarded by tethered drones in war zones as material for birds to build nests. A particular technique popular in low network coverage regions of mid-2000s India consisted of throwing a mobile phone (usually the indestructible Nokia 3310) high up in the air in order for it to catch a signal and transmit a message to a beloved. One can find resonances of this activity with the observation Gilbert Simondon makes in relation to TV antennae — ‘…it seems to represent a gesture of sorts, an almost magical power of intentionality, a contemporary form of magic. In this encounter between the highest place and the nodal point of transmission of hyper frequencies, there is a sort of ‘co-naturality’ between the human network and the natural geography of the region.’[3]
Understanding the emergent behaviour of many-body systems is one of the outstanding problems of modern science. It is often impossible to predict the state of systems composed of multiple bodies because their collective dynamics produce unforeseeable patterns and forms of organisation. Simple interactions between individual particles may quickly compound into incalculable complexity at scale. A system may spontaneously reorder itself; or collapse; a body may flicker across multiple possible positions; an ‘I’ may inhabit many ‘We’s; a relation may hold or slowly fade away; small forces may deliriate large systems. The real question at stake is a dispositional one: how to approach indeterminacy in a non-paranoid way.
Epilogue/Collapse
The seminal Indian modernist artist Jyoti Bhatt, himself a driver of milieus and a keen lore-keeper of artistic chatter, narrates a story that he claims to have helped him understand the fundamental concepts of semiotics. A young man goes to a priest to seek eternal knowledge. The irate priest keeps avoiding him, giving excuses and injunctions. This goes on for many days, until finally the priest hurls a stone at the young man and utters some curses to ward him off. We don’t know why the priest is so vile and inhospitable, perhaps it is that he is protective of some secret knowledge or that he is only trying to hide his own ignorance, or perhaps something else. In any case, the young man takes the stone that was hurled at him and starts worshipping it, using the curses that were hurled at him as chants. Eventually, he attains enlightenment. When the priest hears this news he is shocked, and runs along to meet the young man and ask him how he did it. The young man laughs and replies, “With your words and things!”
I propose that the story carries more to it than a lesson on the arbitrariness of signification processes. Rather, it is important to investigate precisely the cosmotechnics of curses and stones in order to apprehend the kind of knowledge that otherwise escapes priests.
[1] Technics here have to be defined in a wide yet precise sense — not as a collection of tools, but as relations. Technics are processes of binding to, capturing, stabilising and redirecting various kinds of forces, whether physical, biological, social or symbolic. Unlike the narrower term technology, which usually points to machines or devices with instrumentally defined functions, technics is not primarily about objects. Rather it is about different kinds of couplings that implicate bodies, procedures, gestures, instruments, infrastructures into a shared order. For Bernard Steigler, technics are exteriorisation of memory onto material surfaces. This ‘technical memory’ is an aid to forgetting, since it allows for knowledge to be preserved in the form of different materialities and modes of inscription. Consequentially, what appears as interior thought or culture is never self-grounding but always already scaffolded by these exteriorised supports.
[2] From Latin mundus, meaning world.
[3] Gilbert Simondon, “Entretien sur la méchanologie,” Revue de synthèse, vol. 130/6, no. 1 (2009), pp. 103–32, here p. 111.
Key References
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Babu, Roshni. “Philosophy of Technology in India: Reinventing Cosmotechnical Materialisms.” Technophany: A Journal for Philosophy and Technology 3, no. 1: 1–24, 2024.
Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016.
Hui, Yuk. Art and Cosmotechnics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Maharaj, Sarat. “Unfinishable Sketch of ‘An Unknown Object in 4D’: Scenes of Artistic Research.” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2, no. 2, 2009.
Majaca, Antonia, and Luciana Parisi. “The Incomputable and Instrumental Possibility.” e-flux Journal, no. 77, November 2016.
Malatsie, Kabelo, and Lantian Xie, eds. Matter Mattering Matters: A Scienticity Reader. Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2025.
Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004.
Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2017. Originally published 1958. Stiegler, Bernard. “Technical Decision.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 16, no. 4 (2011): 1–11.