Belief/Broken Numbers

By Anant Saraf, 2024

Could noisy images be showing us phantoms that we cannot yet explain?

This work originates from the examination of a young artist's relationship to home, religion, technology, and the South Asian belief that these are all closely connected and, even sacred.

Here, photographic noise- created 'organically' by increasing a camera's ISO, or sensitivity to light- is interpreted through the lens of techno-animism. This follows from the beliefs that God is omnipresent, all beings and things are interconnected and technology cannot be separated from the human experience. In each image, photographic exposure becomes a measure of knowing, where overexposure marks the Gods we know, and underexposure and noise hold the phantoms we cannot yet explain.

The phrase 'Broken Numbers' is used to describe not only photographic noise, but also all information produced by computation that is considered useless, erroneous, or random and discarded.

This exploration began with images of Kolkata. As it shifts toward those of Providence, it carries these beliefs- of seeing a God in the noise, of the sacralization of the everyday- with it.

Photographed and Researched as part of an ongoing project, Belief/Broken Numbers is the adaptation of this work into a photo-story for desi--gned's issue 3. Scroll to see pages.

Below are 2 excerpts from text accompanying the work:

“He could not grasp the significance of his home, its sacralisation of all that was around him... He defined his world in images, slowly discovering that his home could never be defined. Like saints without religion, numbers divided by zero, and Gods that always failed.”

“In his two hundred and fifty seventh walk, he noticed an intangibility—an otherworldliness unacknowledged. He could not explain it. Technology helped him make sense of the world. Yet, when it confronted this intangibility, it made broken numbers.”

Additional images below and more coming soon.

Belief/Broken Numbers

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