Belief/B r o k e n N u m b e r s (2024-Present)
Could noisy images be showing us phantoms that we cannot yet explain?
This work originates from the examination of my relationship to home, religion, technology, and the South Asian belief that these are all closely connected
and, even sacred.
Here, I interpret photographic noise– created ‘organically’ by increasing a camera’s ISO, or sensitivity to light– 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 my hometown, 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.
Below are 2 excerpts from text accompanying the work. All text accompanying the work is published in
the adaptation of this work into a photo-story for
desi—gned’s issue 3 (scroll to see pages).
“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.”