Artist Statement

Navigating today's fraught era of fractured Western postmodernity as a transdisciplinary artist-researcher of multicultural diasporic origins, one feels ever more convinced about the need for a practice-based critical inquiry that moves beyond the limitations of traditional discursive forms. I conceive of my practice-led research as an interrogation into how expanded moving image spaces might function as sites for radical decolonial epistemic interventions in imagining inclusive posthuman and transhuman futures—refashioning our understanding of classic 20th century film grammar through an engagement with premodern non-Western frameworks and the powerful re-embodiment possibilities of post-digital culture.

My approach to moving images is fundamentally informed by Indian film scholar Amrit Gangar's provocative formulation of a cinema of prayoga (ritual or practice in Sanskrit)—a distinctly South Asian experimental film praxis rooted in Indian philosophical traditions that conceives of filmmaking not in the avant-garde mode of stylistic experimentation of the European or Soviet kind but as alchemical-meditative ritual: a laboratory for investigating the phenomenological nature of perception and consciousness using the durational qualities of moving images as a time-based medium. This framework provides the conceptual foundation for my expanded cinema installations, where each work is conceived fundamentally not as finished artifact but as ongoing investigation—what might be termed cinematic sadhana, or mediated contemplative exploration.

Working in a largely non-indexical idiom within this prayoga framework, my moving image work is directly inspired by the austere minimalist aesthetics and Deleuzian time-image poetics of world cinema auteur traditions: Yasujiro Ozu's pillow shots and elliptical editing rhythms, Robert Bresson's fragmented corporeal images, Mani Kaul's radical desynchronization of sound and image, and G. Aravindan's meditative long takes. Emphasizing what Deleuze identifies as the time-image's capacity to render Bergsonian durée visible rather than act as mere container for dramatic storytelling, this cinematic tradition allows phenomenological awareness of the viewer to emerge through their own attuned sense of attention. 

Taking cue from their work, my moving image praxis comprises conceptual renderings of 16mm and HD/SD video conceived as responses to the neurotic quality of life as an immigrant and person of color living in urban America: addressing issues of personal memory, cultural alienation, and general disillusionment so central to the postcolonial diaspora experience in postmodern Western society. Stylistically, I am interested in the question of how to evolve an authentic visual language that conveys the tentative and uneven textures of this fractured interiority using dynamic virtual spaces, spatial montage, handheld cinematography, and variable video playback configurations, as seen in my recent video installations including Mesh of Echoes (2025), Phantasmagoria (2025), and Through Rough Seas (2025). 

The shift from traditional lens-based work toward computational worldbuilding, shaped by my ongoing studies at UCSB with computational media artist Lisa Jevbratt and transmedia-theorist Marcos Novak, extends prayoga in profound new ways. By creating programmatically rendered navigable “hyperworlds” featuring sound-image collages through computational methods including Perl scripting and HTML/WebXR-based VR development, I attempt to construct a new form of transmodal, practice-led epistemology: one that operates through multi-sensory immersion and embodied interaction rather than purely discursive epistemic modes. 

Such work necessarily positions itself within contemporary posthumanist discourse of radical re-embodiment: using immersive technologies to heighten rather than escape corporeal presence, foregrounding the viewer's phenomenological awareness within expanded cinematic spaces. It materializes the recursive, fragmentary structures characteristic of South Asian narrative ecology—nonlinear, cyclical temporalities of Puranic literature, and nested transmedia architectures of performing arts traditions like kathakalakshepam—through endlessly reconfigurable code-generated environments. Extending post-structuralist Deleuzian film theory into new spatio-temporal contexts of interactive digital worlds, it reignites what Gangar calls cinema's original field of possibilities—open-ended narratologies that resist clear resolutions in favor of interpretive modes of pure phenomenological experience.

Finally, as a transnational artist-researcher with South Asian diaspora roots, my work also operates as auto-ethnographic investigations into my own postcolonial identity, using radical new critical frameworks such as South Asian modernities and Indofuturisms to fundamentally reimagine possibilities for artistic interventions in the future cultural Anthropocene. The fragmentary, rhizomatic poetics of my moving image work emerge directly from the uprootedness of my lived experience as an expat, immigrant, and person of color in Western postmodernity. In this sense, my practice contributes to the contemporary discourse around decentering dominant post-Enlightenment epistemologies by recuperating and foregrounding alternative indigenous hermeneutics and knowledge systems as vital methodologies for imagining inclusive and equitable post-human futures.