Artist Statement

Navigating transdisciplinary research and practice in Western postmodernity as a member of the South Asian diaspora community in today’s fraught sociopolitical climate, one feels especially motivated and ever more convinced about the need for practice-based critical inquiry. In this context, I conceive of my practice-led research as an interrogation of how expanded moving image spaces might function as sites for radical decolonial epistemic interventions in posthuman and transhuman futures—refashioning the grammar of classic cinematic spatio-temporality through engagement with premodern, non-Western aesthetic and philosophical frameworks, and the re-embodiment possibilities of post-digital culture.

My approach to moving image praxis is fundamentally informed by what noted Indian film scholar Amrit Gangar theorizes as the cinema of prayoga (ritual or practice in Sanskrit)—a distinctly South Asian experimental film philosophy that conceives of filmmaking not as the avant-garde mode of stylistic experimentation in European or Soviet cinema but more as an alchemical-spiritual ritual, a laboratory for investigating the very nature of perception and consciousness using the formal intrinsic qualities of moving images as a medium. Gangar's formulation of prayoga reclaims cinema from Western narrative conventions such as linear temporality and fixed ocular perspective, positioning it instead as contemplative apparatus for durational phenomenological inquiry. This framework provides the conceptual foundation for my moving image installations and expanded cinema work, where each work is conceived fundamentally not as finished artifact but as ongoing investigation—what might be termed cinematic sadhana, or disciplined exploration of mediated experience.

Working within a largely non-indexical prayoga idiom inspired, my moving image work is directly inspired by the minimalist aesthetics and Deleuzian time-image poetics in the austere cinema of world cinema auteurs: Yasujirō Ozu's pillow shots and elliptical editing rhythms, Robert Bresson's fragmented and stark, corporeal images, Mani Kaul's radical desynchronization of sound and image and use of Hindu notions of cyclical temporality, and G. Aravindan's contemplative long takes of meditative beauty, all emphasizing durational experience or Bergsonian durée of the film form over its capacity for narrative storytelling, allowing phenomenological awareness to emerge through an attuned sense of attention. Where traditional industrially produced cinema treats duration as mere container for dramatic action, these practitioners reveal time itself as subject—what Deleuze identifies as the time-image's capacity to render durée visible. My early 16mm experimental films were conceptual works conceived as a response to the neurotic pace of my lived experiences as an immigrant and South Asian person of color living in urban American settings: addressing issues of personal memory, cultural alienation, and the general sense of disillusionment so central to the postcolonial diaspora experience in modern Western society. Stylistically, I have been interested in the question of how to evolve an authentic visual language that conveys the tentative and uneven textures of this fractured interiority. My recent moving image installations including Mesh of Echoes (2025), Phantasmagoria (2025), and Through Rough Seas (2025) extends this minimalist sensibility into expanded spatial contexts through a combination of handheld cinematography, non-indexical abstract compositions, long durational shot-taking, and variable frame rates, that emphasize the guna (quality) and rasa (affect) poetics of embodied perception borrowed from classical Indian literature on aesthetics.

The shift from traditional lens-based work toward computational worldbuilding, profoundly shaped by my ongoing studies with computational media artist Lisa Jevbratt and transmedia-theorist Marcos Novak at UCSB, has only served to extend this prayoga in radical new ways. Working with Jevbratt, I’ve been exploring computational methods—particularly Perl scripting, HTML, and WebXR development—as genuine research methodologies and tools for constructing interactive augmented moving image environments that let viewers navigate and co-author experiences within these through embodied engagement. Novak's theorization of liquid transarchitectures as mutable, algorithmically generated fields rather than static containers where the virtual and physical realms meet producing emergent hybrid conditions provided the conceptual framework for reimagining traditional 20th century cinematic space as dynamically rendered, habitable environments. By embedding dynamic programmatically rendered sound-image collages with photogrammetric 3D assets and spatial audio in navigable virtual environments, I attempt to construct what I conceive as transmodal scholarship: practice-led research that operates through sensory immersion and embodied interaction rather than purely discursive epistemic modes. 

This computational dimension allows me to materialize the recursive, fragmentary diegetic structures characteristic of South Asian narrative ecology—nonlinear, cyclical temporality embedded in Puranic folklore literature, and the nested diegetic transmedia architecture of kathakalakshepam performance traditions—through code-generated environments that are endlessly reconfigurable, creating strange new spatial topologies and interactive possibilities within virtual spaces. Akin to digital mandalas or refractive contemplative spaces where navigation functions as a form of epistemological practice, entering these “hyperworlds” allows viewers to generate embodied perceptual experiences that are fundamentally irreducible to the propositional knowledge of discursive, textual based scholarship.

Such work necessarily positions itself within contemporary posthumanist discourse interrogating the boundaries between organic perception and technologically mediated experience to promote a radical conception of re-embodiment: using immersive computational technologies to heighten rather than escape corporeal presence, foregrounding the viewer's phenomenological awareness within expanded cinematic space. This stance also aligns closely with the durational aesthetics of auteur filmmakers like Ozu, Bresson, Kaul, and Aravindan, and with post-structuralist film theory's critique of movement-image cinema, extending the realm of direct phenomenological experience into interactive digital territories, creating what Gangar terms cinema's "possibilities"—open-ended epistemologies that resist clean resolution of narratives in favor of a storytelling of multiplicities. 

As an artist-scholar of South Asian diaspora identity, my work also operates as auto-ethnographic investigations into identity, displacement, and cultural hybridity using radical new critical frameworks such as Asian modernities and Indofuturisms. The fragmentary poetics I have developed emerges from the uprootedness of my transnational lived experience as a person of color in Western postmodernity. In this sense, my practice contributes to contemporary discourse on decentering Western epistemologies by foregrounding alternative indigenous hermeneutics and recuperating premodern frameworks as vital methodologies for imagining post-cinema futures. This synthesis of prayoga philosophy, minimalist cinematic poetics, and computational worldbuilding offers powerful alternatives to the ocular-focused, linear narrative paradigms dominating both conventional filmmaking and digital media today, proposing instead new moving image frameworks that can function as laboratories for new forms of rigorous, embodied scholarship.