Caroline Picard: Is this what you thought the Haus der Kulturen der Welt would feel like?

Rohini Devasher: To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I had any particular expectations about the HKW.

CP: I guess I ask because the name “House of World Cultures” seems very literary to me, it sounds like the sort of place people in a novel would go. [Laughs] How did you come to be here? Did you apply?

RD: A curator I know, Maya Kovskaya, attended the first 2014 Anthropocene Curriculum and she said it was something I should look at, so I decided to apply.

CP: It does seem like there is a strong interest in ecology and technology in your work.

RD: I’m glad you said that because I’m always a little afraid of saying so, because I feel like I don’t necessarily have the, what’s the word …

CP: Chops?

RD: Exactly! That is exactly the word I was looking for. Because I don’t have any training in ecology, I don’t have the field experience people who work either with grassroots organizations or specifically with real science do, whatever that means, but ecology is something I am very interested in, and I’m glad that comes across.

CP: Your work addresses fractals, botany, radio telescopes, video feedback, the sky …

RD: There are parallel streams in my practice. Video feedback is one side, my interest in amateur astronomy another, or my wall drawings—which I’ve been doing since 2004. Depending on the research I’m involved with at the time, the wall drawings change, obviously, but they’re a very real, physical, embodied way of working on a space. At present, I’m very interested in the contemporary condition of wonder—I’m with the Amateur Astronomers Association in New Delhi, for instance, because I’m worried that Delhi is losing its skies …

CP: What do you mean, losing its skies?

RD: I mean light pollution. When I first joined the group in 1997, we had overnight observations at Nehru Planetarium, right in the center of Delhi. Now you have to go six or seven hours out of the city to see stars. It’s really bad. Pollution in Delhi in any case is bad, but what people aren’t talking about is light pollution. What happens when a generation of people grows up without ever seeing the stars? This is troubling to me, as seeing the night sky is something that plants you on the Earth in a way that nothing else does.

CP: Yeah, astronomy makes you think about what is above and beyond—just acknowledging that burning rocks hang out in the distant universe is wild! But I also love pretending sometimes that the sky might just be a black cloth with pin holes in it.

RD: Yes, or a screen for projections or something.

CP: I understand that you started as a painter and a printmaker.

RD: I think printmaking started everything off. You have two parts to making a print: the platemaking and the actual printmaking. The plate—whether stone, metal, or a screen, whether it’s a block of wood—has this potential for multiplicity and iteration which I found very interesting. Even when I was studying printmaking I was frustrated by the idea of the edition, where every print that you make has to be identical to all the rest. Later, I started using the plate as a sort of block that also has the potential for multiplicity and iteration. I would take a lithograph and just one piece of paper and just keep printing over it with that same image.

CP: A bit like an analog method of distortion …

RD: The interesting point is that when pattern becomes noise becomes chaos, and then after that form emerges again. That is what got me interested in plants, because nature is fractal. Nature has a very simple and effective method for building complicated structures from simple parts using recursion—manifesting in almost infinite instances of pattern, symmetry, and geometry. Plants are only one example. From the more conventional forms of printmaking, I moved into digital media, where I would construct these sort of strange denizens of a science fiction botanical garden, specimens in a bizarre “cabinet of curiosities,” or portents of a distant future. Each final work was the result of many hundreds of layers, of both photograph and drawing. However, once finished they were necessarily flattened, which meant they lost any sense of their gradually articulated complexity that is so integral to their making.

CP: And is that how you moved towards video?

RD: Literally, it is, yes. One day I was just surfing, researching complex systems online, and I saw an image of what looked like a starburst, so I clicked on the link and landed on a page with a DIY diagram of video feedback, which has been around since what, the 1960s, right? I only tried it out then. Until that point, had you had asked me if I was interested in working with video, I am certain the answer would have been no. However, this feedback approach was a language I understood; I got it, it was just a camera plugged into a TV. It is a camera looking at itself, like a reflection. The forms generated within it start to mimic biological life, which is amazing, and then a wealth of possibilities are opened up within this dynamic system. This and the fact that it is so embodied appeal to me.

CP: So, the technology starts to perform patterns we’d otherwise attribute to the natural world? What is it recording? Is there a first landscape, for instance, that you then distort? Like the lithograph block?

RD: In video feedback the forms are all generated within the machine, so if you just have a camera and the TV, then usually you get a blob, a circle, which then becomes a square, which then becomes a triangle; it’s instructional if you want to understand morphology. It’s very similar to traditional kaleidoscopes. The optical equivalent of acoustic feedback, where a loop is created between the video camera and the television screen or monitor. Like two mirrors facing each other, the image doubles and interferes with itself. If you add mirrors at right angles to the TV, that’s when it gets really interesting, it becomes fractal. Because there are more surfaces for the light to bounce off, you get an amazing array of spatiotemporal patterns, mimicking those exhibited by physical, chemical, and biological systems, i.e. plant structures, cells, tree forms, galaxy-like formations, starbursts, bacteria, snowflakes. I take all that footage, I put it into a computer, then cut it up and stitch it back together in different configurations, sort of like a backward jigsaw puzzle.

CP: Over the last few days in Berlin, we’ve had different conversations about the technosphere as an auto-poetic system. It seems related to what you have been describing.

RD: It is! Video feedback is an example of self-organization of pattern in nature, which is why this behavior starts to look like trees. Take phytoplankton or zooplankton, under the microscope they also have the most incredible skeletal structures. This really interests me: how you see biological patterns mirrored in digital space. Take moss growing at zero gravity—it grows in a spiral, as if the spiral shape is embedded in the material somehow.

CP: Would you say you “collaborate” with the material?

RD: It is the artist, me, interacting with the environment at a point in time, and it is the material suggesting the way forward, which is exactly what happens with printmaking and video feedback. The material, in a very real way, leads the way much more than in any of the other work I do.

CP: But then isn’t everything that way? Like any material has limits and strengths that one has to adapt to and work with?

RD: I’ll tell you what, I don’t feel that way with the other work that I do. When I go to an observatory, for instance, the site becomes the activator, but I don’t think I would call it a medium.

CP: Even if you are there to document the site: for instance …

RD: The telescopes.

CP: Yeah, please describe it.

RD: I’ve been working on this project for about five years, but it started long before that. I joined the Amateur Astronomers Association in New Delhi in the same year I joined art school and was a quite active member for about five years. Then I lost touch with the group for a while, but then in July 2009, India witnessed the longest total eclipse of the millennium and I traveled to Patna, Bihar, to see it. Unfortunately, the weather played spoilsport and the eclipse was completely occluded; I saw nothing, except the rain, the darkness, and the euphoria of every astronomer on the roof. I have never been as aware of my position on the Earth as I was at that moment. I had this intense sense that there was something there, something tangible, something that could be channeled, something extraordinary. I wondered if it was possible to create a sense of engagement with someone else’s experiences, even when the experience was the single most transforming celestial event: a total solar eclipse.

CP: I appreciate your interest in the astronomers’ euphoria, which seems somehow to have helped you locate your place on the Earth as well.

RD: Almost immediately after that, I took up a residency in Delhi called “The City as a Studio,” initiated by the Raqs Media Collective at the Center for Developing Societies (CSDS). I applied, got the nine-month fellowship, and began by interviewing amateur astronomers. Then I started traveling to a bunch of observatories all over India with them, including the second highest observatory in the world, the Indian Astronomical Observatory (IAO) at Hanle. It is in Ladakh and is one of the world’s highest sites for optical, infrared, and gamma-ray telescopes—like something straight out of Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama.” It’s this 14,500 feet high altitude desert and you’ve got these incredible telescopes—they become almost chimeric, like interesting signifiers … that’s what got me interested in the idea of these sites of technological strangeness as interfaces.

CP: And when you’re at these locations?

RD: I just shoot. I photograph the site almost blindly … The video-feedback work demands such a structured and specific approach, but when I first started shooting these sites, I had no idea what to do because I felt, “This is the real world; how do I react to it?” I was shooting everything but what the amateurs were shooting; they were shooting the night sky. I wasn’t interested in that; I was more interested in the astronomers’ lived experience of the site.

CP: Even though you visit these visually astonishing places, my sense is you’re not trying to capture a traditionally sublime experience of the landscape … does that make the landscape more or less of a medium?

RD: That is a great point. I don’t think I’m interested in the sublime in the way I understand the word, if that makes sense. However, I am interested in “wonder.” I don’t know if that’s very different? While I’m shooting the site I don’t know what the end result will be, so I don’t know if I can say that the landscape is a medium. Once you get the footage, then of course the footage will tell you what to do with it.

CP: I’m about to flirt with metaphysical territory maybe now, but for me, when I see something that I want to work on—write about, for instance—I feel there’s a way that the material acts on me. In this sense, therefore, I cannot tell whether I would locate the landscape as a kind of medium, or if the medium would only be in the materials I used to capture that landscape.

RD: Yeah, I think you’re right—like when I went to Japan on this other residency, to the island of Kyushu, and I realized that there was a volcano three hours away, so I was like, “I have to go there,” and I was as drawn to that site—so now I’m wondering, “What’s going on here?” Because actually, you are right; it is about the other kind of sublime, the more traditional reading, right: just this incredible, smoking volcano. I haven’t done anything with that footage yet.

CP: What did you film when you went there?

RD: Kyushu actually has one of the largest calderas in the world. You can normally walk along the huge crater, but it wasn’t possible when I went because there was a level two eruption and the route was closed off for a kilometer approaching it. What I actually shot was the smoking crater—a huge cloud, like a massive cloud-maker—spewing this beautiful bluish-white smoke into the sky. I also shot a lot of fog and mist; it was a very wet and overcast weekend. (The clouds seem to follow me wherever I go, but that’s a whole other story: I have been to some of the highest sites in the world and have yet to see the Milky Way!)

CP: What did the volcano smell like?

RD: We were coughing a lot and couldn’t figure out why, but it is just as you imagine, like rotten eggs, extremely acrid. It is amazing. I trekked along other parts and saw these even older calderas, which are these beautiful perfectly green mounds with little dips in them, but then, because you’re high up, and they’re in the middle, you get this amazing volcanic sort of fractal pattern in the ground. The fog came down then, so the mountain came in and out of focus. It was an amazing experience, and I’m not sure what yet, but maybe I’m going to build some kind of fiction around the idea of disappearance and reappearance.