Abhishek Hazra: New Witnessing is emerging

Abhishek Hazra is a visual artist based in Bangalore. His work explores the intersections between technology and culture through the narrative device of a 'visual fable'.

He is interested in the social history of scientific practices, and his current, ongoing project attempts to explore the history of science research in colonial India. Abhishek works with animated shorts and digital slideshows that often integrate textual fragments drawn from fictional scenarios. He is also interested in the way in which the languages of science journalism and information visualisation participate in the complex dynamics of 'knowledge dissemination' and 'translation'.
Recent shows include First Left, Second Right, a 3 person show at Thomas Erben Gallery, New York with Yamini Nayar and Kiran Subbaiah; Horn Please. Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art (curated by Bernhard Fibicher and Suman Gopinath), Kunstmuseum Bern and Ghosts in the Machine and other Fables: an exhibition of video, sound and interactive works at Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi (curated by Pooja Sood).

Witnessing raises questions of truth and trust, Hazra immediately suggests when the interview starts. The moment one says, ‘I witnessed it’, you are kind of inscribing your body in the process.

That is why in an earlier timeframe the camera image was seen as having a certain indexicality to truth, because you would have had to have been there - to be a witness- to have been able to film it. This brings up questions around knowledge and the body and how to approach what we understand as knowledge. The classical hard empirical approach is that knowledge is only true knowledge when it is experienced though your own sense organs, but in our present context our relationship with knowledge formations is immensely mediated through multiple layers of intervention.

In contemporary context the question of trust is crucial, since distance and disembodiment are an integral and accepted factor of communication. In distance and disembodied communication one has to posit one’s confidence in the productivity of engagement.

Because trust in any sort of transaction is in a way reposing one’s faith or one’s believe in the productivity of that transaction. You believe the transaction, what ever it is, and it can have various degrees. It could be collaborating on a paper, or asking someone a technical query, whatever. Unless and until you assign a certain degree of concreteness to it, it ceases to have any value or meaning. Often the way we negotiate this trust is that we segregate and compartmentalize, Hazra notices. One invests a certain amount of trust on someone’s claim for expertness in a particular section of a domain, like lingo scripting for example, and then you mentally structure your mind so that you decide internally that you are not going to invest the same trust in this person’s judgement on ecology for example.

Where before place was the beholder of trust, now it is time, Hazra agrees. Temporization has become very critical, which again brings up the question of trust. Credibility, and in a way reality, is build up through time.

Given a phenomena X, be it a person’s online presence or be it a certain thing that keeps on happening, if it keeps on happening you assume that it must be of a certain quality or structure. Also this can be abused as a strategy, which Hazra also repeatedly comes across.

Today human being’s experience evolves in a complex combination of biological and social systems, in which the algorithmic system interferes all the time as well. It is very difficult to isolate any of the three.

It is like a feedback loop where you are not sure what the structure of the loop is. It is a multidimensional loop, Hazra argues. It is as if the users, the human subjects, manipulate the algorithmic system to generate a phenomena, which is somewhere in between the collaboration of the social-, the algorithmic- and the biological system. Algorithmic pattern recognizers have the dark possibility of shaping and streamlining the way people engage with the world. It is all the more crucial now to be very aware of how these manipulations operate. Hazra is convinced that the more a person is aware of how the mediation is actually happening, the more this person will be in an empowered state.

In the experience of human beings the different realities merge. Data images of one’s body influence also how the body feels. Hazra discusses the example of a database of sleep patterns. This generates two different kinds of body images.

There is the corporal, haptic and sensorial image of the self, resting and sleeping and a certain sense that you have when you wake up from sleep. And there is the other image that is extracted from how for example an Ipod was extracting your sleep data. One never knows at what point you are slipping from the one image to the other. There is no sharp line anymore. There is a certain practical aspect to it, because as a bat you can flap your wings and use radar to fly and as a human you cannot. However, Hazra argues, our notion of humanness and indivisibility of our own body are conditioned by commonsensical everyday body experiences and these experiences are the result of a multidimensional reality in which social, biological and algorithmic reality all partake.

Working in a local and global context Hazra argues the value of deconstructing one’s local identity. To define ‘indian-ness’ for example is like a trap. One gets locked up in the prison house of one’s own representation and this is then mediated by a set of other discourses and assumptions.

One’s own perception of one’s self is already a complex constructed entity. The notion of one signature, which is the true and most effective manifestation of one’s inner presence, that notion in itself is problematic and possibly a mirage, Hazra suggests. Perhaps the essence or the core of presence does not exist, which raises the question of thresholds. What is the threshold at which a certain entity ceases to be itself? This question is similar to the old neurological example of putting a brain in a box of nutrient and blood vessels and carbon dioxide is taken out, but there is no body. Is it still a person? As a way out of this dilemma Hazra emphasizes that we have to be aware that a person can have 500 different ways of signing. This is a more productive and real approach to identity and authenticity than the notion of the most original authentic signature or presence of a particular person.

The question of authenticity is even more ambivalent, Hazra argues. Traditionally and commonsensical there has to be a certain kind of unexplainable tie to the soil of the land to be really authentic. The popular notion of the authentic is locked into the notion of the true representation of a given culture. These are the politics of representation. Whereas authenticity, Hazra argues, has to do more with the degree and intensity of engagement than with supposed organic ties and binds one has. One can be as authentic in Facebook as on a piece of land for 80 years.

Engagement is an intensity of dialogue, sustained interaction, granularity, not flipping through, no keyword analysis, being interested in the comma, the semicolon and the dot and where the page number is etc.

To take a book metaphor, Hazra explains, I might not agree with a certain text, it is miles away from what I am feeling, I might have violent disagreements with the text, but yet if I am saying I am trying to engage with tit, I try to bring myself apart, vanish my own presence and try to engage with the text on its own terms. In the question of engagement, the question of self is in not-a-direct relationship. You might not engage with, or you might be really engaged with something that is psychologically very distant from you.

When looking at systems, engagement brings the act of witnessing to another level, Hazra continues. The act of engagement is a process to be aware and to externalize your self, to create a third point and watch yourself watching. So what is it to be self-reflexive? How do you witness yourself witnessing?

And is that the central argument of consciousness? One could say the algorithmic reality is a response to the witnessing act we were missing, Hazra thinks out loud. We try to extract a vantage point, which will then give a pattern, which is not visible to you when you are inside the system as a ‘participant-witnesser’. Only when you try to extract your self outside the system, and at a third witness position at a different level of reality and watching the system and the participants in the system witnessing each other, only then will these larger structure of data and patterns emerge. When discussing these issues it is interesting to Hazra how many of the crucial aspects of thought, language, consciousness, awareness of the world, keep on coming back. Our entire relation with truth has changed, he concludes.

When designing in a local/global context time becomes very crucial. When having to design a very specific thing like an online paying bill system, this is something, which is possible to be done at a certain degree of ‘success’ if you follow certain procedural and engagement aspects.

Often what happens in an actual context, there are all these usability guidelines, which tell you how to make a billing system, and often the speed of today’s transactions and so on. But there is no time for the software developer and the interface developer and even the person who is doing the copywriting in the ways the words are phrased on the screens, to all spend a week together and watch how the kiosk manager manages his kiosk. Perhaps the job gets done, he will manage to send his data. However, if time of engaged interaction would be there, a more nuanced response to this could have been possible. This question of time in such a case becomes very important. People shape their own presence in time and you cannot know this at the other end of the world. As a midway solution, questionnaires are used but often things get lost. The designers and programmers may not have any clue to what really are the usage patterns. For example they do not know the intangible usage patterns of a typically Brazilian teenager and to how that usage pattern perhaps reflects on other aspects of the social context in which the Brazilian teenager is located. To get a sense of that one needs another temporal engagement there. It demands a much more sustained long during engagement. Sustainable things only get shaped in time, including the design of technologies.

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Hereunder the transcript in text.