Continued explaination from the slides:
My studio practice began with a return to my core interests in building speculative worlds and developed through a series of exploratory studio experiments. Rather than immediately attempting to build a fully realised futuristic landscape, I began by zooming into its constituent elements, starting with visualising the technogods / AI-alien: an amalgamation of the god, machine, AI and alien (working title). From there, I moved towards constructing the site of invasion. Instead of placing it in a generic, Westernised futuristic setting, I chose to situate it in the place I come from: Noida.
I wanted to represent a more recognisable Indian reality, beyond the familiar images through which India is often imagined for Western audiences. I became interested in the contradictions of a place caught between competing ideas of modernity: the fallen Western dream of skyscrapers, now left mid-construction or abandoned; a landscape undergoing rapid urbanisation while retaining rural social structures and ways of life; and the consequences of globalisation being imposed without sufficient time or context to negotiate its arrival. The machinima that follows depicts happenings inspired by real occurrences in Noida.
This choice led to an unexpected broadening of my enquiry. What began as an exploration of technological futures now also included the culture of the site of invasion: my hometown. I became interested in how its particular social structures, cultural beliefs and relationship with modernity might shape an encounter with the technodivine alien. How would a place like Noida respond to the arrival of this entity?
This further informed my critical enquiry:
How can we imagine Indofutures beyond ornamental aesthetics and precolonial nostalgia, where mythological imagery is often remixed for a Western gaze and made palatable for external consumption? How might we instead build futures from our own lived realities, recognising the aftermath of colonialism and ongoing neocolonial structures, including global technological systems such as the internet? Rather than producing empty or purely aspirational narratives, can speculative futures help us anticipate consequences, question existing conditions and imagine possibilities from which we might learn or against which we might be warned?
Use of AI: The digital environment of Noida featured in this work was built through vibe coding using Claude Pro, Opus 5.5.
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