Art
How Elsewhere In India was created through vision and inspiration
Murthovic and Thiruda explain how their project Red Bull Presents Antariksha Sanchar and their upcoming game Antara inspired their latest endeavour.
Almost three years after presenting fantasy Bharatanatyam dance opera Red Bull Presents Antariksha Sanchar, the co-founders of Antariksha Studio, audio-visual artists Murthovic (MSR Murthy) and Thiruda (Avinash Kumar), have returned with another transmedia performance. The duo describes Elsewhere In India as “Carnatic music meets electronic music meets AI-generated art”. It’s a somewhat inadequate explanation for the production, which encapsulates several ideas.
The protagonist this time is an out-of-work “cultural” cyborg Meenakshi who teams up with Murthovic and Thiruda to go on “rhythmic adventures”. Together, the trio represent “the trinity of dance, music and visuals” that forms the core of the work done by Antariksha Studio, which Murthovic and Kumar run with Kumar’s mother, Bharatanatyam dancer, choreographer and teacher Jayalakshmi Eshwar. Murthovic and Thiruda took us through the making of the project, which will next be staged at the FutureFantastic Festival in Bengaluru on Friday, 24th March.
Elsewhere In India combines gaming and Carnatic-infused electronic music
© Abhishek Shukla
The inspiration
Thiruda says multiple “triggers” led to the creation of Elsewhere In India, which premiered at the Magnetic Fields music festival in Rajasthan in December 2022. The earliest impetus came from Red Bull Presents Antariksha Sanchar and Antariksha Studio’s work-in-progress “cultural adventure video game” Antara.
“We felt like we needed to take all that learning and take it back to the source of our own practice, which is the electronic music scene and the clubs and the festivals,” says Thiruda. Another trigger was the female protagonist in the Antara video game who was inspired by Jayalakshmi Eshwar. “We wanted to explore the future world of that same character,” he adds.
The final push was a grant the studio received from the British Council as part of its India/UK Together Season of Culture 2022-23 programme. “We were working on this concept for about six to seven months, and then the grant came along, and helped us crystallise [it] into [something] real,” Thiruda says.
Elsewhere In India is inspired by a video game
© Shrey Gupta
The setting
Elsewhere In India takes place in 2079, a point in the future when Thiruda and Murthovic imagine artistic and cultural expressions will be “near extinction”. In this sci-fi world, “one line of cyborgs was created to replace the guru, the teacher,” says Thiruda. “These ‘cultural’ cyborgs were manufactured with the intent of teaching and transmitting culture in various forms and shapes. But by the 2070s, even cyborg production has already stopped because of a global AI meltdown. Meenakshi is one of the few remaining from the golden age of cyborgs, which, we say, is from the 2040s to the 2050s. We’re using a cyborg as a metaphor for thinking about the future of society.”
While Elsewhere In India is set in the not-so-distant future, it’s not dystopian. “What we’re trying to capture is a decade into some hopefulness arising from ultra-dystopia. We’re looking at a golden period till the 2050s, and then a meltdown, which plunges the entire world and India into catastrophe. And then there are glimmers of hope that are coming up in different parts of the world as well as in our characters and what they represent. The aesthetic we’re trying to focus on could be classified as ’post-cyberpunk’, which [unlike cyberpunk] looks at what India or the global south needs to think about, which is essentially: How do you resolve the problems? How do you create a sense of hope? How do you bring people together in spite of the dystopia?”
Elsewhere In India premiered at Magnetic Fields 2022
© Shrey Gupta
The music
The bass music, house and techno you hear during the performance incorporates Thiruda and Murthovic’s recordings of folk and classical musicians from across the country. The current iteration features samples from those in West Bengal, which Murthovic gathered with the help of sarod player Soumalya Sareswari, and those from states in south India to which he travelled with the guidance of his friend Shreya Nagarajan, who runs the Chennai-based Shreya Nagarajan Singh Arts Development Consultancy.
Out of the many gigabytes of audio and video recordings, only about “15 to 20%” are presently part of the show, says Murthovic. Next on the agenda are visits to Rajasthan and the north and the north-east of India to expand their range of sounds. “The idea is to bring back different colours that we have and somehow make them fit this post-cyberpunk, solarpunk world narrative of ours,” says Murthovic, whose 3D avatar is seen carrying what Thiruda describes as “a post-cyberpunk sarod”. This has the body of the 200-year-old stringed Indian classical instrument but has been embedded with modular music devices that enable it to play a hybrid of classical and electronic music.
Elsewhere In India was one of the few exclusives at Magnetic Fields
© Shrey Gupta
The evolution
As Elsewhere In India evolved out of Antara, it is built upon the visual world created for the video game, which was developed using Epic Games’s Unreal Engine. Among Thiruda and Murthovic’s aims is to use video game engine technology to “showcase, remix and interact with cultural heritage in a vibrant yet respectful, considerate manner”. The scenes of Meenakshi and the duo exploring the world around them are intercut with images and film footage from publicly available archives as well as 3D models and scans of Indian art and artefacts. At the Magnetic Fields premiere, for instance, the visuals included objects from Chennai-based heritage museum Dakhshinachitra.
What viewers see however depends on what format of the production they experience. At a club or music festival, you’re likely to get “a very loose anthology of eccentric stories for each track”. When Elsewhere In India is staged at venues such as galleries, it will be presented as “a live cinema experience” that narrates a 60 to 75-minute story, with voice samples that will serve as the speech of the 3D characters, and titling and information plates that will provide additional explanatory context.
The British Council grant Thiruda and Murthovic won was for an XR (eXtended Reality) show that they plan to develop over the next couple of years. This, they say, could take on different forms, from a live performance that can be viewed with 3D glasses; an immersive experience centred around an audio-visual installation; a VR short film made in collaboration with US-headquartered art, design and tech incubator NEW INC; and an “art” video game through which players can explore the world that they see in the show. “The idea is to place [the game] inside a museum or a festival where people can maybe wear a VR headset and walk around and enter the places and interact with objects,” says Thiruda.
The mission
Murthovic and Thiruda’s larger objective is to debunk the idea that the classical arts are a fossilised form of culture. “Murthovic hears [things like] he’s not an electronic musician anymore, he’s in this traditional space,” says Thiruda. “We wanted to make that point more explicit that there is a futurism that one can place on top of the classical foundation, and that the classical is itself a form of futurism. This is actually amazing, progressive talent that we’re collaborating with, to make Indian electronic music more meaningful and future-facing.”