Roshangoallè

Machine Learning, Natural Grass, LED Sign Light, Pedestal, Soil, Audio

2019

Documentation

Roshangoalle, translated as Sphere of light, is a mixed media installation that includes text in the form of a LED sign, natural grass, soil, pedestal, and audio. The LED sign that reads The Valley of Eternal Happiness lights up in response to the high and low frequencies of the audio component controlled by a software called Processing. The higher the audio frequency, the fuller the text is lit. But the sign text is always incompletely lit no matter how high the audio frequencies are. The audio is generated using a multi-layer Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) algorithm that trains and samples character-level language models. The algorithm analyses and trains on the input audio data, in this case, the found political speeches of Indian politicians and their representatives in Kashmir about Kashmir and its landscape. Through recognising patterns in the data, the algorithm forecasts new audios, thus predicting a voice from the future. This voice then tries to light the LED text but always fails. The work addresses the spectacles, stereotypes and absurdities present in the narratives of political imaginaries of the Kashmiri landscape. It questions the popular notions of the landscape, its representation, territorialization and marginalization.

Video Documenttion