The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

109 ARTISTS Cool Memories of Remote Gods (stills) (from ‘Machinic Elixir – Improvisation Two’ series 2016–ongoing) 2017 Single-channel digital video projection: 16:9, 14:48 minutes, colour, sound / Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation – SB 13, 2017 / Images courtesy: The artist MOCHU Born 1983, Kerala, India Lives and works in New Delhi, India There is a boom in smart phone applications about ‘mindfulness’, and micro-dosing — ingesting small amounts of LSD over the course of the day — is used to improve creativity. These are just two trends that have emerged in the technology industry over the last ten years as a result of a renewed interest in spiritualism and psychedelia. These ideas have a precedent in 1960s and 1970s New-Age spiritualism and the emergence of computing technologies. While the technology industry is keenly researching how these ideas can increase productivity, Mochu addresses the aesthetics of these techno-utopian visions — and their aftermath — in his videos, drawings and writing. In the video Cool Memories of Remote Gods 2017 from the ‘Machinic Elixir – Improvisation Two’ series, Mochu uses a mix of high- and low-fi post-production techniques to convey the experience of a bad acid trip. Psychedelic art is not just an aesthetic choice; rather, it is the methodology that defines the video, and Mochu uses it to constantly question the relationship between perception and reality. Mochu invokes the psychedelic and otherworldly using surreal and glitch imagery. In Cool Memories of Remote Gods , cactuses take on a nuclear glow, lava craters open up in the sky, and walls twist and bend. In the silent short Mercury 2016, 1 Mochu revisits the work of the significant seventeenth-century Indian artist Ustad Mansur, a Mughal painter known for his naturalistic depictions of animals and plants. In 1979, the International Astronomical Union named one of the craters on the planet Mercury after the artist. With this in mind, Mochu animated Mansur’s paintings as if they were under the influence of the uninhabitable planetary conditions of Mercury. In both these works, normal conditions are upended and we are left to question anything that is usually taken for granted. Throughout Cool Memories of Remote Gods simple techniques recur — the artist stretches parts of the image across the screen or inverts the footage to draw viewers’ attention to altered perspectives. These techniques were employed previously in Painted diagram of a future voyage (Who Believes The Lens?) 2013. In this earlier video, the artist disrupts aquatints by British landscape artists Thomas Daniell (1749–1840) and William Daniell (1769–1837) that depicted India ‘as a world of pre-technological charm and primitive appeal’. 2 In his video, Mochu distorts the Daniells' landscapes to create a warped perspective, so that the final work presents scenes with competing viewpoints. In this way, Mochu outlines how one perspective is often privileged over another. In the mind-bending Cool Memories of Remote Gods , the same technique is used to question whether what we perceive is, in fact, reality. Mochu emphasises the similarities between science fiction writing about ‘new worlds’ and colonial ideology. Inflected with the science fiction time warp trope, Cool Memories of Remote Gods examines orientalism and its entanglement with 1960s counterculture. Haunting the work is the knowledge that while the hippie movement professed to be international, it was mostly enjoyed by the middle classes of the West. Mochu also highlights the influence of Indian artistic practices within the symbolism of the counterculture. He follows the hippie trail in India only to find that glowing signs, psychedelic posters and restaurant menus are all that is left behind. Mochu proposes, however, that there is something to be learnt from the kitsch remains of the counterculture’s spiritual journey, as indicated by the inclusion of the opening quote from L’ardore (2010) by Italian author Roberto Calasso that focuses on the literature of the ancient Vedic people of northern India, which proposes that decay can teach us about life. In Cool Memories of Remote Gods 2017, Mochu attempts — but fails — to represent the enormity and complexity of the universe. By lingering on this failure, however, he points to the limits of representation. Ellie Buttrose Endnotes 1 The artist’s works are available to view on his website, <www.themochu. com>, viewed July 2018. 2 ‘Interview with Mochu by Charu Maithani’, PROPRIOCEPTION , February 2016, <http://proprioception.in/painted-diagram-of-a-future-voyage-who- believes-the-lens-by-mochu/>, viewed July 2018.