Aakarsh Singh

Local Area Noumenon Detritus (LAND) is an experimental film that treats simulated ecology and geology as actors in an investigation of the divided land between India and Pakistan. The film is built around the Katas Raj Temple Complex, a cluster of abandoned Hindu temples in Chakwal, Pakistan, believed to have formed from the tears of the god Shiva as he wept over the loss of his wife Parvati. Director Aakarsh Singh approaches the site as a noumenon, a term from Kant for a thing that can be conceived but never perceived (Kant cites God, the cosmos, and the soul as examples). The site was also literally beyond reach for both of its collaborators. As an Indian national, Singh cannot easily cross the border to visit it, and his collaborator Ahmed Bilal (who carried out the site research and photogrammetry) cannot enter the temples strictly cordoned off for Hindu worshippers. This shared inaccessibility pushed the film towards a visual language of cosmic horror, depicting a land too uncertain and uncanny to imagine.

LAND was built primarily in Unreal Engine, supplemented with photogrammetric scans, point clouds and a custom LoRA adapter. The game engine let the film simulate the "groundlessness" the artist and writer Hito Steyerl describes as the present condition, a loss of stable horizons and fixed perspective. The camera moves freely between body-cam found footage, drone shots and angles no physical camera could replicate. The geological and ecological entities become actors in every sense of the word. They dissipate light, break down into particles, grow organic matter or bleed, refusing both perception and traversal.

The film runs across two halves. The first, Geodesic Survivor Account, follows a speculative joint India-Pakistan research unit as the land reacts violently to being perceived and crossed. The second, Geodetic Noumenon Recount, watches the area's myths resurface and morph its geology to enact themselves again after eons. Local Hindu and Sufi creation stories are woven into a single narrative for a fractured land of many faiths: the exiled Pandava princes of the epic Mahabharata, a riddling water spirit who enchants those who fail its questions into permanent sleep, and the peacock that Sufi cosmology places upon the cosmic tree in paradise.

The film leans on the genre of cosmic horror, which renders entities too formless and vast for human perception, to figure geology and ecology themselves as carriers of an inhuman horror rather than relying on a single monstrous creature. Through interweaving this with new media imagery and localized mythmaking, LAND attempts both worlding and world-building: the construction of an environment, and then the act of letting it outlive its author's control. The aim is a new framework for examining fractured land, one in which there is no reliable narrator, and the ground we stand upon has itself become unreliable.

About the Artist

Aakarsh Singh is a creative technologist and new media artist mediating game engines and video alteration systems, as vehicles of alternate worldbuilding and worlding. He sees emerging technologies as underutilized lenses to dissect extant post-colonial truths and falsehoods, while simultaneously exploring the fabrication of new ones. Photogrammetry scans, simulated ecologies, archival footage and internet imagery are all actors in his reflection on (faulty) personal memory, communal mythmaking, and cybernetic constructivism. He is a recent graduate of the Bachelor’s in Interactive Media program at New York University Abu Dhabi.