The Hard Drive Dreams in Flowers and Distortion

In architecture school, we make models of buildings in Rhino. Last semester, I worked with a classmate and we recreated the Seashore Chapel by Vector Architects using skeletal frames of plans and sections. We propped them up along each other and extruded and cut and conjoined and zoomed into and traced and guessed and failed and deleted and re-extended and spun out and spun into. We made a building that I’ve never been inside.

Perched on the edge of the beach in Nandaihe, China, it looks directly into the Bohai Gulf of the Yellow Sea, raised high enough so the tides can slip safely under it. I craved, with a portraitist’s desire, for the chapel’s interior to envelop me, for it to dismember my agnosticism, overwhelm tactile sensation, white stucco crackle, sunlight-suffused, salt into me. How would my body react, how would it occupy the chapel’s interior? To cast my shadow on the floor, its bamboo wood invitation, would be a form of diabolical mark-making. When the files got too big, inundated and heavy, it was as if sprites coughed out of the corners of the architecture, flimsy nets of glitching data that made new lines. New entryways into the subject.

Mountain Castle Mountain Flower Plastic is a genius work of art by experimental animator Annapurna Kumar. I have watched the film a number of times which I can’t recall. It escapes me.

Instead I find questions. How do we organize information? How does information exist inside the architecture of the container? How do we categorize, group, consolidate? What is documentation’s logic? What are documentation’s successes and failures? Is documentation boundless? How is technology changing the way we organize? How does that change our approach to seeing? Can these openings for storage unlock new ways of picturing what hasn’t been pictured? Can we somehow travel into those discoveries? 

The body of this film, haunting with its palette of greens, purples, oranges, and greys, is a composition that embraces play, instinct. Energetically, elements encounter entropy, whiz across the screen. Clips of vastly different amounts of information butt against each other, conglomerating into a whimsical, wheezing argument, dangling on a line, flickering bright. The clips hurdle into a crescendo. They tell us that in our micro-imaginations, the microscopic finds new homes, new spaces. Energy, I’m reminded, can’t be created or destroyed. This dial of intensity Kumar toys with as we flood into the film’s glitchy, sharp, strobe-forward aesthetic surges toward us a scientific spectacle. Leeway now opened, this loss in explicit spatial grounding helps us gather enough momentum to then consider what the stakes are in freely bringing together ideas, as well as the possibilities this looming tchnolocial era poses for us, for the gatherers, for the artists.

Kumar admits the work “also kind of accidentally turned into an environmental film” (Girls in Film, 2021). Four yellow flowers stumble into a plastic jug. An empty interior of a room flickers awake, like a sunlit coin, from the chest of a mountain. Grids of ingredients, flowers, stones, plastic products, pixelated furniture, décor, heads and stems and petals—jittering and overturning unanchored in wild convulsing collages of backgrounds, shapes, colors, lines.

According to a ScienceDirect article, plants, according to plant genome-sequencing projects, contain more than 40,000 genes.

Trying to be flexible, trying the splits, it never working out, can’t like I used to. I can’t unstiff, unspool, afraid to tear. Planing the fingers to the toes, straining for it, tearing.

I am constantly scared that I’m forgetting significant information, memories I cherish, because I make room for more knowledge. I hold onto, savor, let go, savor, let go, recombine, set out the net anew.

Kumar’s film is excitedly studying how a hard drive—as a man-made object—and the brain—as a pure, granted, psychological object—compile information. This is a film about multiplicity, confusion, simultaneity, awe, and the saccharine maximalism of the hologram, its method of stockpiling and presenting data. This cataclysmic monsoon is a treasury—staccato, tricky, toppling. When we transpose into new systems and spaces, are we truly the same? It seems we can’t hunt for the information, the pesky emblems, we want in comparable ways across all these languages. We must adapt.

I want to house all the scents I’ve ever smelled together into a tiny chip that can fit into a giant fan that I turn on and sit in front of eyes closed. I want to turn my eyes’ floaters into plastic sculptures and throw them at a wall. I want to fall inside the motherfucking motherboard.

Savor, let go, recombine, set out the net anew. Pressing Save in AutoCAD because the world will turn tomorrow. Making a thousand folders just for my new poems. I open a thousand to stockpile photographs of styled rooms from bygone eras, decorated hallways, pockets crammed inside cities across the world. Mislabeled JPGs I open one by one, to fall into unknowing. If only I could keep making folders inside folders inside folders until my computer opens its chalky mouth and raptures its cry into me to stop. My fingers, disturbingly, would ache for more.