Anurag Singraur is a visual practitioner who thrives on finding ways to bring together Art and sciences, more importantly technology and its mediation. Interested in translation and its complexities, he uses media as an opportunity to explore and bring newer reading to the existing set of knowledge by interchanging different sets of data to further understand the infrastructure of multiple hardware/software. He is a postgraduate of Ambedkar University Delhi (2022-2024) and a graduate of the College of Art, Delhi (2021). Also, Co-initiated and a resident at Studio A68 (2019) which thinks around 'space' and its negotiations in daily life via gatherings, displays, showcasing and developing thoughts and ideas around living and working together.
MA Visual Art, Ambedkar University (2022-2024)
BFA College of Art (2017-21)
Diploma, Painting (2015-2017)
BA, CSJMU Kanpur University (2013-2016)
Research
A critical understanding of the term ‘technical object’ in terms of Yuk Hui in “What is a digital object?” (Hui, july 2012, 380-395), who writes in the voice of Simondon and Martin Heidegger, is something that bases the project. A technical object claims the technical individual and the technical element as its components. Often these components find an overlap when their classification takes them to a point where it's almost impossible to draw a distinction amongst themselves. The technical object takes an introspective turn to deploy a mechanism of self-definition where it carefully breaks down its own existence. This unfolding displaces its materiality that seems to lie in its sheer physicality. Materiality that encompasses its sensory experience slowly gives room to the possible number of elements of its formation. But what seems to have a formative glow over this object may just be another projection of its presence in the 3-dimensional world.
This incorporated a closer look to not only the creation of the technical object but also the ambiguity of the term which casts shadow on the multilingual narrative it can have. The technical object is the sum of the ‘technical element’ and the ‘technical individual’. The technical elements within any machinery are its primary cogs that constitute its formation. The basic nut and bolt may be termed as the technical element of a machinery but there is no particular distinction. While considering the nut alone, it may be a technical object and the component then that it constitutes becomes the technical individual made of technical elements. The extraction of the material that constitutes the nut may replace the technical element. The formulation of the mineral in the earth may be a result of the coming together of things that are not even remotely associated with it in a very human relational understanding. How does one know then that if at all there is a distinction between the natural and the technical object, it is not a result of the sensory. Hence, the interchangeable nature of an object between the natural and the technical marks no boundary of difference.
This also places a light on the existence of a technical object and its components beyond its life as a utility material/ commodity. The regime that a technical object claims over its components is only within its use value and its marketability. How Heidegger, in his seminal work, "Being and Time" ("Sein und Zeit") (Heidegger, Oct 12, 2011, 2.0-3.0) define an object in accordance to the human and its worldly relation, in two ways: Ready-to-Hand (Zuhanden) and Present-at-Hand (Vorhanden). In this hypothesis, ‘ready- to- hand’ refers to the typical rendering of an object in its mundane utilitarian identity and defined by its use value, while ‘present- at- hand’ refers to the perceiving of the object as discrete entities. Meaning that they are seen beyond their use value. This usually happens when something in the mechanism of the structure of the object is changed or ‘goes wrong’, where the object is seen more in a theoretical framework with a more observational stance towards it. With a more playful approach that this discretion of the object takes, it seems to not only expose the epistemic logic of its existence but also progressively define it ontologically. The humanist understanding of the object finds a crack in the logic of its use value and gives room to reason for its existence beyond the capitalistic framework. How Heidegger defines the ‘present-at-hand’ is an assemblage of ‘elements’ that they unify into, but at the same time, further outwards these unified individual assemblies yet again into another unified form, the object. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective Edited by Arjun Appadurai (Appadurai, 1986, #NA), is an influential collection of essays that explores the social and cultural dimensions of commodities. Meaning, a commodity is not just an object of economic exchange but something that carries social relationships and cultural meanings. The essays also closely look at the modification of the commodity with respect to the change in social and cultural context.
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