Past

Feb 11th 6 pm – Kiran Kumar – Six uneasy fragments (exactly) about the natural and spiritual

Alan Turing (1912-1954). Born in England to parents living in British administered lndia, a tvventy year old Alan wrote a six-page meditation titled »Nature of Spirit«. Archived as among his »non-scientific« writings, the Turing Archive also holds 72 unordered pages filed under a note: 
»it will be difficult, in some places impossible to know exactly what the fragments are (exactly) about«.

These 6 and 72 pages at the fringes of his mathematical work, become a curious and critical surface upon which to (re)inscribe a(n other) story. A piece of (speculative historical) fiction for a pioneer of (theoretical computer) science. Dreams in digital palimpsests of ethnographic, archival and choreographic layers teil tall tales of Alan's first tvventy years in colonial lndia and lndonesia. In a provocative (re)shaping of his mathematical mind through premodern täntrik practices of drawing and dancing, the work offers a fragmented speculation on decolonial implications of non-dual täntrik art-science on our present condition of binary digitality. This work is the penultimate instalment in a long-term artistic research »Epistolary Ancestries«, an inquiry into a personal filiation of practice, reflected through a corpus of open letters to already dead persons.