Glitch is derived from ‘glitsh’, Yiddish for a slippery place, and from ‘glitshn’, meaning to slide, or glide. Glitch was in use in the 1940’s by radio announcers to indicate an on-air mistake. By the 1950’s, the term had migrated to television, where engineers used glitch to refer to technical problems. By the 1960’s its usage had migrated into space where it became a part of the language of the Apollo missions. A glitch is a fracture in the continuum of a system - a lapse which causes the functionality of the medium to be revealed. Descriptive systems, particularly electronic ones, provide a continuous stream of information, a continuity of rhetoric which our minds instictively follow as if someone were talking to us. A glitch provides a hiatus in the stream, revealing the discourse as a fabrication – not a conversation We find ourselves suddenly returned to the present, to the room in which we sit – reminded that there is no direct human presence behind these oracular presentations. If we were being addressed by an android which presented a flawless impression of a human being, a glitch would immediately reset our point of reference, instantly forcing a reminder of our abduction into uncanny valley.
During Henry the VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the mid 16th Century many of the churches in England buried their stained glass windows in the hope that they would be saved from destruction and reinstalled during some more tolerant period in the future. Many were dug up in later years but they were often badly damaged. Sometimes new windows were assembled from the remaining fragments leading to the creation of ‘medley windows’ in which the biblical scenes and representaions of religious figures became hopelessly fragmented and ceased to carry their original narratives. Digital networks and their contents have shown themselves to be similarly vulnerable to iconoclasm, acts of war, mechanical failure and other forms of destruction and as well as being largely untested by the passage of time. Descriptions of the same material alter over time as they appear in different contexts for different purposes. Enlightenment descriptions which priviledged scientific knowledge over other forms of description still exhort us to pursue a utopian dream – the completed description of the world – a project that seems destined to be fulfilled at some undefined point in the future.
One of the few coloured images of the dodo made from a living specimen has been
attributed to Ustad Mansur and dated to th period 1628-1633. Mansur was a Mughal painter and court artist who practised during the reign of Jahangir during which period he excelled at depicting plants and animals. He is thought to be one of the first Mughal painters to illustrate the Siberian crane and among the last artists anywhere to draw the dodo from life. An act which
represents a fundamental lesion between the object itself and subsequent representations
which can be compared to Durer’s ubiquitou woodcut print of a rhinocerous – an animal which he never saw.
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Ferdowsi wrote his classic The Shahmaneh or Book of Kings nearly 1000 years ago. Over the years many editions have been produced, its 50,000 couplets often illustrated with luminous miniatures. Despite invasions, changes of regime and religious purges, the book has continued to help cement the Persian identity up to the present day. The relative stability of the language has enabled even the oldest versions to be read without difficulty by Farsi speakers today. Generations of non-readers have also had access to the stories as part of an oral tradition of storywtelling which continues into the present. Its presence in the memory of Iranians represents a kind of invisible membership of a race defined by the words and phrases of its poetry; the nation drawn together by mutual love of the stories it contains. It’s themes pursue the rise and fall of kings and dynasties from a mythical pre-historical period up to and beyond the Arab invasion. The concept of Royal “Farr” is a central feature of its verses and its possession was seen as a requirement for kings to rule. Farr is divinely bestowed, but it can also be lost, and its loss is often seen as the precursor to the downfall of kingdoms. A divine light was supposed to emanate from holders of Royal Farr, to the extent that those in its presence were forced to protect themselves from its intensity with their hands, an action sometimes supposed to be the origin of the military salute.
Bollywood Megastar Sharukh Khan has the starring role in the 2001 blockbuster ASHOKA, a uniquely Indian tale in the mould of a Shakespearean tragedy. The popular version of the story, also followed by the films narrative, tells of King Ashoka’s brutal conquest of the Kalingas in 265 BCE (in present day Orissa). Overcome by guilt and remorse at the destruction and loss of life, he converts to Buddhism, building a fabled 84,000 stupas scattered over the sub-continent from Afghanistan to Kerala, and spending the remainder of his reign spreading the Dharma throughout the known world. Predictably, the film is at odds with accepted historical accounts, but it brings a story to popular culture which is one of the foundations of the history of ancient India, as well as of the modern democratic nation. The Lion of Ashoka forming the emblem of the current Indian Parliament and the Buddhist Wheel of Dharma the centre of the postindependence flag. The principal Stupas contained glass reliquaries of great beauty and simplicity which, in their turn, held small gold and coral stars originally buried with the Buddha’s remains, along with fragments of bone and other relics. That the world knows anything about this story is owed to a handful of 19C Orientalists; John Marshall, George Turnour and James Prinsep amongst them, who deciphered ‘Delhi No 1’—an ancient script previously lost to history and now known as Demotic Sanskrit or Brahmi.
In this script Ashoka’s edicts were engraved on rocks and stone columns at cross roads and in market squares, the transcriptions revealing the dissemination of Buddhist scriptures as far afield as Italy and Vietnam and mentioning Ptolemy, Alexander and Antiochus by name. This was perhaps the first time that such a large area of the subcontinent had been deliberately seeded by ‘one big idea’: the resulting monuments linking belief with geography and pilgrimage with merit, no doubt contributing to the epic movement of humanity which continues to be such a feature of life in India today. Orientalism however, now has an almost entirely perjorative association. In large part this is due to Professor Edward Said’s famous work Orientalism (1978) in which he identifies Orientalism as “… an instrument of Western Imperialism in the form of an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into western consciousness…” Not surprisingly this book caused a great deal of post-colonial hand-wringing in University Departments of Oriental Studies, not least because anyone could see it was a good point well made. However, it was also true that the translation of the inscriptions carved in Delhi No.1 revealed spectacular insights into the past, now available to anyone with an interest in the common history of humanity. Forty years before these discoveries, the East India Company was at war with the French and their Indian
allies, displacing much of the population of South India in the process. Tipu Sultan was the last Indian monarch to hold out in the south and unsurprisingly he did not like Christians and he especially did not like the British. He had a mechanical tiger commissioned by French craftsmen which mimed eating a British officer, who makes agonised clockwork groans. Just the sight of this contraption made him chuckle and when it was turned on it was said that he lost control completely. Despite plans and promises, Napoleon failed to come to Tipu Sultan’s aid in South India, and he was defeated by the British at the Battle of Seringapatnam in 1799, the clockwork tiger now in solitary confinement in the V&A. In 1872 a Bombay branch of the V&A Museum was opened (without Tipu’s Tiger) in Byculla, a suburb of South Bombay. It took just over one hundred years for its name to be changed to the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, by which time a number of sculptures of the rulers of the Raj had accumulated in a quiet part of the garden alongside the Museum. Most of these figures, slightly bigger than life size and ostentatiously dressed in Roman robes, had been removed from junctions and other prominent sites in and around the city and left, mostly headless, to contemplate their legacy in a grassy corner of the Museum’s Garden. Around a hundred years later, Raja Ravi Varma would become famous for his paintings of members of the court of Travancore (Kerala)
which fused Indian and European styles, This image is currently in a Hotel in Kochi. Lalbagh Gardens where we now find ourselves was originally laid out by Hyder Ali and further enlarged by Tipu Sultan who shared the Mughal passion for gardens with his father, an enthusiasm from which a large and grateful public continues to benefit. Dr Rajkumar is the current director of the Gardens and judging by the queue outside his office he has significant pastoral duties to attend to, in addition to time consuming requests like ours. It’s not hard to imagine that he is keen to get back to the research work for which the Gardens are justly famous. We wait outside the office in the January sun, which is located in a peaceful corner of the gardens, watching large white butterflies looping through the trees. When we are ushered in, he has our letter unfolded on his desk in front of him: “Personally I have no objection to your doing a photo-shoot here in the Gardens. However, we have no entertainments licence as such. Just to put you in the picture, I am currently dealing with a complaint which centres on our pruning a shrub which supposedly forms the preferred nesting material for a migratory bird. This has been the basis of an ongoing campaign by local ornithologists. So, as I’m sure you can guess, its better to go through the proper channels which will give your project a secure basis, particularly as it’s on the Mahashivaratri holiday.” The original model for this
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Hindu. There are some familiar faces and someone has brought a friend—a Bollywood director: “This is Rakesh – he does mainly chick-flicks…” We shake hands and Rakesh says: “This is all very interesting, but tell me —why would you photograph common people?” Well, its kind of a documentary project. “Oh… right!” he says.
Titan is the largest of Saturn’s moons and was the first to be discovered. When the Cassini mission dispatched the Huygens lander there in 2005, the images taken by the Cassini spacecraft, before it plunged into the gas giant Saturn, revealed a huge plain of shining wet ground on Titan thought to be the result of a rainstorm, making it the only world apart from our own where rain is known to fall. It is the only moon in the solar system known to have a significant atmosphere; nitrogen and methane extend ten times as far into space as Earth’s atmosphere. and consequently hydrocarbonfilled lakes and rivers form part of its landscape as do mountains, the largest of which rises to around 11,000 feet. Titan’s average surface temperature is −179 °C. Methane is liquid at this temperature and the raindrops which fall on its surface would be the size of large marbles falling in much the same way as snowflakes fall on earth, because of the low gravity and thick haze. Methane rain apparently falls on Titan’s north pole from clear skies and space scientists have yet to explain the missing clouds.
fo erutan eht si tI aisehtseanys sesnes eht taht rieht esol - seiradnuob noisiv dna dnuos nus eht - edilloc eht hguorht emac tih dna sduolc a sa dnuorg eht a thgil eht – hsarc gniknil ekirts dilos eht dna yks eht dnuorg
We stand there in the silence and I think about Noahs ark about which astronaut Jim Irwin developed an obsession following his trip to the moon. Sefir smokes a cigarette leaning on the doorframe of the car. It’s a moment easily committed to memory. Our small white Opel sitting there on the stony desert, the biblical snow covered mountain on the horizon. Jim Irwin made six trips to Mount Ararat to look for the Ark, between his walk on the moon in 1971 and his death from a heart attack 20 years later. In spite of all the pre-flight medicals, his heart condition was only diagnosed once he was on the moon’s surface, picked up by monitors in his space suit. Looking back at the earth from the lunar rover, he was overwhelmed to see the earth ‘through the eyes of God’. On his return to earth he founded a Biblical fundamentalist group called the ‘High Flight Foundation’ and devoted much of the remainder of his life to searching for Noah’s Ark on the slopes of Mount Ararat.
The World Heritage site at Hampi in Northern Karnataka, India covers more than fourteen square miles; a stage set so fantastic that it takes little effort to imagine the comings and goings of mythical beings and their interactions with kings and ordinary mortals. On the site is a cave where a power struggle between Vali and Sugreeva, a king and his brother, took place in the mythological past. Vali and Sugreeva are, of course, both monkeys and their names and their stories will come readily to mind to anyone familiar with the Ramayana. However, many might search their memories in vain for the names of the Kings of the Vijayanagar Empire whose capital occupied the same ground on the banks for the Tungabhadra River until halfway through the 16th century, the wild boars carved into the architecture failing to deter a coalition of Deccan Sultanates from the North. In Hampi, the ghosts of real historical persons and events compete for space in a site that accommodates an almost inexhaustible supply of characters from myth, legend and literature. Some of the activities of figures from the historical past are easily confused with their mythological counterparts. Like a character from a European fairy tale, King Krishna Deva Raya was reputed to give away his weight in gold and precious stones to his favourite (Brahmin) courtiers on
auspicious occasions such as the winter solstice. The scales used to do this, popularly known as ‘The King’s Balance’ still stand there complete with eyelets for suspending the seat on one side and pans of gold and precious stones on the other. The Hanuman Temple is on the other side of the Tungubhadra river and there is a coracle service to take visitors across, except on this particular day as there is a coracle operators strike. Due to a quirk of local politics, the coracle operators on the other side of the river are in a different union and not bound by the strike – although there are not able to alight on the strikebound side and passsengers must wade out to them. As a World Heritage site, the area is much photographed receiving around 10,000 visitors a year. Apart from wandering amongst boulders the size of houses and photographing temples and the extremely advanced aqueducts and drainage systems of the past, tourists, pilgrims and archaeologists also photograph the agreed locations of well-known mythological events. The stories played out in the area collectively represent history, belief and fiction, not to mention the childhood stories of a nation. The nearby Vijayanagar steel works, the largest in India, is named after the empire with which these mythological events have been conflated over
the years. The Vijayanagar steel plant, run by JSW Steel, is about 30k away. Apart from the steelworks itself, there is a campus for workers and visitors and the site is large enough to have its own airport – also named after the Vijayanagar empire. It also boasts a shopping mall, galleries, restaurants, a park, a conference centre and extensive accommodation, part of which we are staying in with 18 students from an Indian Institute of art and design, while we visit the two locations. Despite its well publicised green credentials, the steelworks can be seen from the campus some two kilometres away. It emits a wall of mechanical sound, 24 hours a day 365 days a year. One night we borrow the conference centre which has a horseshoe shaped table with microphones for 24 delegates and an AV system which includes simultaneous translation facilities – it’s a good fit for the Turrell corporation and someone has Blade Runner as a file. The opening sequence of the film mirrors the steelworks at night – a spectral and unearthly sight; lights speckle the darkness while plumes of gasses of various colours are burnt off from the tops of metal towers. Mostly we visit the steelworks by day, trying to avoid the pools of molten metal, reversing JCB’s and a host of other opportunities for serious harm that litter the site. Steelworks of this
size have a huge range of operations and processes which operate continuously and simultaneously. High volume vibrations of multiple frequencies emanate from these activities which seem to vibrate innermost cells of the body, combining with acrid and pervasive fumes which lie in wait across the site, their invisible currents moving like toxic wraiths across the rusty earth and blackened piles of slag. JSW are currently supporting the restoration the Hanuman Temple by the river at Hampi, close to Hanuman’s birthplace and the location of his first meeting with Rama. Hanuman, king of the Monkeys, agrees to help Rama in his quest to find Sita, who has been abducted by the demon King Ravanna to Lanka. Even in mythological times monkeys were not known for their reliability and Hanuman has been placed under a curse for previous misdemeanors, which renders him unaware of his superpowers. Rama is able to remove the curse so Hanuman remembers his power and is able to transport them both (together with the bears and monkeys) across the sea to Lanka and recover Sita. The descendents of Hanuman and his subjects who now occupy Hampi seem to have forgotten the loyalty they once bestowed on Rama, having evolved over the years into gangs of roaming kleptomaniacs who make a tidy living by stealing
anything not carved from the living rock, which they do with a speed and efficiency that comes close to a super-power. Identification with great empires and myths of the past bestow authenticity and gravitas on organisations and movements, aligning them with treasured national narratives and adding a more colourful and evocative persona to what, in this case , would have been just another smokey descendant of the Industrial revolution, albeit with well-publicised green credentials. The restoration of heritage sites brings considerable benefits to the benefactors, who now have a footprint which overlays the sacred space, a heritage event which belongs to all as part of a common inheritance, while the benefits accrue from the associated endorsement to the sponsor. While we may not be able to say that myths have any direct claims to truth, we cannot deny their cultural reality – and their consequent power that comes from the value derived from peoples’ love of the stories and characters contained within them. In this way we can attach truth to such cultural strands without feeling the necessity to apply the same truth demands to the narratives of which these strands form a part.
In 1906, the American explorer Captain Robert Peary made the last of his ill fated expeditions to discover the North Pole, during which he was forced to abandon his ship which had become trapped in the ice. He trekked northwards with sleds and dogs towards the pole, his team forced to travel as fast as was possible to conserve their supplies. Taking readings with a sextant on the first day, there were able to establish their position. By the end of the second day their readings indicated that they were much further south than they had hoped. After an exhausting third day their measurements indicated that they were almost back where they had started. Initially, it seemed the instrument might be faulty, or perhaps they were just unaccountably lost. Gradually, they came to realise that they stood on a gigantic ice f loe, drifting slowly in a southerly direction.
Cairo is centre of the belly dancing world and a large area of the Khan El Khalili market is given over to the costumes, slippers and bling that surrounds the profession. Very close, it turns out, to the area where 21 people were killed by a suicide bomber two years previously. Mina, a Jewish belly dancer from London, is in town to stock up on belly dancing accessories for her on-line business, and although she has been here before, she would appreciate a hand, so we arrange to meet in a couple of days. First, I need contact lense fluid, as mine has been impounded by Security at Heathrow, no doubt doing their bit to make the world a safer place. From inside the lobby of a small hotel on Zamalek Island I look through the window at the taxi queue for someone I wouldn’t mind spending a whole day with. One of the taxis parked outside is painted in black and white quadrants, like a jockeys cap. The proprietor is leaning against it and I’m guessing he has painted it himself. I go outside. You know if there’s a chemist nearby? “Yes – it’s this way, I take you there” he says and starts walking down the road. Don’t we need the taxi? “No, we can walk.” His name is Omar and he spends every other week in Aswan renovating a house with his father and two cousins which they are hoping to sell. I ask him if he wants to go on a trip tomorrow; “Sure—no problem,” he says. The next day
the traffic on the ring road is slow, there has been an accident. A truck is pulled up on the hard shoulder of one of the elevated sections. On the ground behind it is the folded white tarpaulin that must have covered the load. An orderly group of teenage boys and young men stand by a crash barrier looking down at the branded plastic shroud. It looks like a discarded pita bread. Three more slightly stunned looking youngish men slide slowly past the window. In the desert outside Cairo, it is hot and very flat. Omar lies in the shade of his black and white car. Sitting there in the desert it looks more like it has come out of a SaintExuperey story than off a production line. I go and climb down into the depths of the Saqqara pyramid, which is deserted except for two attendants sitting on a rock outside. On the way back Omar says: “You want to come to my cousins’ for a beer?” Back in town he parks up and goes into a corner shop. He comes out with four cans of Stella in a white plastic bag. The cousins room is on the second floor of an old town house above a market, which is busy—people shop in the evenings here. Inside the house it’s dark after the low glare of the early evening sun. At the bottom of the stairs there’s an anteroom with lime green walls and a dark red sofa on which his cousins Malik and Karim are sitting watching TV. We shake hands. The
house is extremely old. The stairs are stone and the treads worn in the middle. In the room we talk English and drink the beer, Karim rolls small, immaculately crafted spliffs. They look like the work of someone with netsuke experience. He looks up. “Everyone in Egypt smokes…even the president—but don’t say I said.” Do women smoke same as men? “It is very difficult to have girlfriend in Cairo,” says Omar, answering a question of his own, “It’s a big problem for us… We can have no relations with Egypt women unless we are married. It means you have to have a house and furniture—a lot of furniture—very expensive of course. I am not so strict Islam—but the society is very strict (draws hand across throat). Egypt women even when they are married will not be seen with lights on by their husband. I would like to marry American woman or English—how much does it cost—a flight to London?” After a while they start speaking in Arabic. It sounds like they might be arguing and every so often they gesture towards me. Suddenly I am aware that I am somewhere in the middle of Cairo with three men I don’t really know… I zone out slightly and start wondering if accompanying a Jewish belly dancer on a shopping trip around the biggest market in Cairo is likely to be a problem… then I remember that over in Giza, the Son et Lumière show must be beginning around now. Fat
people in pale blue shorts and white, calf-length socks will be lowering themselves onto the canvas seats of tubular metal chairs, set out in rows on the sand. Their voices will hush as the lights go down and Richard Burton’s clipped tones will ring out in the desert twilight, as they have done nightly since 1961. His immaculately crafted sentences drifting away into the warm, still darkness past the sphinx, hunkered down in its pool of lurid green light and speckled by lasers. For this experience tourists will pay handsomely, although they could just as easily watch the show from the roof of a nearby Pizza Hut for the price of a Diet Pepsi. A few days before, while in the process of refusing a ride on a dilapidated horse, the optimistically named Michael Jackson, I learned that the Show’s management had come up with a plan to prevent tourists from dodging the Son et Lumière box office. They shine extremely bright, focussed lights at the roof of Pizza Hut and various other nearby buildings, making it impossible to properly enjoy the show. In a counter move, strangely reminiscent of Star Wars, Pizza Hut installed baffles to defend its diners from the spectacle destroying rays… Karim breaks into my bubble… “Do you have Pekinese in London?” What? “Omar wants to know – do you have Pekinese dog in London?” Yes, why? He turns one palm up and gives Malik an ‘I told you
so’ expression. “He says he saw a woman coming out of the Australian embassy with a Pekinese and now he wants one really bad!” Next morning I take the short walk across the October bridge to the Egyptian Museum. At the end of the main hall stands the colossal seven metre statue of King Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye. Queen Tiye was known for her strong views and forthright nature and their marriage is thought by many to have been an inter-racial one and a love match, Queen Tiye probably being of Nubian extraction. Their faces are both possessed of the kind of timeless inscrutability of Egyptian statuary of the period; so different to the free-flowing charm of the Minoan art of the same period. It’s easy to imagine the corporate style guidelines for artists and designers in the 18th Dynasty running into the tens of pages—but these two have kept something back for themselves. Their twin smiles suggest the solidarity of a private moment shared under the public gaze. Photographs of this sculpture are generally taken from the front, but in the museum you can go round the back and discover Queen Tiye’s hand firmly cupped around one half of her husbands behind in a gesture that combines intimacy and humour, suddenly making sense of the sly smiles that flicker across the stonework.