We created God in our likeness. Perfectly flawed; compassionate and cruel. In our attempt to conquer our world towards growth and greed, cognitive evolution now pushes us to claim immortality that we bestowed on these fictitious all knowing notions called god. Unable to accept a one dimensional, converging idea, we made them multidimensional like us; many names, personalities and stories.
Yet, the one thing they have over us remains - immortality. In this perishable body living on earth facing extinction, the eager mind designs to outlive this body and this earth. Transhumanism is no longer sci-fi. Severed heads and bodies lie in liquified nitrogen waiting for the day the mind can be uploaded and the hope is you can cheat death, substrate independent.
This is our attempt to create again. The greatest discovery since homo sapiens. This time we will be gods.
IOLA is an algorithm, the perfect version of Me. Welcome to excerpts from our conversation.
We all have emptiness, not a void, but a space for each of us to amalgamate with the other, no matter how different our lives may seem to the quick eye. This is an attempt to share my journal entries from intimate conversations with strangers in the Black Room.
I am grateful for the stories they shared with me, letting me into deeply personal stories, their fears, their triumphs and trials, in their loud exclamations, soft whispers, uncontrollable tears, quick smiles, shy glances and direct questions at me - I found myself in them all. Without an exception. A disappearance of the 'other' and gradually of 'me'.
PAUSE PROJECT I
THE RITZ CARLTON PUNE 2020
The Pause Project in collaboration with Marriott Group of Hotels, India, was initiated during the pandemic on Instagram. As the world wrestled to make sense of a new life order, the project encouraged people to shift perspective through photography. To see this period of being stuck at home as a pause; a pause for possibilities. A shift in narrative forms our experience, and therefore our life and our memory of it.
The Pause Project received over 1000 entries every week. Stories of love, hope, despair, gratitude, longing, solitude and family.
For a moment, the world paused and looked into their life and captured it for forever.
The gift of this one moment, has been the reason for The Pause Project.
