Engineered Isolation

Artist Baiju Parthan talks to us about why life happens where the analogue ends and the virtual begins and why it is important to keep the familiar and the unfamiliar within the thriving terrain of creative thought

- Praveena Shivram

There was something strange happening with the responses that artist Baiju Parthan sent us. A part of the last line was mysteriously getting gobbled up into the white infinite space of the page. If I pressed ‘delete’, a part of the swallowed line would appear. And if I tried to format it, it would simply not relent, like parents at the time of Corona, forcing us to reverse roles and relive our teenage years of ‘you can’t go out of the house’. Even retyping the words, or selecting that section seemed off-limits. ‘In an alternate universe I could have been a data scientist or a programmer specialising in algorithms,’ said Parthan and I wondered if I had entered this alternate universe – that on some level it feels like we are already living, #corona – and perhaps this was an algorithm that simply wouldn’t function in this reality. But Parthan also helpfully added, ‘Or I could be ‘The Fool’ on a Tarot card.’ I had to look that one up – the image is of a man standing on the edge of a cliff, looking nonchalantly upwards at the sky and not the abyss below, with the affirmation, ‘Out of nothing, all that is was made. The same creative power dwells in me also’.

In Parthan’s world, it isn’t that it could be both – the alternate reality, intangible by virtue of its imaginative quality, or the lived reality, made tangible by virtue of its creative prowess. It is that it is both.