Mayankdutt Kaushik is a creative technologist, performer, and PhD Research Scholar at SAA-JNU, where his practice-based research explores computational sub-cultures and posthuman media ecologies in the Global South. Trained in Commedia dell'Arte, he moves between theatre, code, and cultural production. A Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow, his work has shown at Sheffield DocFest, EVA London, DGS2026 (Athens), ECAH, SCMI, ACSS, Stony Brook, Harvard, UPenn, Columbia, and others. Critical and theoretical writing appears in Marg, Rhizomes, Theatre Research International, Critical Playground, Taylor & Francis, AICA, FIPRESCI, and elsewhere.
About the Artwork:
Title: यथा वणिजो लाभकामााः समुद्रम्
(Like merchants desirous of profit who venture upon the ocean…)
Medium: Expanded Cinema (Unreal Engine and TouchDesigner)
यथा वणिजो लाभकामाः समुद्रम् (like merchants desirous of profit who venture upon the ocean). The Upanishads understood, millennia before the first telegraph cable crossed the English Channel, that the sea has never been neutral. It is the medium through which appetite travels.
This work traces a continuous arc: colonial telegraph infrastructure, fibre-optic internet routing, and wave-powered AI inference platforms. From Melville's White Whale, obsession rendered as ocean, through H.G. Wells's plural modernities and W.E.B. Du Bois's Darkwater, where water names both the violence of extraction and its limit, what the land can no longer hold, the ocean is asked to absorb. Built in Unreal Engine and TouchDesigner, this is the Anthropocene's most honest image.