Anandana Kapur

Anandana Kapur is the co-founder of CINEMAD - a collective that tells uniquely Indian stories, a filmmaker and a media scholar. She also curates and serves as jury at festivals such as Prix Italia, the Japan Prize, INPUT and MINA. Taking a cue from the practice of e-darshans where devotees from all across the globe log in to participate in and witness rituals and prayers, this project will create an e-Devi, the goddess of faster internet connection and download speeds, and a transmedia ritual of an online darshan.  

Anandana will create an e-Devi who will be placed on a portal with a payment gateway for an e- darshan via Augmented Reality (AR) at fixed hours for a limited number of devotees per day. They will be admitted via passcodes. The design and cosmology of this concept will be developed using contemporary iconography like machine code and hashtags, and some offerings by way of likes and memes will be encouraged. The cyborg-like embodiment of the goddess herself will be based on the representation of digital avatars and trans-human art. The digital deity will eventually be rendered in AR so that the e-darshan can be truly a transmedia experience. Devotees will be instructed to send in their wishes, demands or prayers via a secure online form. Donations in the form of bitcoins or rupees will be accepted. Outside of the maintenance of the temple, a majority of the collection will be redirected to NGOs and schools, so that the mobile-phone data of crafts-persons and students can be renewed.

Anandana asserts that access to e-learning and commerce still remains a distant dream for many in India, and this project is an artistic device to draw attention to it. She also says that in this project the material, cultural, technological and contemporary creation of the human body is foregrounded, as is the unpaid altruistic labour of likes, shares, comments that sustains the internet. Also, through materialising the tropes of the goddess cult, the need for a more critical and ethical engagement with the virtual world is emphasised.

The outcome of the project will be a cyborg goddess in AR; a mobile-friendly e-darshan portal; and a bilingual - Hindi and English - devotee initiation pledge about safe online behaviour. The grantee’s deliverables to IFA will be documentation of the project, free access to the portal, and the portal downloaded on a drive.

This grant is made possible under the special initiative 25x25, with support from lead donor Kshirsagar-Apte Foundation, and philanthropy partners, Titan Company Limited, Priya Paul, and Sethu Vaidyanathan.