40 milliseconds
40 Milliseconds
40 milliseconds is a series of durational drum performances that seeks to explore ideas of transience, liminality and the psychophysics of time. it uses rhythm to access, interrupt and heighten our awareness of the specious present, dilating notions of linear and uniform chronologies.
40 milliseconds draws on ‘techniques of exhaustion’ as means to uncover the malleability and asymmetry of temporal realities: ‘exhaustion technique’, an acting method that seeks to access to raw, unfiltered emotion through physical exertion; and ‘the technique of exhaustion’, a process of proof by elimination (think π !), associated with the Ancient Greek mathematician Eudoxus of Cnidus. Exploiting this continuous interplay between expansion and contraction, It hopes to make space for glitches.
40 milliseconds attempts to celebrate states of in-betweenness. Physical exhaustion progressively impairs our ability to consciously control bodily function. Movement. Emotion. Thought. It dissolves filters like the auditory threshold between pitch and pulse that the series’ title alludes to - an interval at which sound, akin to light, may be both, particle and wave simultaneously.
Five million incidents (2020)
“In depletion, we create new possibilities, probabilities; In establishing constraints, a crack opens where freedom begins.”
40 milliseconds’ first iteration was conceived and commissioned as a contribution to Five Million Incidents, a series of events, organised by Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi in collaboration with Raqs Media Collective. Spanning 15 hours, 48 minutes, an average human waking day, the performance grasped at the liminal, extra-emotional, unreasonable space in which an incident might occur.
Oscillating between solo recitals and improvised, musical conversations with invited, fellow musicians from a variety of backgrounds, it investigated the idea of common ground, continuity and synchronicity against the backdrop of constantly shifting musical contexts - ranging from Hindustani classical to experimental, electro acoustic music. By accumulating tensions between sound and silence, agitation and rest, by the marking of pulses, divisions and subdivisions, by implying patterns, polyrhythms and counterpoints, by using phase, fragmentation and inversions, by varying pitch, volume and touch: the performance sought to capture collective attention, create shared space for individual experience, singular resonance.
40 milliseconds - five million incidents took place on the 4th of January 2020 at max mueller bhavan / Goethe Institut new delhi. It began at 08:11 and came to an end at 23:59, featuring non-stop drumming.
Participating guest musicians and collaborators included: Shahnawaz Khan Niazi, HashBass, Pandit Mukesh Sharma, Pandit Utpal Ghoshal, Shreya Ray, Shonai, Shashank Das, Nomad Souls Inc., Sahil Vasudeva and Ish S.
‘five million incidents’, 40 milliseconds, 2020, video of performance [reel]. Courtesy of Annette Jacob & Max Mueller Bhavan / Goethe Institut New Delhi.
a circumnavigation (2021)
“the entire world is becoming an archipelago” Edouard Glissant
40 milliseconds - a circumnavigation (2021) featured a complete maritime circumnavigation of Grand Cayman while non-stop drumming, charting a circumference through sound, engaging with the elusive boundaries between land and sea.
a circumnavigation constituted an exercise in futility of demarcation. it explored coastlines that are fractal; in(de)finite and constantly shifting lines enclosing finite areas. it navigated porous borderlands, realms of transition, neither terra firma nor limitless expanse. it teemed with life, thriving in multiple states of in-betweenness.
geographically exhausting the island’s circumference, while physically exhausting the body, the performance used the pretence of conclusion in order to initiate a process of diffusion. it sought to immerse itself into glissant’s archipelagic thinking: the proposal that we should not only acknowledge, but celebrate the rhizomaticity of being - the simultaneity of singularity and radical interdependence.
40 milliseconds - a circumnavigation took place on the 24th of June 2021 aboard the ‘Trinity’ and lasted approximately 8h and 30 mins.
the performance was made possible by the generous support of the palm heights artist residency as well as captain jerry and his team aboard the trinity.
‘a circumnavigation’, 40 milliseconds, 2021, video of performance [archive of live-stream]. Courtesy of Palm Heights, Grand Cayman.
