2011

Artist / Author: Raqs Media Collective

Title: The Untold Intimacy of Digits (U.I.D.)

Photo: Raqs Media Collective

The Untold Intimacy of Digits projects a moving image of the floating trace of a larger-than-life disembodied hand indexed in a distant archive, persisting in its arithmetic, counting to infinity.

The image animates the handprint of a man part contractor, part peasant named Raj Konai which was taken in 1858 under the orders of William Herschel – scientist, statistician, and at the time, a revenue official with the Bengal government. It was then sent by Herschel to Francis Galton, a London eugenicist and pioneer of identification technologies. It is currently in the custody of the Francis Galton Collection of the University College of London. This archive where the Raqs collective first encountered the image of Raj Konai’s hand. Fingerprinting experiments, and later technologies, all began with this handprint.

India embarked on a nationwide Unique Identification Database (UID) initiative using biometric markers, (including fingerprints and iris scans) in 2010 and plans to have its billion plus population counted and indexed in entirety. When completed, it will be the largest biometric database in the world. UID, the work by Raqs, is an allegory, in shorthand, about the deep ancestry of UID (in Raj Konai’s hand print) and the folly of the intimate invasion of bodily privacy that underpins this desire to count the uncountable.

Raqs Media Collective acts in time, altering rhythms, changing directions, accelerating, deepening or stretching temporal experience with images, works, situations and processes that deal with the toxic energies as well as the caring imperatives of the current moment and the many histories that lead up to it. Their work and conversations range across several media, pursuing curiosities, playing with words, images and concepts, thinking the unthought, sensing and feeling new ways of life in a changing world.