In 1832 Professor James P Fielding wrote a story about two itinerant travellers, who claimed to have stumbled upon the ninth observatory of Matsyapur. This was a remarkable claim, because it hankered back to a fabled gathering of astronomers at Matsyapur. A gathering whose purpose was to deliberate on the cause of an inscrutable error that had plagued the celestial observations. In their search for this error they decided to interrogate the universe by constructing nine observatories, each to a different scale and each adorned with instruments of cosmic inquiry. The unwavering quantum they searched for was to be called: truti. A measure, so minute that they believed it to be a building block of the universe itself. Five of the nine observatories were hidden amidst the yantras of Maharaja Jai Singh’s creations, three others were plundered and now lie in decay. Only one remained unrecorded, the ninth and the most spectacular of all. It is this observatory that the two travelers told Fielding about. It is this observatory that we seek to recreate, in a series of interactive vignettes played across scales of endless repetition.
DHRUV JANI
Team: Sushant Chakraborty (Programing); Salil Bhayani (Music and Sound); Anant Jani (Editor and Playtester)
The stories displayed here are excerpts from a larger project supported by the India Foundation for the Arts.
Dhruv Jani is the author at and co-founder of a collaborative game studio called Oleomingus, where he works with Sushant Chakraborty. Oleomingus has been creating a sprawling narrative experiment called ‘Somewhere’, which is an anthology of stories about the search for a mythical city called Kayamgadh, and which populates a fictional History that informs all of their other works. They practice at the intersection of post-colonial literature, speculative architecture and games creating stories that seek to understand how spaces, histories and languages respond when expressed within interactive mediums. Dhruv is the recipient of an arts practice grant from the India Foundation for the Arts. The work of Oleomingus is currently being supported by The Irregular Corporation. Dhruv has been an artist-in-residence at Khoj International Arts association in Delhi. He has also created, taught and exhibited games at CONA and SEA in Mumbai, SIDE at Pearl Academy in Jaipur and at Sketchup in Denver. Over the past two years the work of Oleomingus has been featured and discussed in several international videogame journals including Kill Screen’s Emergent series, Rock Paper Shotgun, IGN global, PC gamer and Intel’s IQ display.
This image is embedded in ...
- When is Space? In An Exhibition on Contemporary Architecture Commissioned by Jawahar Kala Kendra, Edited by Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty. Jaipur: Jawahar Kala Kendra, 2018.