COMPOUND OBJECT

Digital Circulations and Shrines (DHUN Gallery 6) Info

VIDEO
This image was created specifically for the Dhun essay (2026) using generative AI tools (ChatGPT/OpenAI) in order to visually synthesize broader digital environments surrounding the contemporary circulation of Rām nām online. Rather than documenting a single real interface, application, or social media feed, the collage functions as a composite interpretive visualization bringing together recurring devotional, aesthetic, political, and technological motifs encountered during the research process. It is included as an analytical and illustrative image reflecting the multisensory and highly mediated circulation of sacred names within contemporary digital media ecologies. The image also forms part of a broader methodological reflection on AI assisted visual mediation within the project. Its compositional excesses, visual inconsistencies, and occasional inaccuracies, including distortions in text rendering and the blending of multiple visual registers, are not treated merely as technical flaws but as analytically revealing features of generative image systems themselves. The collage therefore also reflects how AI models interpret, aggregate, recombine, and reimagine religious imagery through patterns drawn from large scale digital training data, raising further questions about the remediation of religion, synthetic visual cultures, and the growing entanglement between devotional practice, digital infrastructures, and machine generated imaginaries.
IMAGE
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Title:
Digital Circulations and Shrines (DHUN Gallery 6)
Creator:
Piyush Kukrety; Borayin Larios; Kanika Pruthi
Date Created:
2026
Description:
In its digital emanation, the name circulates as pure repetition within networked space, detached from any single physical site yet constantly re-anchored through screens, platforms, and interfaces. It appears as text fragments, hashtags, thumbnails, reels, compressed images, and algorithmically amplified slogans, where visibility is governed less by permanence than by circulation, engagement, and replication. Within these digital environments, the name becomes infrastructural rather than representational. It is embedded in the logics of sharing, forwarding, remixing, and reposting, where devotional utterance and political sign are indistinguishable from content flow. Each repetition is both identical and newly situated, generating a sense of presence that is continuous but dispersed across timelines and feeds. This mode of existence produces a form of presence without centrality: the name does not reside in a single image or authoritative form but persists as distributed signal across platforms. It is experienced through scrolling rather than viewing, through accumulation rather than encounter, and through algorithmic recurrence rather than fixed iconography.
Subjects:
dhun digital essay
Location:
Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India
Latitude:
25.19
Longitude:
82.59
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.57754/FDAT.ghg0b-e6k30
Attribution
Citation:
"Digital Circulations and Shrines (DHUN Gallery 6)", OMnibus of MANTRAMS, MANTRAMS - Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global Southern Asia, https://omnibus.mantrams.eu/items/dhun-g6.html
Rights
Standardized Rights:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/