Audio-Visual Artists Murthovic and Thiruda Unveil New Project Elsewhere In India

Following collaborations that ranged from a videogame called Antara to a Bharatnatyam dance opera like Antariksha Sanchar, producer Murthovic aka M.S.R. Murthy and visual artist Thiruda aka Avinash Kumar have now emerged with a third thread to their universe, an audio-visual performance project called Elsewhere In India.

With the debut performance taking place at Magnetic Fields Festival in Rajasthan this week, Elsewhere In India pulls together ideas of decolonization, Indian heritage as well as artificial intelligence and Carnatic-electronic fusion, among other concepts. Thiruda credits their dive into vast topics around Indian cultural heritage and working with gaming engines as reasons why every project is so multi-faceted. “I think with both Murthy and my projects, we have multiple interests in the work that we do which allow for all kinds of musical genres, audiovisual kind of work and different mediums,” he adds.

For Murthovic, projects like Elsewhere In India are the best way to find a way to present something that’s evolved (and evolving) with electronic music and not just put out a standard album full of songs. It’s about storytelling and “embracing new technologies” for the seasoned Hyderabad-bred producer.

The “speculative fantasy” show is described as a series of adventures undertaken by the project’s protagonist Meenakshi, who is an “out-of-work cultural cyborg” in the year 2079. Murthovic and Thiruda called on existing artists at Antariksha Studios as well as over 40 artists from South India and Shantiniketan in West Bengal. Murthovic says he met with folk musicians who practice their art for livelihood and to carry forward their traditions and also sampled archival sounds sourced from British and Indian museums.

When they were already seven months into working on Elsewhere In India during the pandemic, they applied for and received a grant from British Council’s cultural exchange program India/UK Together Season of Culture 2022-23. Thiruda feels what worked in their favor is that they were exploring “serious intellectual topics” like decolonizing and “digital repatriation” but through a game and performance art. “[We’re] also talking to young people in India in a casual and entertaining manner,” he adds.

That explains why they’re invited by everyone from Magnetic Fields Festival to rooms in the U.K. to museum galleries in Australia to a science festival in Hyderabad, among other venues to showcase Elsewhere In India. Murthovic and Thiruda also have a club-specific set curated as a side project, reflecting “currently evolving trends of the dancefloor,” as Murthovic terms it.

Visually, Thiruda says there’s the story itself that he binds together, highlighting themes of cultural artificial intelligence and at the future of A.I. and also the intersect of A.I. and art creation. “We do expect the show to evolve over the next six to nine months as we take it to other parts of India and abroad,” he adds. There are shows in Australia, the U.K. and Europe confirmed to kick in from February onwards. “The advantage of working in this format is that every show doesn’t need to be the same, which in itself is quite boring. When it’s only the two of us, we have real flexibility that we can also improvise in each show and that’s part of the plan,” Thiruda adds.