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Antariksha Sanchar is the brainchild of Avinash Kumar, one of the founders of the Quicksand Design studio. The idea behind the brand came from a Bharatnatyam dance that his mother (Jayalakshmi Eshwar) had created, wherein the Indian mathematician Ramanujan receives a divine quest requiring him to embark on a Nava Graha Yatra (a spiritual pilgrimage through the 9 planets of our solar system).

This idea was taken forward by Avinash, who envisioned the story of the dance performance as a point and click video game showcasing the vibrant culture and vast mythologies of South India. While the game itself has undergone multiple iterations and aesthetic changes, but at its core remains faithful to the idea of exploring and showing South Indian culture.

A. Kumar and J. Eshwar

the redbull show and the album

Antariksha Sanchar is a transmedia project and one of the forms that it manifested itself as is India’s first fantasy Bharatanatyam dance opera realized together by Jayalakshmi Eshwar, Avinash Kumar and Shri Rama Murthy (Murthovic).

The dance show comprises a stunning mix of modern technology and modes of storytelling fused with the traditional roots that this story and dance show have in Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music. This story chronicles Ramanujan taking on the massive task of performing the Nava Graha Yatra. Through his journey we are led into the stories, myths, traditions and legends of South India as he searches for a way to travel through the universe. He does this by harnessing the power of music and the nectar from the tree of life. He learns different ways of making musical machines that can power his spaceship and the show concludes with him taking off to explore worlds unknown.

The show was choreographed by Jayalakshmi Eshwar. The visuals, which served as a backdrop and accompaniment for the dance, were created by a team of artists headed by Avinash Kumar. The music was composed by Murthovic, a fusion of modern electronic music with the traditional Carnatic music.

The show also saw the release of two albums, Transmissions in Space Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, one being the music of the dance show and the second volume being a reimagining of music made by Indian musicians and producers.

The music video presented here is for the song “Amrita Lahiri” from Transmissions in Space Vol. 1

ramanujan

“While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing.”

- Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a prodigy in mathematics born in Tamil Nadu in 1887. His major contributions to mathematics lay in the field of game theory which remains unrivalled to this day. His contributions span multiple mathematical fields, including complex analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions.

He also attributed his mathematical research to the goddess Namagiri. He said that he would get the mathematical equations that he was working on through his dreams.

various incarnations of Ramanujan

The Ramanujan in the story of Antariksha Sanchar also has such dreams where the goddess gives him knowledge on what his life’s mission is and how to attain it. He repeatedly taps into the power of his dream to learn new things about himself and the cosmos.

When Avinash first described him to me, my interpretation of Ramanujan was of an incredibly curios child with an affinity for tinkering. It almost felt like a character out of a children’s book or a fairy tale. It was this basic image of Ramanujan that would come to the forefront repeatedly over the course of the project as I designed for the film and animated it as well.

The fact that he was a child in my story meant that there was room for a significant amount of whimsy. Moreover, the video was not particularly constrained by the need to follow a singular narrative thread that made complete logical sense. The music video format is also an ideal medium for such storytelling as it affords an abundant space within which to stretch, warp and explore the flow of narrative.

The same whimsy would extend to how the world that Rama inhabited was designed, adding a bit of humour and imagination. Since he is a tinkerer and inventor and a child, this also applied to the things he worked with and how he designed them.

Designing Ramanujan also meant designing the space that he would occupy. This entailed creating a layout, and giving character to his bedroom. Drawing on inspiration from a variety of references of old Tamil houses, the furniture of that period, I began thinking about the functionality and purpose of Ramanujan’s space. Would he be messy? Would he have a lot of books or just a modest bookshelf? Would he have a lot of pictures of his mathematical and scientific heroes on his walls? A lot of these questions came from looking at the rooms of american teenagers from the 80’s and 90’s.

Rama Design

Rama’s Room

dreams and phenakistoscopes

One of the first things that I did, understandably, was to listen to the track over and over, seeing what stood out to me and seeing if there were specific parts that gave me any hooks for story beats. The major thing that I took away from the track was that it was beautifully repetitive and hypnotic- it sort of drew you in and pulled you into its centre.

The story of Antariksha has a major story beat where the goddess gives information to Ramanujan, telling him how to go about his quest to visit the nine planets of the solar system. He also builds a dream machine at one point, to be more in touch with his dreams and be able to live and remember them in a fuller way.

The hypnotic nature of the track and the story beat about him getting information from the goddess through dreams felt like two pieces that fit together perfectly. I started making story beats around this idea and the final narrative came down to Rama getting garbled dreams, him figuring out how to perceive them correctly and then finally building the vimanas to go to space.

While looking at early forms of moving images like the zoetrope and phenakistoscopes, there is a certain allure to these old looking animations. The circular motion and the constant action that is happening in every direction in a phenakistoscope seemed like fertile ground to explore Rama’s dreams and to tell the story in a more abstract way. The phenakistoscope is basically all the frames of a animation laid out on a circular surface and when rotated, the drawings come to life and you have this wonderful spinning hypnotic image.

Early Phenakistoscope

The first thing to do then, was to design the dream machine. This machine would allow Rama to make sense of the dreams that the goddess was sending her messages through.

After Rama, this was one of the first things that I set out to design. The steampunk look with clear indications of South Indian iconography here has informed a lot of the design choices that I would make later on.

Most of the inspiration for this dream machine comes from the hardware side of video and sound synthesis, as at that time I was just starting to down the wonderful rabbit hole that is hardware modular synthesizers and making music with them.

The Dream Machine

The phenakistiscopes were a little harder to crack, as I wanted to insert the larger narrative of the dance show itself, hidden away in these fantastical dream sequences. The dreams that he gets, in order of how they appear in the video, are of the goddess instructing Rama to go on the Nava Graha Yatra, her explaining and revealing the secrets of flight, showing him the tree of life, and in the last one(a intricate one) taking elements from the previous ones and showing them to us in a burst of climactic colour.

Dream Phenakistoscopkes

the vimanas

The Vimanas are the flying vehicles of Gods and Heroes in Hindu mythology and legends. They are also spoken about in the Vedas, and there is a manual on vimanas, classifying and describing them and also providing some instructions on how to effectively pilot them.

Ramanujan’s vimanas in Antariksha Sanchar, instead of being vehicles to ascend to the heavens, are space ships that will take him to the planets to complete his Yatra. They are still powered by the supernatural forces of music and the essence from the tree of life. In the dance show, the vimana that Rama uses is heavily inspired by South Indian temple architecture such as the Meenakshi temple.

The vimanas in the music video are more driven by the idea that these were made by a child. They are built at home and have very strong South Indian influences. They all are in some way controlled and driven by a piece of a musical instrument. The controls could be the plucked strings of a sitar, a flute or the keys of a harmonium.

Depiction of a Vimana

Concepts for the Vimanas

Rama’s Vimana