Cult, cosmos, and craft at a Thai art academy

‘Cult, cosmos, and craft at a Thai art academy’ is part of a collective experiment in digital composition published within this double special issue of TAJA. Our aim has been to ignite and enable novel forms of social analysis. We invited contributors to creatively rethink the form of the academic article with us and built a custom-designed website to host the results. All original research contributions in this collection are made up of two parts: a digital article and its author/s' exegetical commentary. They have been peer reviewed as a pair. (See our introduction, ‘Epistemic attunements: Experiments in intermedial anthropology’, for an extended discussion of the rationale behind this adventure in ‘off-grid’ scholarship and why the digital article on the Curatorium website is not available as a pdf.)

Access the digital article here: https://curatorium.au/taja-journal/form-content/cult-cosmos-craft. Or by clicking the link in this note.¹

Read the authors' commentary below.

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We should begin by saying what has led us to compose our multimedia web article on khrop khru (‘covered by the guru’), an annual rite in Thailand's craft and vocational academies. Kirin Narayan and Ken George have been pursuing an ethnographic and historical study of Vishwakarma worship in India and beyond since 2017 and teamed up that year with Anthony Lovenheim Irwin—a specialist on Theravada Buddhism and material culture—to lead research into Thailand, where the Hindu-Buddhist deity Vishwakarma is known as Phra Witsanukam. No matter where research has taken us, Vishwakarma is celebrated as the patron deity of artisans, technicians, architects, engineers, and others whose livelihood relies on tools, machines, and fabrication—like the graduates of Thailand's vocational academies. Beyond its obvious relevance to regional studies, the broader aim of our ethnographic and comparative work on Vishwakarma worship has been to recuperate the role of technē and material culture in lived religion and lived cosmology. Our multimedia article, ‘Cult, cosmos, and craft at a Thai art academy’, is in keeping with that aim. For the purposes of this special issue of TAJA on ‘Epistemic attunements’, we also have taken steps to align and shape the article's collaborative design process with the cosmo-technical dispositions of Phra Witsanukam's devotees.

In contrast to more-than-human approaches in multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, sensory ethnography, and affect theory—where ‘attunement’ has gained such methodological and analytic traction—we attune to the numinous, the luminous, the machine, and the tool, and the way devotees dwell, and indeed, attune with them and with each other. For this reason, in this essay, we have been drawn especially to the haptic core of khrop khru, in which a master teacher and devotee of Phra Witsanukam uses their hands to cover and guide the working hand and tool of a student artisan in fashioning an object or image. That ritual gesture is an occasion in which the ‘covering’ presence of Phra Witsanukam is immanent in the substance, surface, design, and touch of crafted objects and craft activity. Here, the act of making an image or other objects visibly aligns the world and cosmos.

Working in the extended world of Vishwakarma and his followers has shown us that one of the ways people attune to the divine is through acts of crafting, construction, and artmaking. Khrop khru ritual puts focus on hand-based fabrication in a variety of forms and gives rise to a socio- and cosmo-technological assemblage we call ‘khrop khru society’. Participation in khrop khru ritual, which serves as initiation into that society, attunes new students to the divine, their teachers, the tools of their respective trades, and to their fellow initiates—creating cosmo-social networks and presenting specific ways of learning and being in the world. The three of us (Irwin, George and Narayan) were inducted into khrop khru society in ceremonies held at Rajamangala University of Technology, Lanna (Techno Chiang Mai) in late July 2019. We do not say so in order to claim privileged understanding of or full absorption into a ‘native's point of view’, but rather, to wed and attune khrop khru's cosmo-technical assemblage with the digital platform affordances and design processes that have gone into this article. We hope we have grounded our understanding of khrop khru by cultivating a receptivity to the haptic core of the rite from the time of our fieldwork through the writing-and-design collaboration of our article. That said, our understanding of khrop khru hardly derives from our receptivity to that core alone; we are not attempting a physiognomic reading of core craft objects to reveal the rite's mysteries and reach (cf. Ginzburg 1989, 33–36). Rather, we have come to know the workings of khrop khru, and have cultivated our sensibilities to its textures, through conversations, interviews, photographs, and performances made in the company of Phra Witsanukam's Thai devotees.

Our goal for our contribution to the ‘Epistemic attunements’ curation was to convey to the reader-viewer the haptic, social, and aesthetic aspects of khrop khru ritual by using the visuality and movement of the special issue's web-based, digital platform. We conceived of the digital elements of this article over a number of Zoom sessions with Jennifer Deger, Victoria Baskin Coffey, and Caleb Kingston—pondering how the relatively passive touch-based medium of the internet, with its scrolling and touchscreens, could be enlivened by replicating the touch-based transmission of craft knowledge, disposition, and lineage brought about in khrop khru ritual. We settled on using material remnants of khrop khru ritual from the Department of Thai Painting at Bangkok's Poh Chang Academy of the Arts as an animating visual guide that would enhance readers' journeys as their fingers scrolled through sections of our piece.

In the annual khrop khru rituals held at Poh Chang, new Thai painting students take turns tracing with a pencil the facial outline of the god Phra Sayamphuwanat as their working hands are held by their teachers. These lines of pencil lead build up slowly over the course of the ritual, and result in scores of dark-silvery lines covering the image of the god's face. These lines simultaneously obscure and illuminate the image on the manuscript page, adding texture and shimmer when they catch the light. We found this image to be not only visually striking, but also a captivating material distillation of khrop khru society, and so wanted to replicate in the digital article the slow accretion of pencil lines that takes place throughout the ritual.

Once we settled on a slow building-up of virtual pencil lines, we were faced with the problem of how to create this visually complex element. We asked the professors in the Thai Painting Department at Poh Chang for permission to use the face of Phra Sayamphuwanat as it was repeatedly retraced with lines of glistening pencil lead during khrop khru. They happily gave consent and sent along some images of Phra Sayamphuwanat from their ritual manuscripts to be sure we had high-quality files to work from. Ethnography usually flows from the field to the office. Fieldnotes, memories, photographs, and textual materials are collected onsite, and then collated, synthesised, and analysed at the scholar's desk or screen. Fittingly, for this project on the god of crafting, arts, and design, we brought the field into the printshop and photography studio, where we relied on the skills of specialised masters to bring shape to what we had conceived.

Artist and designer Amelia Toelke cleaned up the image of Phra Sayamphuwanat from the ritual manuscript in Adobe Photoshop so that it could be transferred to a screen for printing. She then produced the screen and spent a day pulling large-format screenprints at the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York. Anthony Lovenheim Irwin joined Toelke as a studio assistant in the printshop, where they made two different sets of prints—the first on off-white paper with dark grey ink, and another on black paper with yellow ink, attempting to mimic the look of different ritual manuscripts used in Poh Chang's khrop khru ritual. Irwin sent photos of the screenprints as they came off the press to the professors at Poh Chang over social media.

With the prints now made, we had to replicate the pencil lines that would build up on the image, and to capture each layer digitally for the web. For this we worked with Heath Iverson, a photographer and filmmaker based at the Purpose Makerspace in Philmont, New York. Toelke, Iverson, and Irwin then spent a full day carefully tracing and retracing the faces of the Phra Sayamphuwanat prints in the order specified by the master teachers at Poh Chang: facial outline, eyes, nose, mouth and, finally, the unalom—the mark of perfect being—placed between and above the eyes and on the god's lingam-shaped crown. We used different pencil thicknesses on different prints, and photographed each tracing individually so that they could later be put together in an animation for the digital article. At this point the specific aesthetics for the digital visual element had not yet been decided upon, so four different tracing sets were created. At the end of the day, we had hundreds of photos and significantly cramped hands. Ultimately, after consulting with Coffey and Kingston about what would work best for the online platform, we settled on the image and pencil lines that most closely resembled the one used in the ritual—black paper with yellow ink, covered with 108 pencil tracings.

The hundreds of images were then sent along to Coffey and Kingston, who have edited and stitched together the individual photos to create the animations that enliven our piece at each new section. Through our collective back-and-forth, we started calling the different sections of the piece ‘layers’ in recognition of how the article builds upon itself, just as the repeated tracings of pencil lead on the face of the god amass into a lustrous image of a divine being.

Our multimedia article begins with an audio-recording of a Thai classical music ensemble (piphat) playing a ritual invocation to the Buddha and Phra Witsanukam. It is accompanied by printed text. A title page follows.

The article then proceeds through ‘layers’ of description, interpretation, and analysis in replication of the layered ritualised tracings that adorn Phra Sayamphuwanat's visage during khrop khru ceremonies. The layers are as follows:

Layer One – Surface Impressions

Layer Two – Why Khrop Khru?

Layer Three – Who is Phra Witsanukam?

Layer Four – Khrop and Khru

Layer Five – The 2019 Khrop Khru at Poh Chang

Layer Six – Lineage and Cult Membership

Layer Seven – Khrop Khru and the Sacralisation of Technicity

Layer Eight – Khrop Khru, Cosmos, and Far-Futurity

Layer Nine – Conclusion

We hope these thematic or topical layers go far in capturing some of the rich textures of khrop khru ritual, and that the animation we have devised in collaboration with the Curatorium Editorial Collective hints at the way khrop khru society is itself a self-attuning assemblage of human, non-human, and divine beings.