Palace of the Winds (2003)

Vipin Vijay's Palace of the Winds is a poetic essay about that "Holy Little Box," the radio, conceived of as a ghostly transmitter of Indian cultural artifacts. Crossing histories, regions, and ages, the radio, in Vijay's view, has "the power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber." Like an errant transmission, this keenly configured work criss-crosses stories like a flick of the dial: here a female singer prevented from singing live at the station, there a lonely housewife who alleviates her husband's absence with the sound of AM; a DJ calling out, a child prodigy from the forties who impersonated the female voice. "Radio here is a liberal instrument, it might be your extended organ, it can move with you, it is transparent as a dream, an oral dream."