Tiny Elephants

Big-hearted little ghosts who live inside walls and turn the wheels of the world. Come and stroke their heads — they will tickle you back.

Tiny elephants are big-hearted little ghosts who live in the hollows of things — inside walls, between bricks. Day and night they turn the wheels of the world with their trunks, keeping it spinning on its axis. Trapped like a mill horse in a yoke, they sometimes grow emotional, stumble, sit down and cry, or go on strike — and that is how leap years are born. So, for the world to keep turning, the tiny elephants need to be cheered with false hopes, tickled now and then and fed with peanuts.

Tiny Elephants is a group of characters from my novel Gurultu (Rumble), brought to life here with new media tools and artificial intelligence. The work is a box with a red silk scarf stretched over a rectangular hoop. A motor mechanism sits in the cavity beneath it and a Kinect sensor above detects the visitor's hand. When the visitor touches the silk, the motors under their palm push the fabric back, answering with tiny, living touches.

I started writing the novel while working as an engineer inside a large company: a system that had taken on the personality of a corporation, spread across dimensions in layer upon layer of hierarchy, where everyone has to work and be useful. The little ghosts in its walls keep the world turning — until a rebel ghost tries to lead them out.

Surrounded by four walls, breathless and captive, dying and resurrecting, squeezing an elephant into a tiny hole — the work speaks of workers imprisoned in their duties, modern slaves, women locked in their homes, earthquake survivors calling for help under the rubble, and everyone hemmed in by walls, visible or invisible.