symphony of whistles blows through the darkened room at the NED University City Campus, recalling a windy night in a vast desert, or a particularly breezy day in the over-constructed city of Karachi. Clay pots upon trays made of clay line the floor in various arrangements. With wires running through them, these make up the display made by a team of artists called the Invisible Flock and musician Fakir Zulfiqar, along with craftsman Allah Jurrio.

Ben Eaton, a digital artist representing the Invisible Flock at the Karachi Biennale 2022 (KB22) explains the piece as a one of the many that the collective’s area of interest has led them to.

“Most of our work is about the natural world or the environment in some way and how we exist or coexist within it. And we’re very interested, particularly, in the roles of culture within that,” he says.

With this particular piece, Invisible Flock brings the centuries-old Tharri instrument borindo to present-day, experimenting with what exactly can be achieved when 200 borindos tune in and respond to the sound they receive.

Fakir Zulfiqar’s father, Eaton tells Instep, is credited for rediscovering the instrument, which dates back to at least 4000 years. Working with Allah Jurrio, Zulfiqar’s father recreated and modified the borindo, adding more holes to the little pot that is blown into to create music.

Apart from the very technological aspect of this work, which is in line with the exploration of how digital advances inform communities, economies, and art, and vice versa at KB22, Invisible Flock also work with the themes of legacy and the inherent differences between eastern and western instruments.

“They’ve made 200 individual borindos for us,” says Eaton. “And then we have created these small electronic circuits, that are playing very quiet sounds into them, that tune to each instrument’s resonant frequencies. So that means that it’s the frequency of sound to which they vibrate.”

While serving the KB22 vision, the piece also serves as an expression of Invisible Flock’s interest in the effects of interaction between objects, people, and places. Each borindo, handmade as it is, has to be slightly different. As sound is introduced to this network of instruments, each one echoes back a different vibration. Not to get too philosophical about this, but there seems to be an interesting side result of observing how the same things might hit different people differently, who in turn would change or react to each shift in their own unique way. Supposing that Invisible Flock had no intention to comment on human nature/nature/life and its many intricacies, it still is humbling that art in any medium, of any scale can mean different things to different people. That in fact, the sound sculpture, as it is referred to, is so meta, that you could keep coming back to it and walking away with a different thought every time.

Though a digital artwork in its final iteration, one of the thoughts behind this work is that of preserving legacy.

Eaton points out, “Fakir is not a young man, nor is Allah Jurrio, though the former has an apprentice, but [at this point they are] the only craftsmen to be working with this instrument and there is a risk of cultural extinction.”

The interest in the borindo arose from a multitude of other concerns. Apart from thinking about the lack of notation or record indigenous music and instruments may have, Invisible Flock found themselves interested in the notes that these instruments play as well.

“I became very interested in the idea of older practitioners performing this type of music that stretches back hundreds and hundreds, thousands of years potentially, but because there’s no formal form of notation it’s muted. This is the music traditionally passed down master to apprentice, and when they die, those sounds will also disappear,” Eaton elaborates.

“I was very interested in to how there was a relationship between that and the wider extinction of sounds like birds that were also undergoing globally,” he says. “And so, I was quite interested in that idea of what these practices are, and exploring new ways we can interact with them, activate them and preserve them.”

It might seem too obvious, but of course this digital upscaling of a local instrument seems to put a fine point on how the world and the people in it evolve so rapidly, that we barely have time to register it. In that, we may want to take stock every now and then of what is too important to be lost, too precious to be forgotten, and what we can, if we can, allow to evolve with us into every next phase of life.

– The Karachi Biennale 2022 is open to public with exhibits across the city. Visit karachibiennale.org.pk for specific locations and programming.