Where this breaks
Zariia comes out of a long practice and does the opposite of it in four ways. The divergences are the reason it exists.
Zariia is made by Prayas Abhinav — teacher, artist, toolmaker, in Ahmedabad. Twenty years of that work sits behind this page, and every project on it shares four properties. Each one can be finished alone. Each is given away entire. Each is built so a stranger can check it. Each accumulates.
Zariia does none of the four. It cannot be finished alone, because a compilation from an invited session does not exist until other people are in a room. It is not given away entire, because half of it opens only with a key. It cannot be checked from outside, because there is no principle it defers to and no institution behind it. And it is built to resist accumulation, since a label with a release schedule has already become the wrong thing.
The practice circled this for a long time, and did it once. Masking, in 2012, put a key into an object and a private layer inside a public page — then set the form down for fourteen years without making anything with it. That is the honest account of where this comes from, and it is different from an inheritance.
What it breaks from — and the one place it does not
Masking
prayasabhinav.net/design2012. Objects with USB security keys embedded in them, opening layers of private conversation inside public websites — hardware authentication for privacy-preserving communication. Shown at Transmediale in Berlin and the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna.
The convergence. The one strand that does not diverge. Masking already put the gate at the reading rather than at the object: the page stayed public, the second layer opened only for whoever held the thing, and the thing had to go into somebody's hand. Zariia is that arrangement in sound. What separates them is that Masking's key was hardware — losable, lendable, confiscable — where a per-drop key copies perfectly and cannot be called back, and that it was a concept exhibited rather than a catalogue released. That last one is the difference between showing a form is possible and having to live inside it.
Ever
prayasabhinav.net/everA twelve-month mentorship pathway — "helping things happen that wouldn't otherwise". You apply by answering two questions: what are you making, and what is the gap you cannot close on your own.
The divergence. Ever and a session both refuse the credential at the door. After that they part. In Ever the thing being given is his — his attention, his twelve months, his judgement about what would help. He can convene it whenever he decides to. In a session he has nothing to give and is not the one making the work. Four or five people have to say yes, and if they do not, there is no record. He is the one who needs something here.
Visual Art
prayasabhinav.net/visual-art87 photographs across six series, and 41 paintings. Tracing Emptiness Through the City's Walls; a single concrete interior observed across the hours of one day.
The divergence. 87 photographs and 41 paintings made by one person who needed nobody's permission and nobody's presence. A camera in an empty concrete interior is the purest form of the practice: complete authorship, complete control, and the room is a subject rather than a participant. A session inverts every part of that. Authorship is shared and may not include him at all, and the room is not being observed — it is making the thing.
Design
prayasabhinav.net/designExperience design, product and interaction, platforms — and participatory design as its own named strand. The permanent installations at Mumbai Airport T2 were curated by Rajeev Sethi.
The divergence. In participatory design he holds the frame and the participants work inside it. At T2 he was inside somebody else's curation. Zariia is neither. A label is a patron, which is not a metaphor: it creates obligations to named people about money, credit and rights, settled before the invitation rather than after. No previous strand of this practice ever owed anyone anything.
Koher
koher.appA ten-year practice building free, open-source tools that keep a real outside in the room. Transparent costs, open core, no exit ramps.
The divergence. This is the sharp one, and it is close to an opposition. Koher is free, open, no exit ramps, and the whole point is that nothing is held back from anyone. Zariia holds something back on purpose. The open track is a complete free song and the sealed channel's presence is declared rather than hidden, but the mechanism is still a gate, and the curatorial note refuses the comfortable reading of it. This is the first thing here that is deliberately incomplete for most people who encounter it.
Split-Domain Cognition
splitdomaincognition.orgThe principle underneath the tools: language work and judgement work are two unlike kinds of thinking, and failures follow when one channel is asked to do both.
The divergence. SDC is a claim argued in public, positioned against Hume and Dijkstra and Kahneman, and it stands or falls on whether it holds. Zariia can make no such appeal. A label that convenes rooms produces its authority out of the encounters themselves, with no external principle to defer to and nothing a stranger can audit. A record persuades or it does not. For a practice built on being inspectable, that is a considerable thing to give up.
zetizeti
zetizeti.comThe principle running as software — a standalone product with its own brand, deliberately not a Koher tool.
The divergence. Both make the position enforceable in code rather than declaring it, and there the resemblance ends. zetizeti's guards point inward, limiting what the tool may do to a student — a restraint on the maker's own power. Zariia's lock points outward and sorts an audience into those who were handed something and those who were not. One reduces a hierarchy. The other creates one, which is why the risk is named rather than denied.
Museum of Vestigial Desire
museumofvestigialdesire.net2012–2021. Practitioner philosophy through fragmented essays — an archive that was never an institution.
The divergence. The Museum spent nine years cataloguing vestigial desires — its own definition calls them auto-triggered, recurrent, and productive of instability — and framed that labour as the garbage collection culture could not do for itself. Something that keeps returning and never gets acted on was material for the archive. Zariia is the first time the response to one is to go and do it instead of filing it.
What the site is made of
Type
Antic Didone for display only — the wordmark, headings, and the lede. It is a didone, and its hairlines are drawn for large sizes; it carried the running prose here until July 2026, which is what made long passages tiring to read. EB Garamond now takes the running text, and Cutive Mono the labels and machinery. All three are open-licensed and self-hosted here, so no page needs a third-party request to render. The player is the one exception, and only for the neural codec, which it says on the page.
The chord
Fired earthenware — black slip, clay body, terracotta as a mass, bone slip as the painted line, and a Moroccan blue-teal as the cold counter-voice. Drawn from zellij and pierced lanterns, Kutchi pottery, Greek registers and the matryoshka.
The carrier
A normal FLAC file. The audio is the open track byte for byte; the sealed channel rides in application metadata blocks, bound to its track and sealed with AES-256-GCM. The player runs entirely in the page — nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored.
This site
Nine static pages, no build step, no trackers, no analytics, no cookies. A first visit costs about 36 KB.
What it owes
The Flaming Lips, for Zaireeka — four discs meant to play at once on four machines, which is where both the name and the idea that a record might need other people come from. The name, at length ▸
The baithak — the invited room, which has held music in this part of the world for far longer than any label has, and which is the real precedent for what happens at a session. How the rooms are made ▸
Everyone who has passed something along by hand — the tape circles, the bone records cut into discarded X-ray film, the cassettes that crossed a country faster than a censor could follow. What this is an instance of ▸
Zariia is Prayas Abhinav's, and so is everything on this site unless it says otherwise. The carrier is open. Get in touch at me@prayas.in, or find the rest of the practice at prayasabhinav.net.