credits

Credits

Who made Zariia, what the site is made of, and what it owes.

Heavy handwoven cloth in deep folds, terracotta and dark teal running through it.
Two threads in one weave, and neither hidden.

Zariia is made by Prayas Abhinav — teacher, artist, toolmaker, in Ahmedabad.

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 the site is made of

The fired-earthenware chord: five colour masses, warm light on a dark ground, with the cold counter-voice black slip clay body terracotta bone slip moroccan blue
The chord, drawn as it is used: five masses, wobbled and overlapping, none of them a line. Four are fired earth. The fifth is cold, and it is where the sealed channel lives.

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

Four things Zariia is indebted to: four simultaneous discs, the baithak, the bone record, and the passed cassette four at once zaireeka, 1997 the invited room the baithak cut into an x-ray bone records passed by hand tape circles
The four debts, drawn together. Three of them moved the object and let whoever held it hear everything on it. Zariia moves the gate inward: the object travels whole, and the key is what passes hand to hand.

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 gathering, which has held music in this part of the world for far longer than any label has, and where one thing is said in the open and another only to whoever is present.

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 [email protected], or find the rest of the practice at prayasabhinav.net.