On September 2, 1882, William Jennings made the first known photograph of lightning in Philadelphia; the glass-plate negative revealed that it branched like a river system. In that same year, 1882, Kinthup (archival code K.P.), a tailor from Sikkim, accepted a commission from Captain Harman of the Survey of India to drop fve hundred marked logs into the upper reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo Gorge, in order to ascertain whether it and the Brahmaputra River were in fact one and the same watercourse. Downstream lies the Assam Plain. From the 1830s onward, the British Empire, seeking to free itself from dependence on Chinese tea, turned this river valley into an alternative production zone. The Empire planted tea at the very outlet of the river. The membrane on the surface of this work is precisely bacterial cellulose cultured in the infusion of Assam black tea: the bacteria synthesise cellulose fbrils layer by layer on the liquid surface, and the tea colour is gradually compressed into the membrane as it grows. The undulating relief is derived from measured elevations of the entire river basin; after the moist pellicle is laid over the moulded terrain, it shrinks upon drying and tightens itself into every crevasse, much like lightning. At the precise location where the logs were once released, a tunnel now pierces through the mountain, and the river’s fow is converted into electricity by a five-stage turbine unit, to be transmitted to distant cities. Water has taken millions of years to trace its meandering course; electricity takes but a single instant to travel in a straight line.
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