ILA TYAGI is a Writing Lecturer at Yale-NUS College and a scholar of film studies. She has lived in Kuwai, India, the United States, and Singapore.
In this conversation, we discussed:
Ila's disseration on film and the American oil industry
the unusually rare phenomenon of women eating on screen
the cultural construction of good writing
This conversation was conducted in 2019 and has been lightly edited for clarity.
JY 00:15
This week, Lecture Theatre pays a visit to Yale-NUS College. It's the mid-semester recess, so it's all quiet on campus. We meet our guest, Ila Tyagi, at the Oculus, a circular fountain entrance, before meandering through pathways in the courtyards and wood-panelled corridors, before we finally get to Ila's office. Ila is a scholar of film studies and joined the college just last year as a writing lecturer. Ila, welcome to our podcast.
Ila 00:51
Hi, Jun Yan. Thanks for having me.
JY 00:54
So tell us more about about your life story. How did you become an academic?
Ila 00:59
That's a long story. So long, in fact that I would need to go back to the previous generation to tell it—specifically to my mother. My mother never finished college and has also never worked. So while I was growing up, she was keen that I have all of the opportunities that she didn't have herself. She wanted me not just to finish college, but also to be as educated as it's possible—to have a terminal degree like a PhD. She also wanted me to be financially independent career woman. So when I was growing up, being a good student was non-negotiable. I had to work hard on my studies, which I did. But by the time I got up to my final year of college, I was somewhat resistant to the idea of going any further.I wasn't feeling too enthusiastic about getting a master's degree or a PhD. I had been a student more or less my whole life at that point and was eager to work for a change—to earn money instead of spending it. So after graduating from college, I got my first real job. I worked as an account executive as a public relations firm in Manhattan. I quickly realized that I was not a good fit for the corporate life, though, and grew to hate it over time. I hated being chained to a desk for a minimum of nine hours a day, often more. I hated how I was constantly pressed for time, I hated the tedium of the work itself. The work managed to be both incredibly dull and presented as absurdly high-stakes at the same time. So my work life consisted of long stretches of boredom interspersed with periods of intense panic. I hated having no control over what I was assigned to work on. And so I found myself missing the privileges of student life. Like being able to work on something I was actually interested in, instead of something my boss had assigned to me. And instead of always being busy, having the leisure to just sit on my couch and think about big ideas.
JY 02:55
So how do you go back to school?
Ila 02:58
So after working as a PR executive for a little over a year, I was ready to go back to school. I applied for only one Master's program at Columbia, since I was living in New York at the time. And luckily, I got into that one master's program that I applied to. My undergraduate major had been English literature, but I felt that my interests had evolved in the year or so since college. I knew I still wanted to study some humanities field, but I didn't want it to be English literature anymore. I like that the Columbia Master's program in American Studies gave me a lot of freedom and flexibility to explore and develop new interests. Since American Studies is such an interdisciplinary field, I was able to take classes not just on literature, but also on architecture, on history and on film. When I finished my two year Master's at Columbia, I felt my interest in film was sufficiently developed to apply to PhD programs in film studies. So I applied to 11 PhD programs and ended up getting into four—each in a different corner of America. Well, I got into one program in Michigan, one in Texas, one in Connecticut, and one in California. And since I like flying, it was fun to zigzag across the whole country visiting all four campuses. It came down to the University of Southern California program in LA and the Yale program in New Haven. I was dying to live in LA; I can't think of a better city in which to study film. So choosing between those two programs was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made. But Yale's academic prestige eventually won and I went to New Haven. Since I was an international student in America, another factor that influenced my decision was knowing that it might be easier for me to get a job abroad if I went to Yale, than to USC, since the Yale name carries better internationally. And I think I made the right decision. My five years of Yale were the five happiest years of my life. I was so happy there that I hoped to find a job at an institution that was as much like Yale as possible, while ideally still being different enough to be interesting, and I think I found that with my current job as a faculty member at Yale-NUS.
JY 05:03
So most listeners will probably be unfamiliar with the field of film studies, as opposed to film production, so can you say a bit more about what the discipline is about?
Ila 05:15
Yeah, film studies as an academic discipline is different from film practice. If I were a practitioner, I would actually be shooting movies. But as a film scholar, I instead research film history, film theory and film aesthetics. Film history entails film production, film, distribution and film exhibition in their historical context, answering questions like for example, how did other visual media like television pose a threat to Hollywood movies in the 1950s? Film theory involves developing and applying a range of academic frameworks to cinema. For instance, Laura Mulvey, the male gaze. Laura Mulvey theorized that the camera's gaze replicates a heterosexual man's gaze and the way women are displayed on screen as objects to be looked at. There are lots of scholarly film theories, but the male gaze is a big one. And film aesthetics is close reading the images themselves, that is studying what the effect is of various decisions the filmmakers made regarding how the image would be framed, or how the image would be lit, or what colors would be in the image, how the images would be edited together, and so on.
JY 06:26
So have you actually made any films yourself?
Ila 06:29
I've never actually made any films except for one experimental short that my friend and I made for an art class that we took in our freshman year of college. Neither of us knew how to edit films. And so we shot each scene in the same sequence in which we wanted it to appear in the final film. And we would just stop the camera when the scene was over and start the camera again, ready to shoot the next scene. It was very basic. More experience with actually making films would help my work as a film scholar. But I don't think it's essential. In the same way that I don't think a literature scholar needs to have actually written a novel themselves to still have valuable insights about the texts that they study.
JY 07:06
So why do you think film studies scholarship is so important? Why does it matter?
Ila 07:12
I think film scholarship is important for a number of reasons. But the primary one is that without film scholarship, our collective cultural memory of old films would be lost. I sometimes ask my students what the oldest film they've ever seen is. And the answer can be somewhat depressing for me to hear, when they say things like Juno or Legally Blonde. Students who are currently college-aged were born roughly around the year 2000. It's rare for them to have seen any film older than the year 2000, when in fact, there's an entire century of moviemaking prior to that. Of course, it's not entirely their fault because it is hard to find old films on streaming services like Netflix. So if film scholars didn't teach film classes, it would be easy to forget that old films even exist. So I see my role as being to ensure that we don't forget about that century of filmmaking from the 1890s to the 1990s. And this is related, but I think of myself as much more of a film historian than a theorist. That historical period I'm most interested in is called the classical Hollywood era. Its classical rather than classic because it shares qualities of compositional symmetry and stylistic restraint with ancient Greek and Roman art. Classical Hollywood covers the period in American filmmaking roughly between 1917 to 1960, so about 40 years. I especially like black and white movies from the 30s and 40s, when classical Hollywood, also known as the studio era, reached its apotheosis. And I think my interest in keeping the memory of all films alive came about when I was growing up in Kuwait. There was little to do in Kuwait for fun when I was living there. So when I was at school, I was usually at home watching the Turner Classic Movies channel on TV. TCM is where I first started watching old black and white movies. That sparked my love for them. And that's the ambition, the vision—that keeping their memory alive — that kind of drives my professional work.
JY 09:13
So a shout-out to TCM fans! What are the prospects for film studies in Singapore? What has been your experience been studying film here, or teaching film studies classes ?
Ila 09:29
I haven't actually taught any film studies courses in Singapore, although I plan to teach where next spring called Hollywood in the 1930s. I've only been here for a few months, but I get the sense that Singapore is overflowing with cinephiles—in that every screening I attended at the Singapore International Film Festival last fall was packed. And my students seem receptive to taking film classes as well. They know that my PhD is in Film and Media Studies. So they have already asked me if I plan to teach any film courses that at Yale-NUS in the future. I've told them about the Hollywood one I have planned. So I'm hopeful about the prospects for Film Studies at Yale-NUS and in Singapore.
JY 10:05
So let's talk a bit more about your dissertation, on films produced by the American oil industry. I had no idea that the oil industry was in the business of producing films. So tell us a bit more about what the dissertation is about and what it can teach us in a time where fossil fuel companies are under heightened scrutiny.
Ila 10:28
Yeah, I got the idea for doing a dissertation on how energy resources represented in visual culture when I was working on my Master's degree. At the time, environmental humanities was still an emerging field. But in the past 10 to 15 years it has exploded, and is now pretty established. I had always been interested in oil as a result of living in Kuwait. My dad was a marine pilot for the Kuwait oil company before he retired. And like I said, I was also interested in movies at the same time. So I like the idea of a research project that united my two interests in films and fossil fuels. And the central question that my project is trying to answer is, what visual tools are adequate for representing the global oil industry? I was working with the assumption that the global oil industry is difficult to visualize for a variety of reasons, like the fact that it's spread out all over the world. The fact that oil itself is very deep underground and drilled for in remote locations. The fact that the oil industry is not at all transparent, it deliberately hides behind smokescreens to conceal as much of its inner workings as possible from everyone, from political officials at the top, down to the public. So the main premise of my dissertation is that the oil industry's opaqueness poses a significant challenge to visibility, but that tools of visual technology can overcome this barrier and help us see the oil industry more clearly. I thought that seeing the oil industry more clearly would have two benefits. It would help us better understand the representative potential of moving images as a visual medium, and it would highlight the strategies that the oil industry uses to conceal its corrupt practices from view.
JY 12:06
So can you take us through the structure of your argument? How do you develop an argument in a film studies dissertation?
Ila 12:16
Each of my dissertation's for chapters focuses on one distinct type of visual footage and one type of visual tools to represent the oil industry. The chapters are arranged in chronological order. The first chapter features classical Hollywood movies from the first decades of the 20th century. The second chapter features mid-century propaganda shorts produced by the American Petroleum Institute. And in the early Cold War era, that is in the late 1940s, the 1950s and early 60s, it hired filmmakers to make movies whose message was that oil was the foundation of the American economy, and was critical for safeguarding the values of the capitalist free world. So these short movies were basically advertisements for capitalism, and many of them are available on YouTube and they're fascinating to watch.
My third chapter is about environmental documentaries, tracing the long-term ecological damage of catastrophes like oil spills, the Exxon Valdez oil spill in the 80s. And the more recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. After the Deepwater Horizon spill happened, the oil company BP actually banned any aircraft from flying over it, because they didn't want any aerial photographs that would reveal the full extent of the spill to become public, which is the kind of thing I mean when I say that the oil industry is a blind spot posing a challenge to visibility by deliberately concealing itself from you.
And my fourth and final chapter is about a cutting-edge pilot program that BP ran in Alaska in 2013, in collaboration with a drone company named aerovironment. Because of the oil industry's enormous spacial scale, it can be difficult to visually monitor the condition of infrastructure like pipelines manually, because they're spread out across thousands of miles. And yet, you have to monitor their condition regularly and carefully because if you don't, pipelines may rupture, and cause yet another environmental disaster. So BP and AeroVironment experimented with the potential of drones mounted with laser cameras to overcome the challenge of visibility posed by the industry's spatial scale. These laser cameras can scan huge geographic areas quickly and convert the data into 3D digital maps that industry employees can then look at on their computers from the comfort of their offices. They don't have to go out and brave the harsh Alaskan weather.
So in short, all four of my chapters are interested in the idea that human vision is weak and limited by the fact that our eyes are stuck to our bodies. Our bodies can't fly overhead or dive deep on the ground. But visual technologies like drones can overcome the limitations of the naked eye and make things that are normally hard to see, like the global oil industry, easier to see.
JY 15:04
Wow, that's fascinating stuff. So you spoke earlier about your work as a PR executive? How do you think your experience there influenced the way you think about this topic?
Ila 15:18
I was working as an account executive at a PR firm in New York that had a range of clients for many different industries. But two of the major accounts that I was assigned to work on were energy-related. One account was a wind energy association. And the other account was a biofuels company. And one thing I learned from working on the wind energy account is that renewable energy is a tough sell in America. It's easy to villainize the oil industry—most people would agree that big oil is bad. But at the same time, big oil is rich and politically powerful, which makes its influence more or less unshakable. The wind energy association that we were doing PR for had this noble mission of trying to make wind turbines catch on in America. And a big part of our job was trying to counteract all of the mismisinformation that mysteriously circulates about wind turbines. The turbines are made to seem environmentally disruptive, for example, because birds might fly into their rotating blades, and a few birds might do so. But relative to the decades-long disruptiveness of a major oil spill, this environmental impact is comparatively minimal. And another big problem is NIMBY-ism. NIMBY stands for not in my backyard. So a problem that we would repeatedly encounter is that people will be committed to renewable energy in theory, but if you ask them to build a wind turbine near their house, they would say no. So a lesson from this job, which was later reinforced when I was studying energy while doing my master's degree and PhD, was that fossil fuels are so entrenched that it's very difficult to redesign all of society around renewable energy sources. The reason why American cities look the way they do, for example, is because a car culture built on fossil fuels made urban expressways and suburban sprawl possible. We know that burning fossil fuels is making our air unbreathable and turning our oceans into hot vinegar. And yet, we can't seem to turn the page on hydrocarbons and start a new chapter on renewables because the scale of that energy energy transition is so staggering.
JY 17:23
So how this impacts your writing? How do you think this background actually translated into your research and your dissertation?
Ila 17:34
This shaped my thinking as I was writing, because I knew that the oil industry was socially dominant, economically dominant and politically dominant. But how that tremendous power and influence spills over into and shapes art and culture seem to me to be comparatively understudied. I was interested in the idea that a society organized around fossil fuels shapes culture in indelible ways. For example, cars are a cornerstone of American movies, whether they are road movies or car chase sequences and action films. Abandon use of fossil fuels is an inextricable part of American culture and values. The sacred American value of freedom, for example, is often manifested as the freedom to hit the open road in your car, to just be able to take off whenever you feel like it for as long as you want to, because you never have to worry about running out of fuel.
JY 18:28
And that's not going to be a hybrid car.
Ila 18:32
No, it's going to be a gas guzzler.
JY 18:35
So I want to pivot for a moment and spend a bit of time about one of your early projects, which is just so interesting, that I couldn't resist asking about it. And it's a project about scenes of women eating food in film. So what was going on there?
Ila 18:52
Yeah, that was my Master's thesis. I'm as interested in food as I am in fossil fuels, and those interests are not as unconnected as they might seem. What the two projects have in common is a mutual interest in sensory experience. I'm drawn to the empiricist idea that all that we can know about the world is what we glean through our five senses. Materiality matters, and I've always preferred the concrete to the abstract. So my doctoral dissertation on the oil industry focuses on the sense of sight. Specifically visual technology tools like the drones I mentioned, mounted with laser cameras that can enhance the abilities of the naked eye.
And my Master's thesis focuses on a different sense—the sense of taste via scenes of women eating food and film. Food studies, like environmental humanities is another field that emerged relatively recently, and gender tends to play a significant role within food studies. In her book, Unbearable Weight, a scholar named Susan Bordeaux argues that food and appetite are both gendered: men eat meat, women eat salads, men can eat as heartily as they want to, but women can only constume dainty bites, because they have to keep themselves thin and because to have a voracious appetite is not ladylike. If you have a voracious appetite for food, it seems to imply that you have a voracious appetite for other pleasures of the flesh as well. And a woman who lives for her own pleasure destabilizes our expectation that a woman should devote herself to caring for others, whether it's her husband or her children or her parents. So Susan Bordeaux observed that it's rare to see a woman eating to the full satisfaction of her desires and film. Women are often shown cooking or serving food to others, but rarely eating it themselves. If they eat at all, it's usually only to take a dainty bite or two. If they eat more than a dainty bite or two, the narrative takes pains to justify this as an exceptional occurrence, by making it clear that the woman is pregnant or has been starving for a very long time.
So I found this idea that women and culture are only allowed to eat under exceptional circumstances to be fascinating. And in my Master's thesis, I decided to look more closely at scenes of women eating from a range of movies. I looked at a classical Hollywood film from 1945 called Christmas in Connecticut. I looked at a Czech New Wave film from 1966 called Daisies and an Indian film from 1996 called Fire and also the recent American comedy Bridesmaids from 2011. So structurally, my master's thesis is similar to my later doctoral dissertation in that I had four chapters arranged in chronological order that spanned a wide time range. Susan Bordeaux's argument that women have a fraught relationship with eating on screen is certainly true of American movies. But the Czech and Indian movies that I looked at complicated the story a little bit. Daisies—the Czech film—is amazing. It's about two female friends who just run around their city eating, eating, eating all the food that they can lay their hands on all day long. And then the film kind of playfully subverts the notion that women should agonize over what to eat and how much to eat. Because the two female characters just eat whatever they want to, whenever they want to. And I wish that all women had the freedom to do that in real life, too.
JY 22:05
I would love to catch those films at some point. So let's turn for a moment to your role as a writing lecturer at Yale-NUS. So you're based out of the Writers' Center at the college. Again, that's probably quite a foreign concept to most listeners. So can you say more about what you do as a writing lecturer?
Ila 22:29
Yeah, academic writing is something I've been interested in ever since college. When I was in college, I worked as a writing fellow for three years. As a writing fellow I was assigned each semester to a writing intensive class, and all the students in the class had to submit a draft of each of their essays to me, before submitting the final version to their professor. A couple of weeks later, I would read the draft, and then meet with every student to offer suggestions for improvement. I did something similar for three years while completing my PhD at Yale. I work as a writing advisor at the Graduate Writing Lab. Graduate students would book appointments with me that were either for half an hour or a full hour; they would send me a 10 to 20 page piece of writing in advance, I would make comments and then we would meet to talk about it. And at the Yale-NYS Writing Center, I'm back to working with undergraduate writing since we're a college rather than a university, and we don't have graduate students. The undergraduates also book appointments with me that lasts for 45 minutes each. They don't send me their papers in advance. I read them during the appointment, but they're usually quite short. So I finish reading them in about 10 to 15 minutes. And then we talk for the rest of the session about concerns the student has about the paper, what their ideal version of the paper looks like. And I try to help them achieve that ideal vision.
JY 23:47
So why is academic writing something that has to be taught, independent of specific disciplines?
Ila 23:54
I think the work that the Writing Center does is important for at least two reasons. The first reason is that the center helps students make the transition from high school writing to college-level writing. The students at Yale-NUS come from all over the world. And so they have a wide variety of academic backgrounds, very different levels of training in academic writing. The writer center acts like a screen. Everyone who filters through it gets on the same page regarding what the basics of what an American-style college paper are: how to structure your introduction, how to write a thesis statement, what a topic sentence is, how to structure a conclusion and so on. Students aren't required to come to the writers' center but those who do leave with training on how to write a paper that is at least kind of minimally competent. And I and the other writers' center employees can also provide students with guidance once they've mastered the basics on what the different disciplinary conventions are: how a literature paper differs from a philosophy paper, for example.
And the second reason why I think the work the writers center does is important is because everyone, even the most talented and experienced writer, benefits from involving at least one other person in their writing process. Essays written in isolation tend to be weaker than papers where the author has discussed content and form with at least one other person. When you're working on a piece of writing, you often end up staring at it for so long that you develop blind spots you aren't even aware of. So it's always helpful to have a fresh pair of eyeballs offering you a new perspective on what you've written, such as by pointing out that a connection between two sentences that may have seemed perfectly obvious to you in your head is actually missing on the page, or by showing you how to develop your ideas.
JY 25:37
I'm struck by the phrase that you use, American-style college paper. Because one of the things I've always been curious about is the way in which writing and what constitutes good writing is culturally constructed. So can you say a bit more about how that pans out in an environment that is as diverse and multicultural as Yale-NUS?
Ila 26:00
Yeah, this cultural construction question makes me wish that I had received training in academic writing, in at least one other country besides America, so that I could compare what I know about American style academic writing with at least one other higher education system. But I went to college and graduate school entirely in the States. So my perception of how university papers are written beyond the States, like in Europe, is vague. American-style college papers emphasize picking an argument at the beginning of your paper, supporting your argument with a series of sub-points and then concluding. I have a dim memory of a college friend who had grown up in France, saying that this format felt very alien to him because he was used to a three part structure where you have your thesis, your anti-thesis, and finally a synthesis of the two opposing views.
When I was in college, I was told that it was not good to have sentences that were too convoluted in my essays. I was told that a sentence should be short. The main point of the sentence should come as early in the sentence as possible. The main point of a paragraph should come as early in the paragraph as possible. The main argument of a paper should appear early in the introduction. I remember writing tutors in college telling me that an academic essay is not a detective story, you should never leave a reader in suspense about what exactly you're trying to say. Foreground the key ideas instead of waiting to reveal them at the end. When I was working at the Graduate Writing Lab at Yale, I relayed these conventions of American-style academic writing to a fellow graduate student who was from Italy, and she was somewhat resistant to these rules because she said that Italian writing often features long winding sentences. She didn't see a problem with translating convoluted sentences as she would have written them in Italian directly into their structurally identical English equivalents. And it was always tricky working with her writing, because I was torn between wanting it to resemble the conventions of writing in American academia more closely on one hand, but also wanting to honor her distinctive voice and style at the same time.
JY 27:59
So do you have any observations about some of the writing of of the Singaporean students you have encountered?
Ila 28:05
The writing standard standards of the Singaporean students who have worked I've read so far is pretty high. In the literature and humanities survey course that I'm teaching this semester, we set aside one whole class meeting to focus on writing prep before their first papers were due. I spent that class meeting telling the students what basic expectations I would be bringing to their papers when I was grading them, for example, the expectation that everything should be signaled as clearly as possible. It's easier for a reader to identify what the paper's argument is, if the thesis statement is clearly signaled with words like in this paper, I argue that x. My students' papers have been embodying all of the conventions of academic writing that I had passed on to them. And the best papers of the bunch go above and beyond merely being clearly organized and phrased. The best papers that I've been reading, while grading this past week, have dazzled me with the originality of their insights. They help me see the texts that we've been reading in the course in fresh ways, by making truly innovative observations about how language works in them.
JY 29:12
So you've lived in Kuwait and India, before studying in the United States, and you moved to Singapore, last year, in July. So how you find Singapore so far?
Ila 29:23
I like Singapore a lot. Actually, to me, it feels like a perfect blend of the three countries I've lived in so far. It feels like India, because there are many Indians and people of Indian descent here. I like that I can go to see a Hindi film in a Singaporean cinema on the same day that it's released in India. The natural environment here also reminds me of India. For example, when I was a little kid in Bombay, there was a saga tree near my parents' apartment that used to scatter those bright red seeds on the ground. Since I like shiny things I used to collect the seeds and store them with my buttons and beads. And I see the same red seeds gathered on the ground here because we have many saga trees in Singapore. And it helps me feel a sense of belonging that I haven't felt for a long time. In the States I had no childhood memories associated with the types of trees that grow there. And so I didn't feel quite as rooted there as I do here.
JY 30:17
We are actually near a residential college named Saga.
Ila 30:20
Yes. So Singapore feels like India for those reasons. It also feels like Kuwait because both Singapore and Kuwait are city-states that have a large expat population, and so feel very international. In Kuwait, the petroleum industry is inescapable; there are refineries everywhere you look. And when I look out if the windows of my apartment here in Singapore, I see Jurong Island in the distance with all of its petrochemical refineries. I see gas flares burning from the chimneys at night. The industrial infrastructure is quite beautiful to me, especially around sunset when all the lights on the port come on, and the whole waterfront starts glittering. The view of the refineries on Jurong makes for a pleasant connection to my time in Kuwait.
And Singapore feels like the States mainly because where I work is designed to replicate a small American liberal arts college closely. Sometimes, in fact, it feels like I've never even left the States because there's so much continuity between my past life studying at American universities and my current life working at an American-style college. All the things that I thought I would miss about the States are available here. For example, Thanksgiving was my favorite American holiday and I thought that if I moved to Singapore, I would miss out on the traditional annual feast of turkey with cranberry sauce and all the other trimmings. But Singaporean hotels do Thanksgiving dinners and Thanksgiving weekend brunches. I went to one last November. And that was also enough of a slice of America in Singapore to make me feel like I never left.
JY 31:53
Striking— the cultural hegemony of the United States. I'm going to conclude with the final question. In a sense it is a terribly pressurizing question, but we ask that of all our guests. So what do you think you'd be working on in 10 years' time?
Ila 32:10
Hmm, I'm actually not sure. I know that I will always be interested in visual culture and will always be interested in the five senses, and especially interested in moments when our senses fail. That is an aspect of reality that are beyond the abilities of our five senses to perceive. For example, I'm interested in portions of the electromagnetic spectrum beyond visible light, like the ultraviolet and infrared rays that we don't usually see with the naked eye. When I was researching my dissertation, I learned that the oil industry uses infrared cameras to monitor natural gas leaks. We may not be able to see gas leaks with the naked eye, but an infrared camera picks them up. I also learned that classical Hollywood cinematographers used to film used film strips that were sensitive to infrared rays in movies from the 1930s and 40s, because those film strips allow them to create a wider range of visual effects than ordinary panchromatic film strips. There's an Irish photographer named Richard Mosse, who has taken infrared photos of natural landscapes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, that I love for their bright bubblegum pink color. So I think my next project might be on some aspect of infrared in visual culture.
JY 33:30
I shall have to look forward to that. And thank you so much for being with us today. It was a pleasure talking, as always.