[Reader-list] [Announcements] [Sarai Newsletter] December 2002

[dak at sarai.net]

Contents:
I  	@rt.net.uk/now 
II	Workshop @ Sarai: Writers Unblock - Fiction Writing 
	& The Daily Life of Intellectual Property Law 
III	Films @ Sarai: Focus on the Documentary 
IV	Tactical Media Lab @ Sarai
V  	Launch of Deewan-e-Sarai, the Sarai Hindi Reader
VI	New @ Sarai Interface

I 	@rt.net.uk/now
	An Exhibition, Lecture and Workshop Programme, presenting facets of 
contemporary Internet Based Art Practice in Britain 
	Curated by Honor Harger (curator, webcasting, Tate Modern, London) 
and Pauline van Mourek Broekman (editor, Mute - A Journal of 	New 
Media Arts, London)
Organised by the British Council in collaboration with Sarai: The New 
Media Initiative, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.
December 2 - 5, 2002 
Exhibition  at the British Council, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi.
December 4
Presentation and interaction with Sarai 
December 5
Net Art Now 
Presentation by the Curators at the British Council, followed by a 
public conversation, moderated by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Sarai.
About the Exhibition
@rt.net.uk/now is an exhibition that brings to the fore key issues in 
critical internet-based art practice. Issues of borders and 
borderlessness, mapping and territories, the relationships between 
'old' and 'new' media, access and control, critical reflections on the 
experiences of the 'thinning' of time and the thickening of the data 
cloud around us. 
Internet based art is often mistakenly regarded as art 'showcased' on 
the internet. This programme seeks to challenge this notion by 
offering instead a foregrounding of the intrinsic properties of the 
net as the material of a new form of art practice. This is a 
sensibility that is conceptual, interactive, time based and that often 
plays with the difficulties of access, unstable connectivity and 
crashing software - features that are so much part of everyday online 
experience.
Pauline Van Moerik Broekman and Honor Harger deliberately eschew the 
'flashy' and spectacular effect-laden world of mainstream web content 
to curate a series of online experiences that are designed to be 
thoughtful, and at times, sharply political in the way in which they 
treat the questions of online and offline territoriality and the 
'fragmented public sphere' of the internet.
The works presented by them represent the critical cutting edge of 
online art practice and include projects by leading contemporary 
British net artists such as Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker, Tim Knowles, 
Richard Wright, Andy Deck, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie. The exhibition 
will chart an eclectic mini-journey through new media projects from 
the past few years, culminating in some of the absolute latest and 
most contemporary examples in this context, based on the premise that 
the quasi-historical purview will give an opportunity to look at some 
of the questions that may have lingered in context.
About the Curators
Honor Harger is a new media artist who is currently working as an 
education and online projects officer of the new Tate Modern Gallery. 
Honor has been working on developing new techniques of audio streaming 
for quite some time as a part of a group called Radio Qualia. 
Van Mourik Broekman is co-publisher and editor of the London based 
technoculture magazine Mute, which she co-founded with Simon 
Worthington as 'the Art and Technology Newspaper' in late 1994. As 
well as editing Mute, she writes regularly on art, media and 
technology for journals and books. The editors, especially Pauline van 
Mourik Broekmann, have created a very active and dynamic network of 
contributors, artists, writers and critics who represent the best in 
 the British avant garde new media scene. Mute Magazine has been 
presenting public forums on new media culture at the Tate Modern.
Honor and Pauline will be travelling to Kolkata and Bangalore Indian 
cities to make presentations and conduct workshops as a forerunner to 
the exhibition between December 6 and 15, 2002. 

II	Workshops at Sarai
1. 	December 11-12, 2002
	11 am -5 pm, Sarai Interface Zone
	Writers Unblock
	with Meaghan Delahunt
What is the work of a writer? How do ideas for fiction crystallize and 
grow into short stories... and novels? What is the daily regimen, and 
what are the exercises and observational practices that an aspiring 
writer needs to work out? How to make the "writer's block" into a 
piece of living textual sculpture?
Meaghan Delahunt, Asialink Fellow and writer-in-residence at Sarai, 
will  conduct a workshop on writing fiction through a series of 
imaginative and fun excercises that grapple with these questions. She 
will also share aspects of her own creative process, as it was 
deployed in the writing of her first novel 'In the Blue House', and 
offer advice and insight into working with agents, publishing houses 
and other  practical aspects of the writer's trade. To pre-register 
email dak at sarai.net or call 3960040. 
'In the Blue House' won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, in the Best 
Book category in SE Asia and South Pacific, and the Saltire Society 
Award in Scotland. 
2.	December 20-21, 2002
	10 am -5 pm, Seminar Room, CSDS
	The Daily Life of Intellectual Property Law
In the context of the global economy Intellectual Property Rights 
(IPR) has emerged as one of the important modes of ensuring that 
cultural and economic flows  occur within a given set of rules and 
regulations. This necessitates the  disciplining of the activities of 
those who operate beyond the
boundaries of  the regulated formal economy. Thus IPR unfolds itself 
in the lives of  people on a day to day basis, determining what 
economic activities they may  or may not engage in. These boundaries 
are also backed by an omnipotent  threat of coercive violence through 
the use of the police force as agents enforcing IPR. 
At the conceptual level there have been a number of challenges posed 
to the philosophical and the material basis of IPR.  These  range from 
the open source movement in software to the open  revolution  in 
content, music and publishing. This  broad movement can  be  called 
the movement of the creative commons. 
What clearly inspires  the open revolution is a dissatisfaction with 
the philosophical premises of  IPR (romantic authorship, incentive 
theory, monopoly rights etc.) as well as  a  recognition that, given 
the distribution of inequality implicit in the  global  economy, there 
is a need to articulate a praxis that allows for more  democratic 
modes of participation within the global economy.
Legal scholars, lawyers, researchers, media practitioners and law 
students from across the country will discuss these and other issues 
at this workshop. We will also screen The Code - Story of Linux, a 
film that brings many of these issues to the forefront and Arjun 
Raina, actor and playwright, will perform A Terrible Beauty is Born, 
his play on work, distance and Call Centres.    

III	Films @ Sarai: Focus on the Documentary
	All screenings are at the Seminar Room, Centre for the Study of 
Developing Societies, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi -110054. 
1.	Friday, December 13, 2002, 4:30 pm
	Mat / The Vote 
	Directed by Pankaj Rishi Kumar, (2002), 80 minutes 
Mat/ The Vote is a filmic deconstruction of the electoral process in 
India. It closely examines the interests and issues that guide the 
performance of different players - political parties, candidates, 
party workers and voters - in a competition for power. 
The film follows Imtiaz Khan, BJP candidate, in the Uttar Pradesh 
assembly elections held in February, 2002, and Hemraj Saathi, a BJP 
worker.  The overall election process in Siyana, UP,  forms the matrix 
of the film. The crucial subjects here are the voters, divided and 
categorized according to caste and community. 
The production of  Mat/ The Vote has been motivated by a need to bring 
the vital issues in Indian democracy to the fore, by revealing in a 
comprehensive and articulate manner, the failure of our society to 
meet even the most basic challenges of such a social and political 
system. 
2.	Friday, December 20, 2002, 4:30 pm
	The Code - Story of Linux 
	Directed by Hannu Puttonen, (2001), 59 minutes
The Code presents the first decade of Linux from 1991 to 2001. The 
film tries to tell one of the key stories of the digital age, a 
symbolic saga of capitalism during the last fin de siecle of the 
second millenium and during the early steps of the third one.  It 
features Linux Torvalds and many of his closest allies in the 
development process of Linux, along with Richard Stallman. 

IV	Tactical Media Lab @ Sarai
On November 14 -16, 2002, Sarai hosted the South Asian Tactical Media 
Lab (TML), one of a chain of such events, that are taking place in 
different parts of the world (Amsterdam, Barcelona, Cluj, New York, 
Delhi and Sydney) as a run-up to the fourth Next 5 Minutes Conference 
(N5M4) in Amsterdam in 2003. 
Over the three days free software enthusiasts, programmers, graphic 
designers, filmmakers, artists, activists, members of NGOs, 
telecommunications experts, students and media practitioners from 
Mumbai, Dehradun, Kolkata, Dacca, Kathmandu, Tehran & Delhi shared 
ideas, experiences, problems and grievances, explored varied uses of 
tactical media, discussed strategies, designed posters and websites, 
disbanded opinions and formed new ones through panel discussions, 
presentations, installations, workshops and a film screening. 
The TML started with a very well attended public conversation between 
Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Sarai and David Barsamian, founder and 
director of Alternative Radio, an independent, award-winning, weekly 
radio program produced in Boulder, Colorado. David Barsamiyan is well 
known in Delhi through the publications of his interviews with Noam 
Chomsky, Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmed. 
This was followed by discussions and presentations on different 
approaches to Tactical Media. Discussions on subsequest days focussed 
on language and localization issues in Free Software, freedom and 
programming culture, ICT and its ability to look beyond the 
development paradigm and on the need for collaboration of new media 
networks in Asia. 
A print and web designing workshop conducted by Pradeep Saha, Managing 
Editor, Down to Earth, and Mrityunjoy Chatterjee, Sarai Media Lab, 
formed part of the TML and audio-visual and web installations were 
playing in the Sarai Interface Zone on all three days.
The event lent itself naturally to the crystallization of a loose 
coalition of tactical media enthusiasts in the Asian region.  The 
participants from Iran, Bangladesh, Nepal and various parts of India, 
spoke of the need to carry the energies that they had discovered 
through their meetings into the future. Plans were made to set up a 
Tactical Media Asia discussion list hosted by Sarai, and everyone was 
in agreement on initiating a cluster of collaborative processes, like 
a free software desktop in the Urdu language as a concrete instance of 
collaboration between people at Sarai and the LinuxIran group. 
For more details click on http://www.sarai.net/community/announce.htm

V	Launch of Deewan-e-Sarai, The Sarai Hindi Reader 
Sarai launched the first Hindi Reader Deewan-e-Sarai 01: Media 
Vimarsh://Hindi Janpad (Media Discourses:// Hindi Public Domain) on 
Saturday November 30. Prof. VB Singh, Director, CSDS, welcomed the 
guests and speakers while Prof. DL Sheth moderated the presentations. 
Ravikant, co-editor, Deewan 01, gave a brief introduction to the 
series that is designed to cover a whole range of issues from the 
history and practice of technology (Electricity, Railways, Computer, 
Internet) to city, films, legal debates around copyright, surveillance 
and information politics, history of labour and historiography.  
Sanjay Sharma, co-editor, Deewan 01, presented an overview of the volume. 
This was followed by readings from Deewan 01. Ruchika read a poem, 
'Internet par Shaadi', and 'Aag ka Copyright', Ravikant read out his 
translation of Bapsi Sidhwa's 'Television Satyagraha ke woh Din', an 
essay on the day in the 1970s when the Indian film, Pakeeza, was 
broadcast on Amritsar TV and how Lahore went berserk. David Lelyweld 
who was a witness to the Pakeeza screening shared his memories of the 
day in private conversations later. Sanjay Sharma then read out 
extracts from his rather funny memoir on the BBC Hindi service.
After the readings invited speakers commented on the book. Much of the 
interactions revolved around the use of language by Hindi writers and 
publishers. Historian Sudheer Chandra praised the prose and supported 
the Deewan's practice of going against the dominant notions of 
shabd-maitri, whereby people do not allow so-called Hindi words to 
mingle with so-called Urdu ones,  but he also pointed out a couple of 
factual inaccuracies. 
Sanjeev Kumar, lecturer of Hindi at Delhi University, liked the name 
Deewan but was critical of the Deewan's assumptions about the Hindi 
Public, especially its literary publics, and pointed out the 
overwhemingly secular mood of high Hindi literature. He sought to 
nuance the notion of tadbhavaization, or corruption, by appealing for 
the acceptance of tadbhavised or apbhramshised Urdu as well. He also 
talked of the inherent lack in training that allows most writers the 
competence to play around with words derived from Sanskrit rather than 
with Perso-Arabic derivations. 
By referring to current trends in the Hindi print media he pointed out 
the disappearance of not only the nuqta but other diacritical marks 
like the chandrabindu,and the halant, in an effort of simplifying 
Hindi typography and moulding it for computer screens. 
Aditya Nigam, Fellow, CSDS, distinguished these two kinds of 
disappearance and celebrated the kind of language Deewan seems to have 
inaugurated. He also praised the hard work put in by the Translation 
Unit at Sarai.
Language debates brought forth passionate interventions from the floor 
and Rana Behl, Delhi University, Yogendra Yadav, CSDS, and Vijay 
Pratap, Lokayan, presented their own insights as language 
practitioners. This  interactive 'lokarpan' went down well with the 
gathering and we are sure to hear more on this for some time. 

VI   	New @ Sarai Interface
The Sarai Digital Interface, available on the terminals in the Sarai 
Interface Zone, is an in-depth presentation of Sarai's activities and 
concerns that also contains areas of interactivity. The Interface is 
designed to let the visitor to Sarai have a hands-on feel of the kind 
of work we do, the issues that we are interested in and to allow for 
an interaction with Sarai projects in various stages of development. 
It contains a digital gallery and also acts as a public platform for 
the sharing of ideas, knowledge and creativity, a digital bulletin 
board for posting messages about public concerns as well as an 
evolving resource that is built and sustained by the community that 
grows around Sarai. The Interface can be used as a space to register 
subjective experiences of living in urban spaces.
The recent additions to the digital gallery in the Interface are: 
Cold Glory at Ground Zero
Photographs by Monica Narula
Exactly a year after September 11, 2001, New York city, under a clear 
sky. A nervous flutter of US flags at every block are signs of 
remembrance, and foreboding. And talk of war brings alive a cold glory 
in early autumn. Monica Narula follows the flag and its strange 
appearances, on pavements, walls, alleyways, and the outer perimeter 
of Ground Zero.
Graffiti and Signage in the City 
Photo-essays by Sadan Jha and Prabhas Ranjan.
2 HTML photoessays documenting the pictorial modes of visual 
representation through graffiti and signage ranging from the 
religious, the superstitious and the occult to everyday announcements 
in the city of Delhi.
-------------
That's all this month. We hope to see you at the screenings and the 
workshops.
Cheers,
Ranita




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20021204/38288f93/attachment.html