[Reader-list] [Announcements] [Sarai Newsletter] February 2003

[dak]

Contents: Sarai Newsletter, February 2003

Workshop@ Sarai
22	Workshop in New Media Curatorial Practices

Friday Films @ Sarai: 
7	Metropolis 
14	Clockwork Orange
21	Existenz

City One Conference
Sarai @ Asian Social Forum, Hyderabad 

Forthcoming Events:
March 1	Urban Study Group Meet 
March 3-5 	Crisis Media Workshop
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WORKSHOP @ SARAI
Saturday, February 22, 2003
10:30 am – 5 pm
Workshop in New Media Curatorial Practices
by Amanda McDonald Crowley 

This one day workshop on curatorial practice will focus on new media art, 
providing an overview of the following topics:
- New media art practices and access to art work using new technologies 
- New media art theory
- Techniques and technical considerations of new media art exhibition 
- Audience development
- Collaborative practice

Amanda McDonald Crowley is a freelance cultural worker, facilitator, 
researcher, curator from Australia. She is currently artsworker in residence, 
at Sarai with support from Asialink.

To pre-register email dak at sarai.net 

FRIDAY FILMS @ SARAI
All screenings are on Fridays at 4:30 pm at the Seminar Room, Centre for the 
Study of Developing Societies, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi -110054. The films are 
listed in the order of screening.

The Archaeology of the Future: Science Fiction @ Sarai
While scanning sci-fi genres in the cinema, we may well wonder if we aren't 
confronted with futures past, visionary essays which already seem threatened 
with obsolescence. Perhaps these films afford us a sense of the times that 
produced them rather than an unattained future condition. Looking back to the 
days of early cinema history, it was probably Godard who noted, ironically, 
that rather than think of Georges Melies as fantasist and visionary of the 
future (amongst his credits was `Man on the Moon'), we should think of him as 
a realist, fully alert to technological developments that compose our present 
reality. In turn, what is futuristic, anymore, about Fritz Lang's Metropolis 
(1926), with its vertiginous highways and its dank subways; the brainwashing 
sequences of Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), which were perhaps 
already anticipated in cold war fantasies such as The Manchurian Candidate 
(John Frankenheimer, 1962, released around the same time as Anthony Burgess's 
novel); and how far off is the bio port so central to the imaginings of 
Cronenberg's 1999 eXistenZ, when chip implants are so widely advertised in 
current scientific practice and biometrics so central to the lineaments of 
surveillance regimes?

Rather than visions of a technological future, perhaps we should think of 
science fiction as always composed of a layering of times past, present and 
future. Consider the Christian narrative of Metropolis, with the angelic 
Maria urging workers in the catacombs below the city to bear suffering with 
fortitude; or the grotty London council housing, parents attired in 
miniskirts and bellbottoms dating to the film's present time in Clockwork 
Orange. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), conjures up the neon nights of 
Japanese advertising, just as Tarkovsky's 1972 Solaris uses the 
spectacular Tokyo flyover for his vision of the future. Blade Runner also 
mobilizes the oriental bazaar, where dancers cavort with (mechanical) snakes 
cheek by jowl with body part manufacturers. This is the rub: these are not 
simply visions of the future, perhaps, but of its contemporary archaeology.

February 7, 2003
Metropolis (1927), 122 minutes
Directed by Fritz Lang
Metropolis, a visionary and elaborate spectacle by director Fritz Lang is an 
epic projection of a futuristic city divided into a working and an elite 
class.

In 2026, a de-humanized proletariat labours non-stop in a miserable 
subterranean city beneath a luxurious city of mile-high skyscrapers, flying 
automobiles, palatial architectural idylls, tubes and tunnels. With 
stunningly inventive special effects, Lang's allegorical narrative and 
architectural vision creates a highly stylized vision of a not-so-unlikely 
future (especially for 1926 when the film was made.) As the elite frolic 
above the clouds, thousands of miserable workers toil night and day inside 
the belly of the gigantic machine that runs the entire city. Metropolis is 
controlled by a sinister authoritarian whose son, Freder, rejects his 
father's callous philosophy and attitude towards labourers. Meek though they 
are, the workers are encouraged by Maria, a wistful young woman who wills her 
comrades to embrace patience and silent strength. Upon discovering her 
influence upon the workers, a mad scientist kidnaps Maria and creates a robot 
in her image that will incite the workers to revolt. As Freder races against 
time to save Maria and curtail the damage done by her doppelganger robot, 
Metropolis is enveloped in chaos and the classes are brought together in a
breathtaking and highly moralistic climax.

February 14, 2003
Clockwork Orange (1971), 131 mins
Directed by Stanley Kubric