[Reader-list] Notes on Ambivalent Pedagogy from the Cybermohalla Experience
Shveta Sarda
shveta at sarai.net
Thu Dec 16 16:51:07 IST 2004
Dear All,
Below is a paper I wrote a while back from my experiences in
Cybermohalla. The paper is soon to be published in a reader on Utopian
Pedagogy (ed Marc Cote et al).
Comments and feedback is most welcome!
best
shveta
**********
Before Coming Here, Had You Thought of a Place Like This?
Notes on Ambivalent Pedagogy from the Cybermohalla Experience [1]
---------------------------------------------------------------
The formal definition of a pedagogue in a working class locality could
be of a figure who, through interactions, will bring into the
consciousness of students a reality beyond their immediate reach; a
figure who will bring into their life world skills from other locations
that will put them in a more advantageous position in society.
The frame of the life world of the pedagogue is visible, articulate. It
is in a position to propose a vision for the other world - one of
empowering it through intervention. The inner world of the "student" is
of anticipation, anger, restlessness. It lives with different
intensities of indignity and humiliation born of the derision felt at
the perception that it needs to, and can be, 'transformed'. It lives in
the troubled terrain of entitlement to, and gratitude for, as well as
suspicion of intervention.
Reverberations of the question, 'Before Coming Here, Had You Thought of
a Place Like This?' offset the stability of this figure [2]. The idea of
young people in working class settlements as tabula rasa is displaced.
What replaces it? The question calls for a realignment of positions,
redrawing of assumptions and protocols of interactions. What emerges?
"The Edges of Thought"
Raju Malyal, 18 years, lives in Dakshinpuri Resettlement Colony in South
Delhi [3]. A student of class tenth, he attends afternoon school on
weekdays, and during the weekend he helps out at the small eating joint
run by his father in the neighbourhood. Raju, in a public reading before
two hundred and fifty friends, aquaintances and strangers, reads:
"I wanted to think about what Shamsher Ali had written in his text,
'The Edges of Thought'. I read the text thrice, and in doing that, felt
as if Shamsher Ali was sitting in front of me all this while, talking to
me about it" [4].
Shamsher, 18 years, dropped out of school before completing his tenth
class. "No one cares what you do in afternoon school. I wasn't learning
anything, anyway". Shamsher lives in Lok Nayak Jai Prakash (LNJP) Colony
in Central Delhi [5].
The intimacy, desire and searching quality of Raju's narration betray
that the dominant co-ordinates through which the lives of young people
are mapped - the home, the school and the workspace - far from fill all
existing spaces to engage with subjectivity.
Lately, Shamsher has started spending his early mornings at a workshop
in the colony that produces cardboard boxes. Reflecting on his routines,
he writes, "I like to hang around there and chat. The time I spend there
are the only moments of respite I get from thinking. Thought is my
enemy" [6].
There is a rawness to this recognition of living with the
incomprehensibility of certain conditions of social realities, and a
capacity to live with that vulnerability. Inside the stubborn structures
of institutions, frameworks and discourses, is a search for the edges of
thought - the whispering, agile peripheries of the mind that imagine,
flow, combat, seek, assert and create. This needs a space that can
support and allow for this search [7]. It craves and ferrets out
challenging friendships that nurture thought in a manner that does not
read the rawness and vulnerability of a stutter as defeat or
helplessness, but as pregnant with possibilities of new discoveries [8].
Raju reads on, "...sometimes, we create boundaries in our thoughts,
stopping ourselves from thinking, stopping ourselves from finding the
edges of our thoughts, from where we can plunge into newer depths. Why
do we do that? Why do we create shores of the ocean of thinking, or
disallow ourselves from moving towards horizons by being swept away by
waves?"
"A Thought Full Stop"
Reading her text to her peers at the lab about a visit to the Jama
Masjid in Old Delhi, not far from the neighbourhood, Azra described how
she drifted through the city, first on foot, and then on a
cycle-rickshaw [9]. Her brief, passing description of the rickshaw
driver caught the attention of a practitioner from Sarai who was also
present at the lab. The description was shy, as if Azra had found
something disturbing about the rickshaw driver. She had written, "He was
a young man. He was wearing pants and shirt and looked like he had been
through some years of formal schooling. Fair and handsome, he seemed to
be a Kashmiri. I thought, 'Bechara (Poor thing)! Surely he can get
himself a better job than driving a cycle rickshaw'."
Sensing that Azra had perhaps unconsciously adopted a popular critical
stand considered necessary in talking about education and unemployment
among city youth, the practitioner probed further than the description
carried him. He asked, "Azra, can you tell me a little more about the
rickshaw driver? Why did you call him 'bechara'?" Surprised at how
little she remembered about him, and that 'bechara' was a conjunction
she had used in her text to move on to a description of the street by
shifting her gaze from him, Azra, her eyes on the text, reflected, "By
calling him 'bechara', I created a distance between him and my thought.
'Bechara' is not a conjunction for different thoughts here. It's a
thought full stop!"
Bechara is the singular, the figure pushed out of our imagination by our
meta-narratives. A voice muffled, a story silenced, a trajectory of
thought left unmapped and unexplored, save as an evidence for, an
affirmation of our ways of thinking - another statistic. These full
stops are like barricades, creating boundaries around our thought, a
closed community of ideas.
Helping out to conduct a survey to guage perceptions about caste and
religion among children in his colony, Lakhmi found the methodology
evolved very troubling. Each time the child being asked the
objective-type questions was reticent, the interviewer was expected to
guess the child's response and fill in the answers. "I simply couldn't
understand," he said, "How am I supposed to decide whether the child's
silence means 'yes' or 'no'?"
It is perhaps on the silencing of many that knowledge is created. A
pedagogue working within realities marked by inequality, conflict and
contestation cannot be innocent of the intimate relationship between
knowledge and the politics of silence.
A couple with a newborn child refuses to discuss with the family their
acute desire to move out of the close-knit, protective neighbourhood
they have lived in for years. A student drops out of school for the fear
of the indignity of being called a failure. A young man labouring at the
construction site quietly daydreams through the spray of invectives from
the supervisor during the cycles of carrying bricks to the eleventh floor.
These absences in life - the inadequacies of biographies - are the
inadequacies of speech. Silences reside in the recognition of the
politics of these lingering inadequacies.
Crowds carry silences with them. The singular, distanced figure devoid
of its biography, multiplies to become a mass, indistinguishable in its
features, so remote. Azra says, "Sometimes it seems like a bee hive,
sometimes like insects crawling on the ground... There are many sounds,
but none reach our ears properly" [10]. In the smarting relations of
full stops and silences, silencing and knowledge, what can be a
knowledge producer's methods of engagement?
"The Gaps"
On a dark winter evening in early January in 2002, during the LNJP
Compughar's trip to Bombay, we reached the Dadar metro station bustling
with the hurrying commuters moving into and pouring out of the local
trains. Falling into step with a stream of commuters heading for the
exit, we reached the foot-over bridge to the vegetable market. Swinging
batons of policemen attempted to control and bring to order the
hotch-potch of the bodies - some halting for breath, others finding
their own rhythms and directions. Underneath, the market was bright with
halogen lamps lit in different stalls. Crowds thronged the stalls, the
market was flooded, bodies packed together- a sea of heads that could
allow no one admittance. Still, the crowd seemed to be swelling by the
minute.
We decided to walk through the crowd in pairs. Reaching the other side,
we were surprised at the ease with which we had moved through the crowd.
Someone from the group said, "There were gaps in the crowd which we
could not see from above. Once we entered the crowd, we could walk
through these intervening spaces."
Later, in a text from the experience, Azra wrote:
"The crowd from in front -
You see faces, different features and appearances that could not be seen
from above, expressions on faces. Some faces seem to be searching
something. Sometimes, the search seems to be for a glimpse of the
unknown, and on other occassions, it is a somewhat intimate search."
Standing on the footover bridge presented a distanced view from afar.
The frame of the visual field, removed from the experience of the market
and created from a height, produced anxiety, fear. This was a particular
vantage point. But knowledge, as the movement towards and into the crowd
suggested to us, is a question of different perspectives, not specific
positions. The tensions between differences of perspective were productive.
A crowd demands to be entered, experienced. The gaps - ruptures,
disjunctions, joints - present themselves as possibilities, points of
entry. It is in bringing near, in moving through the gaps that an
engagement is sought.
"Speech without Fear and Fearless Listening"
Knowledge is about the bold and simultaneous existence of a multiplicity
of voices that fragment our conception of reality, decenter the act of
production of knowledge, the translation of life worlds; where the edges
of our worlds are in conversation with one another, not muted and
silenced. Speech of millions is of essence in this. What witholds and
prevents speech is the fear of listening to too many voices, a fear that
a cacophony of sounds will result. But there is a richness in the the
multiplicity of a band when it plays with myriad instruments, when there
is improvisation, and more than one sound can be heard.
The twenty two year-old Azra says, "The simultaneous existence of
multiple, diverse voices means there is speech without fear, with
freedom and dignity. And that, in turn, implies that there be
responsible and fearless listening". Being in the network of knowledge
production is as much about being a server, as a host or a client.
Speech is imbricated in the politics of space, and played out in our
everyday lives. When the young people at the LNJP lab decided to
circulate their writings in the colony through the public form of a wall
magazine, they were faced with a peculiar problem [11]. As youngsters,
they had till now been addressed by (elders in) the colony. The question
they were now confronted by was of finding a way of addressing the
colony. The fear was that even as they could, in the beginning, skirt
topics which they knew would earn them the disapproval of their elders,
what about issues for which norms were not specified? Three issues of
the wall magazine, named Ibarat (Inscription), were brought out in quick
succession. But following these, questions of what terrain to chose,
what topics to select, what issues to discuss, what mode of writing to
adopt, superceded and there has been a long pause before the fourth
Inscription. Narration is halted because it does not find a context.
Narration is a function of desire. Desire is not person-centric, but for
a constellation -of people, settings, memories, preferences - in
relation with one another which originate and extend beyond an
individual. Narration flows between these elements, and this flow is
made possible by a curiosity to hear. To narrate is to relive an
experience through the act of telling, through speech. This reliving
requires a nurturing context of friendship, a challenging and
compassionate listening, which evokes and is receptive of a narration.
And to listen, then, is to tussle with your desire, to be vulnerable in
a search for a means to look at yourself anew, to question how another
has been imagined. There must be so many narrations that are never made
because they do not find gradients they can flow towards. Narrations
seek this terrain of hospitality, this context created by thirst and
difference, this desire.
A pedagogue is not a library of known and catalogued books that can be
issued out. And a naraation is not a requisition for a title or an
author. What is the desire that the pedagogue - the guest the young
people of the locality host - imbricated in?
"To think you are alone would be gross injustice"
The formidable discourse of labouring rides over social inequality.
Here, the question of earning a livelihood, to enter the labour market,
is a very important one. This livelihood discourse is one of computer
literacy, of speed - it requires skills in typing, preparing excel
sheets, making database entries, writing letters, designing pamphlets,
cards etc: i.e., computer-based economic activities requiring low skill
levels. The emphasis is on efficency, dexterity, micro-software
training. This vocational training is offered by a number of IT
institutes mushrooming in and around working class settlements [12]. It
presents the familiar and troubling disjunction between two imaginaries
- the discourse on livelihood for the working class, and knowledge
production.
The tussle between the two imaginaries once showed in a dialogue at the
labs around the meaning of working with computers implying the necessity
to learn to type at a good speed [13]. The question that arose was of
the relation between the flow of the keyboard and the flow of thought.
The overpowering labouring discourse, because it blocks off the
possibility to think of people outside the language of productivity, as
cultural producers, makes it extremely difficult for the young people to
suggest to themselves that technology can be entered through creativity
in the technological space [14].
The dialogue at the lab continued by drawing out the difference between
a "hobby" and a "line" (career choice). "Hobby" is the sphere of the
creative, of playfulness and inventiveness. A "line" is what one pursues
in life to earn a living, to secure an income, and this is at the cost
of the creative instincts. With a rejection of folk forms and public
cultures of story telling, or other modes that are associated with a
rich tradition of creative resources, and which erupt sporadically on
the urban scape during religious festivals and events organised to
showcase them, the sphere of everyday expressions of creativity searches
outlets and forms.
In this loss of language around creativity, training to work in beauty
parlours (learning bridal make-up, applying mehandi etc.) is the most
popular career choice for girls in working class settlements. Men may
become part of local dancing or theatre troupes, or painting billboards,
signs, etc. These become modes for bringing the "hobby" and the "line"
together. These micro-practices are an assertion by the young people of
their creative urges.
'Unlikely encounters' [15] with Free Software programmers has opened up
another dimension: the most interesting conversations happen when
programmers visiting the labs talk about their experiences of sharing
skills in a creative community which has participants from different
backgrounds, and in different geographical locations [16].
This creates a fascinating context, in which you imagine yourself, and
also the locality, in the larger matrix of other spaces. It shows the
possibility of a conversational and practice-based universe where there
are people who will find excitement in your quirkiness, play, interests,
ideas. Yashoda, who came to the lab two years ago with a turbulent
personal background, and so a mistrust for all forms of determinate
aggregates, writes, "To think you are alone would be gross injustice".
She is a prolific writer, and one of the strongest votaries of ensembles
formed on the relationship of thought and creativity.
What these interactions and dialogues gesture towards is the reality
that one can have a tranformative relationship with technology - and not
just be addressed by it. This is a critical shift in register. This is a
universe where your thought is of consequence in a larger framework of
production of knowledge.
"What do words contain?"
Word is
a memory: which gives the word its recognition.
a story: an incident that keeps the memory of the word alive.
time: every word carries with it the shadow of time.
image: an image is associated with every word.
thought: different people think differently of the same word.
sound: a sound follows every word [17].
This textural world of the word lies beyond the realm of judgements. It
is not bound by the binaries of ordinary & special, valuable & useless,
good & bad, ugly & beautiful. Fertile and mutable, it evokes and invites
more narrations, linking with other experiences. Nisha Kaushal from
Dakshinpuri says, "Utterances are suggestions for others to open up. You
don't define a boundary of the conversation and it flows through
suggestion upon suggestion". In this mode of excavation of perspectives
and meanings in an ensemble of producers, a universe of hyperlinked
experiences emerges, rhizomic in its growth, inclusive in its spread and
open in its propensity to encounters.
This accretive relay of experiences as texts and conversations creates
an interdependence and densification of ideas - ideas collide and
mingle, open out and jostle. This is practice-based, and it flows from
everyday experiences.
When Nasreen at LNJP narrated her experience of witnessing an accident,
her peers Neelofar and Shamsher responded -
[Nasreen]
Because the bus was crowded, the driver was speeding, halting at the
stops very briefly. One man, who was trying to get on, was clutching on
to the handle on the door. He was trying to put one foot on the steps of
the bus. But unfortunately, he slipped, and along with that, his hand
also lost its grip on the handle. He fell. The driver drove on.
[Neelofar]
When I was listening to Nasreen's story I was remembering scenes when
people, specially boys, run to get on moving buses. Some do this because
the bus doesn't stop long eneough, while others get off the bus and then
get on again when the bus starts to move. Bus conductors do this
often... I like it when people first let the woman, or family members
they are travelling with, board the bus, and then get on.
[Shamsher]
Listening to the story, I feel like I am the driver and am driving the
vehicle, looking at either side. I am glancing at the rear view mirror,
and looking at the road as well, which will take the travellers in the
bus to their destination. But my attention is not on the passengers at
all. I am waiting for the destination [18].
Unstable and mobile links between experiences, thoughts, ideas emerge.
Conceptual connections between ideas and of different producers makes
possible a networked thickening of the emergent concepts. The diversity
and richness of experiences and ways of thinking creates the possibility
of the emergence of a relational knowledge field.
Yashoda Singh, at the LNJP lab, writes about her body, and how she
perceives her room through it:
"The wind has entered with such force from the chinks in our walls, that
a shiver has run down my whole body. The upper part of my body is
outside the quilt, and wind is entering from the sides as well. The wind
comes and makes me aware of its coldness... My back is really hurting
now. So I should lie down. But what's this? The whitewash on the walls
of our house is just like the pair of lips of a woman who has put
lipstick on one of the lips, but not on the other. Because the walls are
whitewashed, but not the roof..." [19]
The intimacy of the narration, its searching quality and metaphorical
evocations is striking. Yashoda thinks through the lived experience of
space through claims and withdrawals, through her own body. The body is
inscribed in different ways in different narratives.
Lakhmi writes about Ashoki, who cleans sewers in his colony by going
inside them. He has written the text in an autobiogrpahical mode,
imagining himself to be Ashoki, and his encounter with Lakhmi Chand's
gaze in the crowd of bystanders (residents of the colony) as he enters a
sewer:
"The boy who had come to file the complaint was also there. He was
looking at me with surprised eyes. Maybe he was thinking that when he
had come ot the office, I was wearing clean clothes and talking to him
like an officer. But today he was surprised at seeing me in dirty
clothes. I was laughing within. In his eyes, I was first an officer, a
sahib. He had called me sir. But what would he call me now? Maybe he was
also thinking of the same thing" [20].
The text raises the question of how the body is socially perceived,
problematising the fixedness of the representational frame around filth,
cleanliness, and notions of waste and disposal. What emerges through
these is a complex narrative of the body - the body is imagined,
narrated, socialised. The complex - rich, layered, contradictory -
terrain of experience and body & social dignity allows for a networked
thickening of ideas.
This practice-based universe produces a contingent, unstable and
relational knowledge field. The 'pedagogue' is a node in this network,
searching the emergent with producers/practitioners.
"What is it that flows between us?"
This practice of producing and building in a network resonates with and
draws from other practices and philosophies - for instance, the Free
Software modes of production. Virtual technological practices inform,
further complicate and deepen the imagination and everyday at the labs.
Sharing of resources through peer-to-peer networks, a class of
applications that takes advantages of resources - storage, cycles, human
presence - available along the links between routers of packages of
data, presents an actual and realisable technological juncture as well
as a metaphorical resonance with the peer-based practice at the labs.
The agility and improvisation of tactical media provide a larger context
of multi-authored production and a network to link with as producers and
creators. Practices like hyperlinking, lists and weblogs provide tools
and practices for cultural producers.
All of these have made possible the creation of and search for new forms
of knowledge, communities and practices at Cybermohalla [21].
Ambivalent Pedagogy
Ambivalence is an affirmation of contradictory perspectives, vatage
points, positionings and feelings at the same time. Ambivalent pedagogic
processes gesture towards the porosity of the boundaries between the
nodes of a server and a learner, realised through thinking about and
practicing in networked relations of production of knowledge. Different
nodes produce knowledge, and through the contingent and specific
relations formed between ideas, experiences and practices, together
search the emergent. Critical to the engagement is an acute
consciousness of and constant reflection on the relations between
friendship and knowledge, knowledge and conditionalities of speech,
knowledge and silences, knowledge and sharing. It is from these that an
ethics of the interaction in each site-specific unlikely encounter evolve.
The encounters multiply over time. Seeking unlikely encounters, as
guests in another locality, Yashoda, Azra, Lakhmi, Neelofar, Raju,
Nasreen, Suraj will carry with them and receive anew the reverberations
of the question, 'Before Coming Here, Had You Thought of a Place Like
This?' The question would be differently inflected, every time, in each
site, layering and thickening its experience and meanings.
----------------------------------------------
ENDNOTES
[1] Mohalla in hindi and urdu means neighbourhood. Ankur-Sarai's
Cybermohalla project takes on the meaning of the word mohalla, its sense
of alleys and corners, its sense of relatedness and concreteness, as a
means of talking about ones place in the city, and in cyberspace. In its
broadest imagination, it is a desire for a wide and horizontal network
(both real and virtual) of voices, sounds and images in dialogue and
debate. A step towards the realisation of this desire is through
engendering self-regulated media labs in working class settlements in
Delhi, which can facilitate the becoming of researcher-practitioners
from the locality. The young people who come to the labs are between 15
and 24.
[2] This question is often asked to visitors by the practioners at the
labs. Is it a question of suspicion of a stranger? Or an assiduous
search for a relationship of dignity? There is a strong realisation at
the labs that their life world is perceived as curios in a 'waiting
room'. To Yashoda, a practitioner at the LNJP lab, a khaas nazar, a
special look cast at her, is a gaze that produces a feeling of
suffocation. She writes, "What can be said of the looks that are not
from strangers, but well-wishers? They seem unfamiliar sometimes. What
are these looks? They leave a trace of suffocation in my life, which
otherwise seems to be going on just fine. Even if I want to tell others
about these looks, I can't. Because I don't understand them myself.
Because in the courthouse of glances, there are no eyewitnesses".
[3] Between 1975 and 1979, during the state of Emergency, Delhi saw the
violent clearing away of irregular settlements under the aegis of
Jagmohan, vice-chairman of the Delhi Development Authority. The
dislocated inhabitants were sought to be resettled in undeveloped plots
in the fringes of the city earmarked as resettlement colonies. Now
bustling with life and not as weak infrastructurally, this is the
beginning of the official history of Dakshinpuri.
[4] The public reading was at the launch of the Cybermohalla
publication, 2003 - a Book Box with ten booklets of texts from the labs,
five postcards, and a CD with animations, a sound & text film and Free
Software for Windows. For the Book Box, and the full text of Raju's
reading, see -
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/booklets.htm
[5] LNJP is officially a slum settlement. The irregular dwelling started
appearing in the early 60s, when people began settling in the unoccupied
land beside the LNJP hospital. Over the years, many more people made
homes here and the density of the colony grew. LNJP lives with an
everyday threat of demolition. In its neighbourhood is Turkhman Gate - a
settlement with a predominantly muslim population, which became a site
of massive demolition during 1975-77. After demolition, the residents
were sent to different resettlement colonies.
[6] For Shamsher's full text, see
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/questionsbetray.pdf
[7] Compughar, or the Abode of Computers - as the Cybermohalla media
labs are called by the young practitioners - is one such liminal space.
The young adults practicing at the labs meet on a daily basis, grappling
with ideas and stuttering into concepts through a sustained practice of
sharing through conversation. The LNJP Compughar was set up in May 2001,
and the Compughar at Dakshinpuri in August 2002.
[8] It is critical for the pedagogue to have a deeper understanding of
the peripheral realities of any such space. Individuals are not
discrete, separate units, but are experientially imbricated in a social
network that extends beyond them. An understanding of the implications
of this vis-a-vis an institution like the school, which disects the
experiential and the network from which a student emerges, is extremely
significant for an experiment like Cybermohalla. Prabhat Jha, one of the
co-ordinators of the Cybermohalla Project writes, "The question we must
constantly ask ourselves is whether we see ourselves working among the
30 or 40 young people immediately in front of us, or among the locality
which they have emerged from and are a part of. As soon as we bring this
into view, the entire scene changes. If we see ourselves as working in a
community, it is not possible for us to forget that along with the
practitioners are their families, and along with the families, the
neighbourhood. That is, the sense that your work has reverberations in
spaces outside of the immediately visible context of the labs, and is
constantly a receiver of reverberations from other spaces, is a very
important one". These ideas will be elaborated in a forthcoming article
by Prabhat K. Jha.
[9] Over the last two years at the labs, a sustained and regular
practice of writing has emerged. Everyone writes in diaries - small
notebooks with ruled sheets. These writings, some of which are in the
biographical register, some in the register of space, others through
engagement with another biography, are a rich database of narrative,
comment, word-play and reflection.
[10] For the full text of 'Crowds from Afar, from in Front and from
Within', see
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/eyescrowd.pdf
[11] The wall magazine is a primary "public form" of the labs. Texts are
written and selected for a twelve page wall magazine designed and
produced at the lab. It is then photocopied and circulated in the
locality by being put up on public walls. The first three wall magazines
were on names of the lanes in the colony, on work, and about the trip to
Bombay. Translated versions of these issues can be found on the Sarai
website -
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/ibarat01/english01.htm
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/ibarat02/pages/english02.htm
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/ibarat03/PAGES/english03.htm
[12] Since the mid-1950s, the post-colonial state in India concentrated
substantial resources into the production of engineers, providing
well-formulated courses and educational infrastructure. This, coupled
with proficiency in English and mathematics in the middle-classes,
engendered a huge labour force that entered the IT industry from the
early 1980s. This labour force is integrated into the global production
of software and services, synchronising well with the provision of
infrastructure for research and development by western economies.
At the second level, the state-run industrial training institutes showed
a great inertia in moving away from training their students for the
manufacturing industries. The IT expansion at the popular level happened
through a massive proliferation of small and mid-scale privately funded
software usage training institutes. This is the local labour force that
does the desk-top operations which run media production, print design,
graphics and popular web interfacing.
[13] The labs are equipped with three computers each, a scanner, a
printer, a sound booth, portable sound recording units, and digital and
analogue cameras. The computers run on Free Software. Image Manipulation
software, GIMP and text editor, Open Office are the applications used
for making animations and typing in and formatting texts. The practice
of taking photographs, recording sounds, creating animations seems to
have an archival impetus, rather than being object oriented, or with an
output in mind. They are constantly worked with, and also catalogued and
logged. This archive then, will create a centrifugal force, where
instead of being worked with to be presented to a public, it may create
a pull -the "public" must come to see it.
[14] An interesting phenomenon is that while there is such a pressure
from the labour market for a familiarity with the regime of propreitary
software, a brilliantly dynamic and productive culture of copying - eg.
MP3s - is part of this very environment. It is in the alleys and small
rooms right here, that the nodes of production that sustain the grey
market economies, thrive. These nodes, through which the locality enters
the larger politics of economic transactions as a producer, are part of
the everyday reality of these practitioners. And it is in this context
that the cassettes with the assorted favourite tracks and the CDs with
the latest film, burned before its release, are freely circulated among,
and copied for peers.
[15] I would like to thank Park Fiction (www.parkfiction.org) for their
rich concept of Unlikely Encounters: Groups that develop tools,
attitudes, courage, practices, programmes, that make unlikely
encounters, meetings and connections more likely, search for them, jump
over cultural or class barriers, go where no one goes, look where no
one's looking. They do not let their activities be reduced to symbolic
action, mirroring, critique, negation, or analysis of their
powerlessness nor do they muddle along in their assigned corner.
http://www.parkfiction.org/unlikelyencounters/begriffe.php
[16] Among many other programmers, Arish Zaini of the GNU/Linux Users'
Group in Iran visited Delhi in early 2002. He has been working with a
small group to develop a Persian language KDE desktop. During his visit,
he spent a day at the Compughar in LNJP, sharing his work with young
women proficient in Urdu and in working with the English language
desktop. In the convivial atmosphere of a mutual exchange of personal
stories and interests in technology and language, a small promise of CD
to install the Persian desktop at the lab was made and sealed. Now, from
the Persian desktop, an Urdu language desktop can be developed and
shared at the lab.
[17] For the full text of 'A Word', written by Suraj Rai after a
discussion among the practitioners at the LNJP Lab, see
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/wordscontain.pdf
[18] For texts from Nasreen's other peers at LNJP, see
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/eyescrowd.pdf
[19] For Yashoda's full text, see
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/beforecoming.pdf
[20] For Lakhmi's full text, see
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/inversion.pdf
[21] From the Technological Imagination of Cybermohalla, version 01 -"Is
there a significance in interaction and collaboration with peers? What
does it mean when edges, margins and in-between spaces become alive,
pulsating, interacting? When clients are also servers? When users are
also producers; browsers are also editors? When centers are dislocated
and resources are dispersed? When diversity and multiplicity thrive?
When ideas are not static or owned, but shared and developed
collaboratively? When unpredictable addresses and routes with unstable
connectivity are generators of knowledge, sites of narration, and nodes
and zones of comunication?" For the full text, see -
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book01/pages/194-215.pdf
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