[Reader-list] emerging media networks: CD produced by PPHP at SARAI

[Ritika]

Dear all,
We at SARAI are working on a project called 'Publics and Practices in 
the History of the Present – PPHP'

CONTEXT:
The project is trying to understand the various media practices in the 
city. It is increasingly being felt that the new globalisation is 
transforming media networks in Delhi. At the level of the everyday, the 
old prohibition and regulation on the social life of commodities have 
proved ineffective, urban residents are now assaulted with a deluge of 
cultural products, cassettes, CD's, MP3s, VCD's, cable television, grey 
markets computers, cheap chinese audio and video players, thousands of 
cheap print flyers, and signage everywhere. What is remarkable here is 
the preponderance of these products comes from the grey or informal 
sector, outside the effective regulation of the state or large capital. 
India today has the world's second largest music market, a large film 
industry with global dreams, a majority grey computer market, hundreds 
of tiny thousands of phone and word processing shops and cybercafes. And 
as if from the ruins of urban planning new media bazaars, which supply 
these networks have emerged, existing in the cusp of legality and 
illegality. Everyday a guerilla war is raging, between new intellectual 
property raiders, the police and unceasing neighbourhood demand for grey 
ware.

PROJECT and PRACTICES:
Very briefly, in PPHP we are trying to understand the Old and New film 
making/distribution practices, rise - fall and future of other cinematic 
practices like Videos, Cable TV Industry and Popular Music Culture are 
few of the media practices that we are trying to unravel and understand. 
Simultaneously we are also entering spaces which are not only 
circulating various media but also centres of media production.

As researchers in PPHP we are trying to traverse and map these emerging 
new spaces, and the ever evolving networks. Our methodology is simple – 
that of threads and networks.  From municipal archives to personal 
collections; from interviews of  people 'in' business to interviews of 
academics, we pass through markets, cinemas, corporate offices, music 
companies, film distribution offices, detective agencies, law courts, 
police stations, government archives and factories, we meet shopkeepers, 
software pirates, porn merchants, architects, singers, accountants, 
laborers, lawyers, officials and policemen - all of whom constitute the 
fraught fabric of the Media City.

PUBLIC FORMS:
We try to knit our diverse experiences into a picture of larger 
processes and transformations by posting  field-notes (largely 
experiential) on a common list and archive - a space for sharing 
information, for collaborative research, for creative interventions. 
Newspaper clippings and other print and audio visual material are also 
collected and digitized. There is a commitment to making the research 
public, and in this endeavour, we engage with a variety of forms of 
presenting research - staccato fieldnotes, news clippings, more 
‘poetic’, evocative texts, archival resources, other ‘intermediate’ 
forms of writing not yet polished into an essay or scholarly article; 
these modes of writing are put out into the public domain via new forms 
– the broadsheet, the spiral bound volume, the hyperlinked CD.


CD:
Last month we prepared a CD for our project. The CD has our field notes, 
articles, some information bytes, a glimpse of our extensive range of 
archival collection. In a nut shell - it contains our research work of 
last three years.

We would want to share our research with you. If you are interested to 
have a copy, just write to me – ritika: ritika at sarai.net or on the 
reader list, along with your address. It'll be nice if you could also 
convey what interested you in the work – to facilitate future 
possibilities of interactions.

The CD is not yet available online, but I will get back the moment it is 
up on the site.

Also if you think that any of your other friends and collegues are 
interested, then please ask them to get back to us.

HOping to hear from you,
cheers
ritika

-- 
Ritika Shrimali
The Sarai Programme

http://blog.sarai.net/users/ritika

What good is that life which does not get provoked or provokes. 
Gottfried Benn