[Reader-list] Announcement - Pad.ma Engagement

[shaina a]

Dear all.

We take great pleasure in inviting you to a day-long engagement with Pad.ma.

Day:
Monday, February, 16, 2009.

Time:
11:am to 7pm

Location:
"Who Are We?" hall - inside the Discovery of India exhibition,
First Floor,
Nehru Centre,
Dr. Annie Besant Road,
Worli, Mumbai - 400018.

Featuring:
Agaaz-Akanksha - Bombay
Ayisha Abraham - Bangalore
Desire Machine Collective - Guwahati/Shillong
GBGB Andolan (NAPM) -  Bombay
Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lütgert - Berlin
Kaushik Bhaumik - Bombay
Lawrence Liang -Bangalore
Nida Ghouse - Bombay
Nilanjan Bhattarcharya - Calcutta
Priya Sen - Delhi
Ranu Ghosh - Calcutta
Sadanand Menon - Chennai
Sanjay Kak- Delhi


For the past year, we (Oil21 from Berlin, the Alternative Law Forum from
Bangalore, and three organisations from Bombay: Majlis, Point of View and
ChitraKarKhana/CAMP) have been working on various aspects of the online
archive, http://pad.ma. At the moment Pad.ma contains some 150 hours of
video and over 92,500 annotations (text entries).

We see the Pad.ma archive as a way of opening up images, meanings and
effects that are present in video footage and its production process:
resources that conventions of editing and viewing have tended to suppress.
This in a way, is its traditional archiving function.

At the same time, Pad.ma responds to the invitation and challenge of a
landscape beyond "the film" as the desired end-product of this medium, and
beyond youtube as its default online repository.  Filmmakers and others are
already engaged in many forms of presentation, interpretation, and the
combination of images and ideas. Pad.ma suggests some specific new relations
between images and text, production and commentary, online and offline,
visibility and possibility.  It proposes a few new ways to write about and
discuss documentary film practice, ways to base academic work on video
sources, and more generally, ways to still care for something that has
become "democratic".  All of these claims, ofcourse, will be tested in
Pad.ma's new phase.

In March this year, Pad.ma will be opened up to external contributions. As a
lead-up to this, we invited a number of "users": independent filmmakers,
artists, activists, researchers, students, scholars, and enthusiasts to
contribute their own material into pad.ma,  or traverse the archive and
explore its ways.

On the 16th of February, we are having a day-long series of presentations
and discussions with this group. We hope you will join us and take part, to
understand the activities over the past year, and to help us plan the road
ahead.

Looking forwards.
with love,
pad.ma group


Who are we:
altlawforum.org
camputer.org
chitrakarkhana.net
majlisbombay.org
oil21.org
pointofview.org