[Nettime-bold] Sarai - first anniversary

[Monica Narula <monica@sarai.net>]

Dear Nettimers

As many of you may know, Sarai : The New Media Intiative (www.sarai.net)
completed its first anniversary yesterday. It has been an exciting first year
for all of us at Sarai, and we thought that we would share with you our
reflections on our experience of the first year on this occasion.

Below is a text that I spoke yesterday evening at the gathering at Sarai when
we released the Sarai Reader 02 (of which more in subsequent postings). I
hope that it gives you a good picture of what we have been up to at Sarai.

Cheers

Monica
_______________________________________________________________
Sarai - One Year in the Public Domain

As a person who has been involved with Sarai from its inception, I am
obviously not a disinterested, objective observer. What I am going to share
with you in the next few minutes is not an 'annual report' on our activities.
It is rather an attempt at communicating some of the excitement of being
here, and I hope that by bringing the reasons for that excitement into what
we (ever since the last Sarai Reader) have grown accustomed to calling the
'Public Domain', I can invite you to find your own points of engagement with
what we are doing at Sarai.

You might as well ask, what do we do at Sarai? Where in all the spectrum of
activities and projects is the focus that animates Sarai? I will try and
answer this with a series of instances of the kinds of work and the processes
that have been at play here. But before I do that, I would like to dwell on
two terms - "Collaboration" and "Commons"  - that have translated themselves
into key concepts for us. Perhaps then you will see how the work we do
connects with the City, with Media and with the Public Domain.

So what are these two words - 'Collaboration' and 'Commons' - and what do we
mean when we deploy them to describe or qualify what we do, and also who we
are. For us, Collaboration denotes those encounters and processes that entail
a synergy between discrete forms, practices, and cultures. These can be
between media practice and media theory, between designers and researchers,
between programmers and artists, between people in a basti and people in a
digital lab, between practitioners across borders and cultures in an
electronic public domain, and between languages.

Typically, the city as a cultural form is the arena where such encounters are
played out to their fullest potential. A programme such as ours which
foregrounds the urban as a category for reflection in this sense mirrors the
sensibility of the city. It does so by welcoming a range of collaborations
that describe an array of origins including scholarship, activism, media
practice, technological innovation, cultural intervention,  creativity and
play, all of which taken together constitute an ensemble of energies that are
animated by each other. All these communicate with each other through a
constellation of media practices ranging from print, video, sound, to the
internet and digital art. All this contributes to, and takes place within, a
notion of the "Commons" - a metaphor taken from the ways in which resources
and space have been held together through history, and which is now deployed
to suggest an accretion of cultural energies and materials that are openly
available and that are built over time, through shared endeavours, in the
Public Domain. The "Commons" is the frame within which "Collaborations" take
place. This, we would suggest is how the City, Media, and the Public Domain
hang together in our frame of things.

How then does this translate into actual practice. I would like to offer you
a few instances from the last year at Sarai.
A residency that Sarai shared with Khoj, an artists network, to host Syeda
Farhana, a photographer from Dhaka, Bangladesh led to her creating a
hypertextual photographic installation on Bangladeshi migrants in Delhi in
collaboration with Joy Chatterjee in the Sarai Media Lab. The work done by
her constituted not only a stand alone digital work, but the nucleus of a set
of materials in the Sarai archive of the city. There are several levels of
interaction here, between Sarai and another institution, Khoj. Between
Farhana and us at the Media Lab, between photography and digital media, and
between art practice and an archival imperative. This is an example of the
ways in which the word collaboration comes to mean what it does at Sarai.

One of our print media fellows - Frederick Noronha - is working on a
documentary history of the free software movement in India. His research
methodology involves an active 'posting' mechanism. He posts his queries on
to a series of electronic lists, and the queries and the responses, as well
as what he writes in the form of notes, observations and essays are made
available online. In this way, an archive of materials is formed out of the
growing correspondence between him and his subjects, for all of whom the
project that he has embarked on is essentially a collaborative venture to
write their history together with him.

Ravi has already mentioned the Publics and Practices in the History of the
Present, work for which has begun, as a unique set of activities that involve
practitioners, theorists and researchers in a repertoire of explorations.
While on the one hand it might involve me photographing the lobbies of old
cinema halls, or the electronics bazaar at Lala Lajpat Rai Market, and Bhrigu
or Parvati taking notes for a detailed ethnography of a media space, it also
involves me and my colleagues in the Raqs Media Collective, Jeebesh and
Shuddha, working together with Ravi Vasudevan and Ravi Sundaram to arrive at
conceptual categories with which to think through the very idea of what Ravi
Sundaram likes to call the 'messiness' of the contemporary!

Collaboration also informs the making of this Reader - "The Cities of
Everyday Life". It has been from the very beginning a collective endeavour,
with five of us at Sarai interacting closely with Geert Lovink from the Waag,
who is now in Sydney, and then with us at the media lab working in tandem
with Pradip Saha, the designer of the book over the last few months. I think
that in this case the results of collaboration are very visible. The richness
of textual forms, and of approaches, and yet the clear presence of a focus on
the city as an object of knowledge, interpretation and reflection of this
order is seldom possible to achieve without the coming together, the concert,
of many energies, curiosities, and passions.

What is even more interesting is that it is clear to us, that this book in
its print form is very much a new media work. Of course this can be
substantiated by the fact that this is a copyleft work, and with
collaborative authorship. But I think that this is true even of the form and
argument of the structure of the book. The texts that constitute the book may
be arranged sequentially, but they follow a hypertextual logic that is also a
result of our online engagements. Also, for instance, the online dialogues
culled from the Reader List. The list itself emerged from the publication of
the first Sarai Reader and has entered this year's book. A book gives rise to
an online community, and the online community gives rise to content for a
book.

Similarly, an important section in the book emerged out of the workshop on
cinema held at Sarai, and Ranjani Mazumdar, Ira Bhaskar and Moinak Bishwas,
each of them independent film scholars, have had their insights relayed into
the book via the workshop. Even a series of film screenings - Nitin Govil's
curation of Science Fiction Films at Sarai - has translated itself into an
essay on the city in science fiction for the Reader.
This model of creating works and processes that embody an encounter between
different communicative practices is  something that we have been able to
arrive at over the past year, and we have been able to do so because the work
we do at Sarai is inter-disciplinary. It is an assemblage of practices and
discursive acts as an interweaving of different rhetorics, of different modes
of address, of diverse technologies of communication. We will carry this
further through the publication of a book from the Cybermohalla project, a
sense of which you can already get in this years Reader and a Sarai Reader in
Hindi, both of which, are slated to come out early this summer, as well as in
all the ways in which we make our work public.  In the book itself, "The
Cities of Everyday Life", the coming together of forms and practices has
pushed open possibilities of what the pleasures of making a book can be.
This is why the the term "new media" for us is not so much about the novelty
of computers, multimedia and the Internet, as it is about new forms and
strategies of practice, about innovative re-combinations between "Old" and
"New" media, between and across, print, film, video, television, radio,
computers and the internet.

We are keen to effect crossovers and transgressions that displace both old
and new hierarchies, which privilege neither tradition nor novelty for their
own sake, and give rise to a more layered and agile form of media practice
that is more reflective of the contemporary in our spaces. This means being
as invested in the making of print objects, visual works and soundscapes as
in the creation of web content, and looking for ways in which practices and
objects can straddle off-line and online trajectories.

We are also working on a number of new media projects which examine questions
related to claims and contests around issues of space and access in the urban
environment and explore the idea of a "digital commons". We hope to realize
at least three to four major new media  projects around these themes this
year on a variety of platforms - on the internet, as installations, and in
the form of  publications. Significant amongst these is the OPUS project, an
online inter-media platform for collaborative digital practice. OPUS will be
a space where old and new media can meet online, and create hybrid works
through dispersed authorship. It is a translation of the basic principles of
openness and collaboration that animates the free software milieu into
general cultural practice. This presumes the cultivation of a sensibility of
creative and intellectual collaboration and free exchange. The OPUS project
has benefited enormously from the contributions of Silvan and Bauke, students
of digital media, who have been with us on extended residencies, alongside
Pankaj and the rest of us on the project. Their sheer energy and tenacity in
terms of coding has been one of the anchors of the OPUS project, and this is
one collaboration that we know has an exciting future.

A central thread running through our work is the politics of communication
itself. Who can access which tools to say what to whom. Hence our engagement
with technology as cultural form and as the crucible of a new contest of
power. This is certainly a conscious choice on our part. We are interested in
Free Software not only because it makes economic sense in an Indian context
to not spend a lot of money on expensive proprietary software, but also
because we believe there are crucial issues of cultural freedom and
creativity that are at stake here. And the insistence that access and control
over the technologies of communication and information must be opened out is
central to democratic practice of culture. We want to contribute to
autonomous, collaborative energies in the field of software, culture and
communication technology, which are conducive to conditions of diversity.
That some of these energies challenge, or at least are skeptical about the
commodification of digital culture across the globe, is something that we
would like to see foregrounded in a lot of the work that we do.
We are also organizing a workshop on Information and Politics from tomorrow
which will include discussions and presentations by activists, media
practitioners and researchers on surveillance, censorship, free speech, free
software, cyber laws and the right to information campaign in India. This
workshop will, we hope, open ground for a serious public debate on the
politics of information, as well as the domination of the media and
communication technologies by entrenched interests.

Sarai is interested especially in those media cultures that lie in the shadow
of technological and social elites. We are interested in speaking to critical
voices that produce and live the new media, which may exist in the street,
the software factory, the worlds of the local videowalla, the neighbourhood
Public Call Office/cybercafe, the gray markets in music, computers and other
media-ware. This is the electronic everyday, which resides in the shadows of
the spectacular media space conjured by the media empires in South Asia, and
will be very much an area where Sarai's work is slated to grow in the near
future.

I hope that all this gives you a sense of who we are and what we have been up
to in the last year. It is evident, but I will say it regardless. We are
busy, we are public, we are open and we intend to stay that way.

Thank you for being such a critical, patient and friendly public.
-- 
Monica Narula
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net

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