city of other peoples dreams (re-)visited

we had mentioned Dubai (as ‘the city of other peoples dreams‘) on this blog back in march of this year. on my current trip to Sarai (to attend the sensor-census-censor symposium) i had the opportunity to spend one day in Dubai to witness how this ‘city of other peoples dreams’ is being constructed. i have posted some pictures to the ‘dubai construction‘ set of my flickr account:

[from the description]: i took these photographs during a stopover in dubai on the 25th of november 2006. they are taken on various construction sites in the dubai marina area that this located about 25 kilometers south from the old city centre in the vicinity of the palm jumeirah artificial island. most of the construction workers pictured here apporached me by themselfes and asked me to take a picture of them. for more information on the situation of migrant construction workers in the U.A.E see the Human Rights Watch report ‘Building Towers, Cheating Workers‘. some more background on the insanity going on in Dubai can be found in the essay Dubai: self-help for those you wanted to build a 21st century city by Shumon Basar

the last article has a number of accompanying pictures. this one is my absolute favorite. pretty much sums up the hubris of the place in one sentence:

paul keller

Technorati Tags: construction, dubai, urban

Add comment December 2nd, 2006

Revisiting Sarai Five Years of New Media Culture in India

Early in 2001 the Sarai new media center opened in Delhi, India. Soon, Sarai became famous for its high quality work and critical engagements. I have been involved with Sarai since its inception in 1998. Around the opening of Sarai in early 2001 I wrote a chapter in Dark Fiber about its founding and first programs. As of 2006 Sarai has gone through a phase of spectacular growth, expanding to 120 people who are part of their network of employees and fellows. Most of them are not working in the Sarai building or even in Delhi. This chapter is no means a comprehensive overview of Sarai’s activities as there is simply too much going on. I am emphasizing new media related research, knowing that Sarai’s agenda is much broader than that. I’ll discuss my own limited selection of projects and in the last part will also focus on the international dimension of Sarai’s work.

This report is in three sections. First, I will describe my visit to Sarai in late 2002. In the second part I report about the new projects and developments I witnessed in late 2004. In the last part, written around mid 2006, I will focus on the international aspect of Sarai’s work. To date, many artists from overseas have done residencies at Sarai. What was their experience and how do Sarai members deal with this growing number of travelers? I will also talk about the Dutch-Indian exchange program between Sarai and the new media center, Waag Society in Amsterdam, which secured the initial funding for Sarai, and are partnering with Sarai in this program. In 2004 this program opened and became a ‘platform’ with initiatives in Bangalore, Brazil and Beirut. As is so often the case with new media projects, internationalization happened at an incredible pace. Sarai has developed partnerships, in the cities of Hamburg, Liverpool, Vienna and others. Sarai is not only receiving many guests from overseas, but also has an impressive international presence, not just in India and South Asia, or the West, but all around the globe.

Sarai’s buzz began with its eight core members – Ravi Sundaram, Ravi Vasuderan and the three member of the RAQS Media Collective: Monica Nerula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddha Sengupta. Dipu (Awadhendra Sharan), who works on environmental discourse in the city, joined in 2004, around the same time as Ravikant Sharma. Ashish Mahajan joined in 2005.

Sarai is a subsidiary program of CSDS, or the Center for the Study of Developing Societies. CSDS was founded in 1964, and is one of India’s best-known independent research institutes with a commitment to critical social thought and democratic political values. Bringing together some of South Asia’s most famous social theorists, writers and critics, such as Ashis Nandy and Rajni Kothari, the CSDS has played an important part in shaping the intellectual and creative map of South Asia. RAQS, an autonomous unit within Sarai, was originally a documentary film collective. Founded in 1991, RAQS has moved from its original focus on film into contemporary arts, exhibiting in major shows such as Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany and the 2005 Venice Biennale. The RAQS members travel a lot, but return to Delhi over the winter months when the annual Sarai journal, Reader, is being produced, and when conferences take place at Sarai. The two Ravis have both worked as fellows at CSDS before Sarai started. In the front building of the compound, CSDS operates as the center, and Sarai is still a subsidiary program of CSDS. All Sarai staff touch base in August when the forty, mostly younger people from all over India, gather in Delhi to present the results of their research.

Ravi Sundaram explains the orginal drive behind the global aspect of Sarai’s work: “Sarai has always been comfortably international, in contrast to nationalist intellectual traditions in India. This is because we recognized the logic of the new network-critique, which buried nationalist state-centered analysis for good. This comfort with international intellectual traditions has set us apart from so many others, and may account for some of our successes in collaborations and intellectual debate.” Ravi admits that it has a flip side. “Success has meant too many demands internationally from a mix including well meaning liberals, narrow counter culture Western characters, and in some cases first rate and wonderful collaborations. Demands are great. The international cultural (arts, new media, academic) economy globally loves ’success’, since Sarai has been represented as that it increases traffic, some of it not always easy to handle.”

At the same time that Sarai’s profile has increased internationally, so has that of the RAQS collective, which existed well before Sarai’s founding. The work of RAQS has become increasingly global while at the same time its content, strictly speaking, remains Indian. The potential tension between a sophisticated global audience and an even more sophisticated local context is hitting the surface. For instance, freelance journalists Johny ML and Mrinal asked, back in 2000, “We do not insist that the art to be pedagogic. But when you leave the gallery you need to carry something in your mind to brood over. What does RAQS Collective give us to ruminate? Where is the critique? What does the RAQS Collective think about the malnutrition in India? What does it think about the Indian beauty industry? On what level does it wants the participants to play the game of participation? What is the computer density in India? And what percentage of the Indian populace is connected to WWW?”

They ask a lot. Beyond moralism and political correctness, really, what does it mean to work in a Delhi settlement one day, and a European art exhibit next? What are the challenges here? And what is my position in this, as an engaged insider and observer? Rather than leap to an immediate judgment here, instead, let’s get a glimpse of what it means in India today to run a politically engaged new media center with a global outreach.

In October 2002, nearly two years after Sarai started its operations, I visited the center for a second time, curious to meet the new staff and see how projects had evolved. The center was a buzzing hub, full of energy. During the six days of my stay I only got a glimpse of what was going on. Delhi, as hot and polluted as ever, was undergoing a major transformation. The construction of the subway was still underway. Due to the tense situation in Gujarat and Kashmir, Delhi felt under siege. Surveillance and control were stepped up; there were police roadblocks here and there. Politically, the week was marked by the elections in Jammu and Kashmir, which resulted in a defeat for the ruling National Conference, a partner in the Hindu nationalist BJP-led National Democratic Alliance coalition. By positioning itself ‘off the radar,’ Sarai had not yet had to deal with state interference. The impression one got of Sarai was that of a dynamic cultural center where new media are center stage but not the sole denominator. Instead, what was driving Sarai was a passion for cosmopolitan intellectual debate on contemporary urban culture. The central concern of Sarai was the connection between urban culture, media and daily life. The annually published Sarai Reader is proof of the strong ties to book culture. At the same time the Sarai server was, and is, host to a range of electronic mailing lists, from its own reader-list, commons-law, picturepost (”a forum to share and discuss images”) to cr-india, a discussion forum on community radio in India.

At Sarai there was a weekly public screening program, using easy to obtain VHS and DVD copies of feature films and documentaries, not 16 or 35 mm film projectors. On the program that week was an Iranian film, Kandahar, by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The day I arrived, Michael Saup of ZKM, the German center for art and technology, gave a workshop that was supported by the Goethe Institute – a technological event the Insititute itself could not host. Also, there were two Australians there, doing a residency. In the midst of it all, there were countless staff meetings. And, yes, there was the occasional electricity cut. Because of road construction, the ISDN connection to the Net had been down for a while, but this improved later on that week. One of the Sarai founders Ravi Sundaram said bandwidth could have been better, but that the government was holding up connectivity because of the post-911 security clearance of cable landings.

Here, we will examine some of the projects:

The Hindi Language and Computing

Ravikant Sharma, a former historian, is responsible for the language and popular culture program. Hindi is perhaps one of the largest languages in the world. However, it is a pity to see that the best books on the Hindi public domain all are written in English. Experts on Hindi film only publish in English. Ravikant Sharma’s research looks at the implications—and possibilities—of new media for Hindi popular culture. He is the editor of the Hindi Media Reader, arguably the first new media publication in Hindi with commissioned articles on free software, satellite channels, and tactical media. The reader also contains specific essays about the Indian context for new media. The first book in this series deals with new media theory, seen from a broad context. Ravikant: “The Hindi world has been obsessed with print culture, which rose in the late nineteenth century. Related is the love for literature. But in our age there are more ways of looking at the world. Film and television now constitute language.” In the Hindi context it is important to discuss the anxiety between ‘high’ literature and popular media. The Hindi media reader discusses the relation between the book and the computer. Sarai wants to play a mediator role and lift the knowledge of one sphere and transfer it into another. Ravikant knows only of a few Indian media theorists, post-Marxist scholars and writers who have been struggling against the dominant trend of treating audio-visual media as suspect. New media are usually seen as part of the package called “globalization”.

By 2002 considerable progress had been made concerning the introduction of Hindi as a computer user language, both on the level of software interfaces and on the Net. But still a lot of work needed to be done. Like Japanese, Hindi has its own set of characters. Both programs and the keyboard required adjustment. Ravikant Sharma: “At the moment there are three levels at which work is being done. There is the font solution, in which you have to install fonts within the application you use. Then there are the dynamic fonts. Thirdly, there is the Hindi Unicode (the extended standard of ASCII), which will be the long-term solution. However, you can’t use it yet for the Linux-based Star Office. Compared to open source programs, Windows has a much better support for Hindi Unicode. The BBC Hindi site has started using Unicode. You can download fonts from there, which are for free. But keyboards have not yet been adapted.” For those interested, there is a yahoo group that deals with Hindi and computing. Lately, Linux groups in India have woken up and start to deal with the language issue. Ravikant Sharma: “I just came back from a conference in Bangalore that dealt with all the issues of standardization—mainly visited by Linux users. Whatever input devices we use, we should give people choices. In India old school typists—turned DTP operators—do most of the work. Their needs should also be taken into account. Many are bi-lingual workers. But there are also those who only speak Hindi. For them we should also offer the phonetic choice at the QWERTY keyboard level.”

Despite rampant nationalism, the Hindi part of the Internet is much more tolerant than one might expect. Ravikant Sharma: “We learned to live with the tension of hate sites. There are limits to what you can do against Hindi nationalists. There is such an obsession in India with the protection of the ‘purity’ of culture. We therefore have to find ways to talk about other topics. There is always the danger that the Hindi language agenda gets hi-jacked by the guardians of cultural purity but that should not stop us from getting involved. I am hopeful. The Hindu right wing forces are losing one election after another. The ruling class is in fact not following the nationalist economic agenda.”

Cybermohalla

Cybermohalla is perhaps one of the Sarai’s most impressive projects. In May 2001 a media lab was established in a squatters’ settlement called ‘LNJP,’ a ‘basti’, next to a hospital in central Delhi. The settlement lives under the permanent threat of eviction. Bulldozers could come at any time and force the inhabitants to resettle on the outskirts of the nine million people metropolis. The project is based in a small room nicknamed Compughar, has three computers (two of them Linux), mainly used by a group of young people most of whom are young Muslim women. Shveta Sarda, who trained as a social worker before coming to Sarai to work on the Cybermohalla project, has taken me to Compughar and translates from Hindi to English the many stories the youngsters have to tell. The co-coordinator Azra Tabassum, a lively 20 year old, shows us around. Compughar is a self-regulated space. Azra looks into the everyday functioning of the lab. Monday to Saturday everyone meets from 10 to 4. There is lots of laughter—and expertise. The Cybermohalla project is now well under way. The frequent visitors, most of them school dropouts, have quickly learned to master word processing (in Hindi), drawing and animation programs (Gimp), games, the digital camera and a scanner. There is even a phone and email access via a modem but the connection is not always that stable. At length we discuss the use of Hindi fonts, compare chemical processed pictures with digital ones, and go through the countless animations the children and young people have made of their computer drawings.

Cybermohalla (CM) is not like many Digital Divide projects in that its emphasis is not primarily focused on access and IT education. Unlike most ‘telecenters’ the emphasis is not on access but on raising cultural competence within the locality. Sarai, together with the NGO, Ankur, (the Society for Alternatives in Education) have developed their own methodology. Ankur’s philosophy is to give young people what they are deprived of in schools. Prabhat Jha, who works for Ankur, writes: “What is needed is that we be excited by innovation, but not get swept away by blind faith in it. That there be creativity, along with a critical attitude.” Unlike most projects in this area the focus is not primarily on (Micro)software training. It takes courage to step outside of the development logic that IT is solely about bringing prosperity. Cybermohalla is first of all about digital story telling. The participants go out into the narrow streets and bring back what they have heard and seen. Technical training is only one aspect. The ability to tell a story is just as important. Prabhat: “Within a month the children understood that they were not doing a normal computer course.” A community media memory was in the making. Shevta Sarda explains that Ankur has an extensive local, national, international network and many visitors from that network visit CM labs on a regular basis. “This is a substantial volume. The content from Ankur circulates within this network, and critically, many invitations to CM to host workshops, make presentations, develop projects come from here. Ankur has made Cybermohalla a critical vantage point to begin rethinking the idea of critical pedagogy within the development/NGO sector.”

Shveta Sarda told me more about the Cybermohalla methodology. “We use a variety of media forms, from wall magazines to html pages, animation, stickers and diaries (texts, audio recordings, photographs). The participants write about the basti, about the neighbourhood, they make excursions into Delhi (short walks, for instance), as well as to other cities. Excursions are often in small groups. The texts—narratives, reflections, descriptions—written individually, are shared within the group. It is through this loop of writing, readings and sharing, and very significantly, the conversations these engender, through the words and ideas that they move through, that members like Azra, Nilofer, Shamsher, Suraj, Babli, Shahana, Mehrunisa, Yashoda and others discover and evolve the various concepts we engage with.” The conversations, Shveta explained, are critical to the process of ‘concept making’ at Cybermohalla. Ruchika Negi, another researcher at Cybermohalla, brought, into the labs through readings and discussions, her own narratives about the city— narratives she was currently working on through her interactions with ’scavengers,’ people who live on the streets, street children, who subsist on the invisible margins in the city.

Besides Shveta, there is Joy Chatterjee, a web designer in the Sarai media lab, who provides support and shares skills in text editing and image manipulation. Also part of the team is Ashish Mahajan, who oversees the technical skill sharing for the use of low-end consumer technology (camera, Dictaphone, sound equipment, microphones). Ravikant Sharma, involved in Cybermohalla because of the Hindi language aspect, agreed that the project has a ‘post-educational’ emphasis. “The mainstream understanding is that there is a direct link between technology and development. And between education and employment. We could say that at Cybermohalla these kids gain critical skills. But we should not pretend that we provide existential comfort to the people associated with us.” Shveta Sarda: “It’s not just the mainstream understanding of a link between technology and development, or between education and employment, but also the notion, a class- based bias of looking at certain peoples as culture deficits, waiting for a delivery system of ideas, words, concepts and skills, that invariably gets articulated under the garb of the language of ‘lack’ and ‘empowerment’. Sadly, this masks the significance of ‘cultural creativity’, or that of users and producers contributing to and guiding (technical) innovation.”

In July 2002, material that had been produced material was brought together in a beautifully designed, bi-lingual book, called By Lanes. All the children, parents and others came to Sarai. The place had never been so packed. The Compughar group read their stories. The response of the basti community was mixed. Ravikant Sharma: “There was some opposition, but now there is openness about what the women are doing. For the first time there are reports coming in from the basti citizens themselves. Before reports were usually written by outsiders.” The Compughar group made an animation about the fierce debate within the basti community. “Why would the outside world be interested about the everyday life of a settlement?”, some asked. The style of diary-type entries in By Lanes about daily life in the settlement is reflexive, poetic, and at times nostalgic, whereas, for instance, the online stories in Cybermohalla’s ‘Ibarat’ newsletter about a train journey to Mumbai are more fragmented and narrative.

In the afternoon we visited the second Cybermohalla media lab in the Dakshinpuri resettlement colony in South Delhi. The lab had opened only two months ago, with Pinki as the co-coordinator. The growing group of participants was still in the process of finding out about the possibilities of the software. Both exhausted from the encounters and the long journey through town by car, Shveta and I returned to Sarai.

In an email exchange a few week later, Shveta wrote: “What Cybermohalla creates is a context for researchers, media practitioners, web designers, programmers—from different contexts, with our specificities, pursuits, subjectivities—to interact, to collaboratively, dialogically create and transform our own, and one another’s’ practices through an awareness of and a critical engagement with one another, to participate in the process—as Jeebesh puts it—not as unequals. It is a dialogic reflection among peers. The processes are not determined by their ultimate purposes. Skills, forms and materials are not introduced into the labs with a fixed, predetermined purpose or instrumentality. We’re not working with or within a curriculum, or ‘evolving’ one. Otherwise where would the room exist for experimentation, or a playfulness with forms, an interrogation of these?”

Sarai and the arts.

Sarai is by no means only a national center. From the beginning it has been embedded in regional South Asian and international networks. The RAQS Media Collective (Jeebesh, Monica and Shuddha), founding members of Sarai who have worked together for many years and have shown their work abroad for a long time. In 2002 RAQS had an installation at the Documenta 11 art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. A year before the opening of the show one of the ‘platforms’ (D11 curator Okwui Enwezor’s term for public debate), had taken place in Delhi. RAQS’ Documenta installation, ‘Coordinates of Everyday Life,’ consists of two parts. The video section, using a few projectors in a dark room, engages with Delhi urban culture. Shuddha: “Many hours of shooting were done over a period of one and a half years. It is 90 minutes of video material if you want to see everything. We engaged with the city in a systematic way, each week identifying an element of city life. We would then go to that particular spot and shoot. There are for instance parts taken from one shot of us in the fog, standing on a bridge at one camera angle for one and a half hours. We learned a lot from that discipline. In filmmaking you are always under the pressure to move your camera and yourself. This shift is related to our move into the arts. It is a move away from the ‘universal clock’ of television. At the same time it is a sign of our ongoing engagement with documentary filmmaking. Before, the ‘clock’ of television was still running in our heads. Now, there is no search for any spectacular, decisive moment. We did not look for the significant shot. In that sense creating a work for an arts context allowed us to re-engage with the documentary sensibility.”

The work also looks at the law and the legal regime governing space. This forms the textual component of the work. Shuddha: “Certainly the presence of rules and regulations in urban space has increased dramatically. The first piece that you see in the installation is the law on land rights, dating back to the 19th century. It defines what is property in land. What matters here is not so much the codification as such but its precise articulation in today’s context through regimes of surveillance and urban relocation.” The paranoia about security is significant in Delhi. For the installation RAQS also produced stickers. They contained simple messages such as ‘look under your seat’, ‘do not touch abandoned objects’ or ‘missing persons report immediately’.

The second part of ‘Coordinates of Everyday Life’ at Documenta 11 was a piece of open source software presented on PC monitors. Opus (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification) is a web-based database structure for shared content. Opus is an attempt to create a digital commons in culture, based on the principle of a sharing of work, while at the same time retaining the possibility (if and when desired) of maintaining traces of individual authorship and identity. I asked Shuddha to what extent the conceptual nature of the Opus database was related to the precise nature of everyday life imagery in Delhi. Shuddha replied: “Both are about inhabiting space in a different way. One is about being restrained by legal regimes in offline space, the other reflects on the possibility of sharing space in a much more free-floating, dispersed fashion. We started to be interested in work that enables work. Opus means work. It’s a work about work. It’s not an object that can be contemplated. Rather, Opus is a playground. I look at Opus as a building or an architecture, as a blueprint. It is like a building waiting to be inhabited. It takes some talking to communicate to an art audience what the implications of Opus are.” Those familiar with free software immediately understand the basic ideas behind Opus. But they would ask: ‘why label it art’? Shuddha: “Certainly. Software questions the boundaries of art. The most interesting response came from a group in Brazil called Recombo who were doing something similar with music. They take the idea of the remix culture literally and built an online architecture for people to make collaborative music. In this way peer-to- peer distribution is extended with peer-to-peer creation. Others are interested in the source code. Now we are translating the Opus ideas into physical space. It is a work commissioned by the Walker Art Center, in collaboration with Atelier Bow Wow, a group of Japanese architects. The show opens in February 2003. We are trying to figure out what kind of analogue manifestations Opus can have in a gallery space.”

In August 2002 a delegation from Sarai flew to Sao Paolo to install a work of RAQS Media Collective at the new media arts exhibition Emoção Art.ficial. The installation called location (n) has eight clocks and eight monitors. Shuddha explains: “The crucial idea is one of time zone. The clocks represent different cities such as Sao Paolo, New York, Lisbon and Delhi. Instead of hours the face of the clock has emotions such as epiphany at 12 o’clock, or anxiety… nostalgia. The fun of the work is that visitors can compare the different states of being in each city. The whole room is filled with the sound of a heartbeat, layered on to which are the sounds of global electronic transactions, modems, fax machines, and phones. On the monitors you see a face slowly moving from left to right. It’s a mysterious image because it looks like as if the face disappears from one and then reappears on another monitor. The face seems to be travelling between the time zones. We are playing with the Kulishov effect in early cinema where expressions and objects each produce different emotional effects. In our case it was about the expression of the same emotions in different time zones. Globally speaking we always had the same emotions. It’s just that there is no singularity. Everyone feels the same but at different point of time.”

My journey around the Sarai projects ended with an interesting exchange on free software and open source in the Indian context. Tripta Chandola is responsible for the free software public outreach project of Sarai. Before stumbling into the Linux scene she studied ancient Indian history. In retrospect, Tripta explains, she had already encountered open source issues during her study when she couldn’t access artifacts and primary sources. Six months ago she became a member of the Delhi Linux User Group. At the first meeting she was appointed general secretary. In the beginning her curiosity was born out of activism. The group produced its own distribution CD and went to schools to give presentations. Tripta: “After a while I realized that the group did not manage to penetrate into the schools and break through the barriers of preconceived ideas. Microsoft is the software that authorities use.” In a response to this impasse, the Delhi group decided to put up a website and post the research results of each of its members. The main issue is: how can Microsoft’s hegemony be broken in more than technical ways? The aim of Tripta’s research is to get more people interested in the cultural aspects of free software related issues. She believes that without research such work cannot happen.

Tripta Chandola: “For me open source and free software is not an isolated body of knowledge. It should be placed in a specific context. In my research I am not only looking at the rival factions between the free software purists and the open source pragmatists. I am mainly looking at the Indian context. I am also interested in the media representation.” I asked Tripta what the specific situation of Linux in India is. “Programmers here are not into the development of Linux itself. They are more involved in the service industry. Linux is new here and only few people have expertise in this field. So Indian programmers do not change the source code (despite the philosophy). They even develop code and then release it as proprietary software, parallel to their free software activities. Not only does this lead to a personality split between daytime and evening, but also the overall development of open source stagnates. There is certainly the image that Indian programmers are not designers. They are not good at conceptualizing software. Instead you tell them to do a certain thing and they will program it. This might be a caricature but there is some truth in it. There is a sense that Indian techies cannot penetrate other disciplines. In order for this to change a different sensibility towards technology needs to be developed. For most of us, technology is still this overwhelming thing. The distance between us and technology needs to be broken down.”

Then there has to be a viable business model. This is a universal problem but here it has significant local consequences. Tripta: “Free software cannot be isolated from the social reality in India. I don’t want to see our efforts as a hobby as that wouldn’t bring us very far. Maybe within programmers’ circles it might be a heroic thing to do—to sit through the night and hack the code—but in the larger picture it reduces its own importance.” Another global and troublesome topic is the total absence of women. Tripta: “Recently I visited one of the colleges. There were lots of women around in the computer science department. Later I realized that all these women, after their graduation in computer science will either study psychology, do an MBA or history or whatever. But none of them will pursue programming. They said that men were better at it. There is the widespread idea that women cannot think logically. The issue is not that women are not using computers. What we should do is break down the barrier between users and programmers.” A cultural turn seems inevitable.

The cultural change we speak about here will not come overnight and might need to be accelerated through conflict and dialogue. Hackers vs. artist types is a conflict that also exists within Sarai, as in so many new media arts organizations. There are tensions with the first generation of young programmers and the artists/intellectuals. Tripta, trapped between the two, explains: “In both ‘camps’ there is this arrogance: what I know you won’t be able to understand. Then the conversations cease to happen. Techies should be involved on all levels. Programming should not be seen as a commissioned job. Techies have to be fully aware of what the ideas behind a certain project are. The problem is: techies at Sarai do not see why technology should be used within arts and culture. They do not see the point of net art and prefer to do ‘more substantial’ stuff. It is important that these issues are addressed in this space, because if they are not discussed in Sarai, then where would they be? Businessmen wouldn’t even bother to look into such issues.” For Tripta the conflict is all about sensitivities and people’s backgrounds. She stresses the importance of going into schools. “We are building a web portal for students to put their open content on. That could be a beginning. The continuing use of Microsoft products has led to a closed sensibility towards software. In that sense, the use of open source software in daily life would indeed make a difference. But that’s only a long-term solution. For artists and critics it doesn’t really matter what software they use. What counts is the openness towards the ideas and the willingness to start the dialogue with programmers.”

When I left Sarai, the staff was examining the 100 plus applications that had arrived for the second round of the seed grants program for students and young researchers. Sarai is committed to generating public knowledge and creativity through research. The Independent Research Fellowship Program is one of Sarai’s most successful initiatives and in particular, Bangalore initiatives have benefited. It does not just support Delhi- based projects. Themes are as diverse as habitation, sexuality, labour, social/digital interfaces, urban violence, street life, technologies of urban control, health and the city, migration and transportation. Around 20-30 micro grants are awarded. Every year in August fellows meet in Delhi to discuss their results, and it is the highlight in the Sarai annual calendar because of the eloquent presentations and lively debates. Project topics range from the use of celluloid and compact disks in Punjab to exploring the space of psychiatric hospitals in Srinagar, from the culture of telephone booths, to identities and aspirations of Tibetan Youth in New Delhi, Urdu women’s magazines: their impact on Muslim women to student politics in Allahabad.

In response to the pogrom in Gujarat (early 2002) and the worsening global situation following September 11, 2001, Shuddha Dasgupta and I produced a conference on ‘crisis media’. When he and I were at the No Border camp in Strassbourg, Germany in July 2002, we sat apart and devised the program in the midst of the Euro-autonomous crowds, who were indulging themselves in endless plenary sessions. In March 2003, a few weeks before the US-led invasion in Iraq, I travelled to Delhi to discuss how media interventions are possible in times of war and crisis. We invited journalists, media practitioners, writers, theorists and activists to talk about the crisis of representation and reportage in situations as diverse as ethnic conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia and Central Africa, the economic collapse in Argentina, the conflicts in Israel and the Palestinian territories, the impending war against Iraq, violence in Gujarat and Kashmir and the displacement of people by big dam building projects in the Narmada Valley. During the meeting the sense of urgency was palpable. Crisis Media: The Uncertain States of Reportage was less playful and undefined compared to many new media and hackers events. The workshop opened with a provocation that stated “The crises in the media are the crises of the media.” The main speaker was novelist Arundhati Roy who compared the mainstream media to a buffalo, surrounded by a swarm of bees that were all the alternative and independent voices emerging from within a politicized new media culture.

When I visited Sarai in December 2004, it looked as if the place has doubled in size. Here, I will give a report of my meetings and experiences.

A group of students from Pakistan were visiting the center. Shevta Sarda gave me an update of the Cybermohalla project. It had expanded, and there were now three labs, and a fourth, solely for R&D purposes, had been established at the partner organization, Ankur. Labs were now regularly distributing broadsheets throughout their settlements. What had been developed over the years, Shevta tells me, is the methodology of ‘digital storytelling’ that, besides email, the Web, video and performances, was using paper as a medium, for example the scratch book and the broadsheet. As the website presently explains, the youngsters who meet regularly in the ‘Compughars’ acquire considerable technical skills in handling computers, digital cameras, audio recorders and scanners, to create interviews, stories, write-ups, photographs, audio recordings, wall magazines, pamphlets, stickers and short animations. “They play with words, ideas, concepts and images to narrate the every day and make an evolving networked collection of diary entries. Diaries are a specific mode of writing: intensely subjective, personal.” The diaries talk about the lanes, elections, perceptions, celebrations, accidents, dislocation, migration, evictions, work situations, technology, life stories and deaths. Cybermohalla experiences have been taken to Gujurat, where communal riots took place in 2002. A successful residency happened with a community group in Bootle, a suburb of Liverpool (UK), in collaboration with the FACT new media center. The locality labs have developed dynamics of their own, independent of one another and Ankur/ Sarai. According to Shevta the number of localities could increase to five but there are no ambitious plans to expand. The Cybermohalla project is wary of branches and does not intend to be marketed as a global concept and developed into a brand. Over the years the use of mobile phones and VCD players have increased, but magazines still have their importance.

With RAQS and Sarai founding member and Cybermohalla coordinator Jeebesh Bagchi, we discussed the latest lab project. He says that Delhi is changing rapidly due to the Commonwealth Games in 2010. The metro, the construction of huge new complexes… all the development is escalating real estate prices, and the periphery is quickly expanding. This is the current condition of the city and the context in which Sarai looks at possible encounters in a newly established lab. The lab is located in Nangla Maanchi, a squatter settlement along the west bank of the river Yamuna, on the fly ash deposits of the thermal power station – its neighbor. The settlement started 25 years ago and now numbers around 1 lakh (100,000) people. It’s a mixed population, resource rich in terms of language, ethnicity and religion. The land they live on, however, is now a part of urban re-development plans, which will become more aggressive with the approaching Commonwealth Games. The authorities have conducted preliminary surveys, and the Supreme Court has been pushing for faster and ‘more effective’ action from the municipality in matters of ‘cleaning up’. This resulted in the eviction of Nangla in the spring of 2006. A blog was installed to report about this traumatic event and a broadsheet was produced. Shveta Sarda writes: “Nangla has been a difficult experience for Cybermohalla. The violence of the law and the plan has been enacted in a very brutal way in the daily lives of Cybermohalla practitioners and their worlds. For instance, we’re talking about slums. It is a category developed by the Law and the Plan, and acts as a self-explanatory form of describing social life. Throughout its five years, one of the challenges of the Cybermohalla project has been to articulate a different way of talking about these spaces, and see them as self-organised settlements with no legal claims to the land on which they emerge. Nangla narratives have been an attempt to narrate this within the sharply conflict-ridden urban re-designing. Interestingly, even the Old City of Delhi was named “slum” by the new elite in the 1950s. Slum is not a neutral word of description.”

The Nangla lab, which no longer exists, had a core group of six. Five two-member teams from the other two labs joined to build it up. It was an experiment, to try to make a new lab by drawing from the collective experiences in other labs. This was not only a question of setting up newer labs, but of entering this process each time with a recognition of the change in location, through the density accreting around each existing node. The idea to set up a separate Reseach & Development lab for Cybermohalla grew from the desire to create a reflective space for the practitioners from the various locality labs. To understand the necessity of a discreet R&D Lab, one must first understand the rhythms of the locality lab. Jeebesh says that there are, at any given moment, 15 to 20 young people in each of the locality labs. There is a shared daily practice of sharing materials with each other, of making things together. This also means there is increasing confidence in creating contexts for sharing outside the lab itself, with the other localities. He sees this as an outward impetus of the labs—what he calls ‘breathing out’.

Secondly, he says that new young people join the labs at different points in time. At the same time, there are older practitioners, with a longer history of practice at each of the labs. This is a differentiation within the space, one that demands innovation in expansion. That is, the question is not one of making new labs alone, but responding to the inner demands of a lab’s social contexts. Thirdly, the labs periodically host other researcher- practitioners—for instance techies and designers—and work on projects with them. Depending on the procedural demands of these interactions, sometimes these projects are absorbed into the daily practice of the labs, while at other times, they require a shift in the rhythm.

Jeebesh: “The question before was how to think all of these aspects. And so, to think of a space which responds to each of these concerns. The R&D lab was then thought of as a nodal space, a space which connects the locality labs, where older practitioners can spend some quiet time for deepening their own practices while still being at the locality labs, where lab practitioners from all three labs can spend time to make things in a sustained way for circulation (along with doing this at their own locality lab), and where researcher-practitioners who come from outside can enter into a context for dialogue without disrupting the daily rhythms of the locality labs.”

By 2006 15-20 people were engaged in Cybermohalla across all the projects on a full- time basis, so a lot could come out of it. The practice itself is open to dialogue. The participants share their excitement, not only with their peers at the labs, but also in creative contexts outside the labs. The confidence is there. For example, following a one- hour storytelling performance in a theatre in Hamburg in March 2004, they started making radio programs. In this way, each encounter is seen as replete with possibilities of newer questions and practices for the locality labs.

Daily writing is now a basic practice at the labs. One associated practice is doing (non- fictional) streetlogs. The idea of the streetlog is, for instance, to sit for hours in a tea or a barber shop, where people move in and out. Practitioners describe the space, how it is, and lock in a few characters in their descriptions. From here they can tell one story about a face they like. What they learn from this is the art of listening. The dignity of listening becomes part of the creative practice – and that’s even more important than writing.

Jeebesh also noted an interesting shift in the approach to images with the coming of digital cameras. They would take a large number of shots, change the colors, resize the images, and make them into short animated films. One of the localities invited old people of the colony to come to the lab and have a conversation. They took photographs of each of these persons, blew them up, put them in frames, and gifted them. Photography enables a different kind of interaction. On another occasion, they revisited the school teachers that they had once run away from! They invited them into the lab and made recordings of conversations of the teachers’ school days. The teachers emerged as human beings, not just social functionaries. Computer skills are not an issue. Participants teach each other the software. Some of them fight their way into English. They see people working as programming and designing. Those who excel at animation doesn’t call themselves “animators”. One would say: “I talk, I think and can do fun things with computers.” Jeebesh is convinced that technology should not translate into a self- definition of identity.

Tripta Chandola, who I met in 2002, and was then involved in the free software activities, has since left Sarai to become a (new) media ethnographer. She is doing partipatory observations in the computer market Nehru Place, in the Govindpuri settlement and a rural area out of Delhi, together with Jo Tacchi, a UK community media researcher who works out of the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. In 2004 Tripta took me to Nehru Place, a business hub in South Delhi and one of the oldest hard- and software markets in Delhi, and now undergoing rapid transition. Large, grey 70s concrete structures and squares are encircled by the shiny mirror high-rises mushrooming all over Asia. The pavement is being renewed. Because of the drastic fall of consumer electronics prices, the old market for second-hand reassembled hardware is still there but it is being rapidly overtaken by cheap high-tech products that compete with recycled old models. Whereas a brand new computer printer can be sold for a discount price, the refilling of old ink cartridges is still a lucrative business. Tripta knows most of the vendors and we talk with some of them. Early in her fieldwork, Tripta had tried to mould some of her experiences into semi-fictional narratives, but then she started to keep a diary in notebooks – writing down her observations in an anthropological manner, revisiting her encounters. In such instances the technology steps back.

A few months after having worked in the settlement in 2004 she wrote to me: “Working with issues like poverty, with communications on the forefront and its aura of ‘development’ looming behind, we realized that things are not as straightforward as they are put out to be.” You have to give up stereotypes. Using electronics is part of the everyday everywhere. This shouldn’t surprise us as it is easier to obtain a TV than get clean tap water. Tripta is trying to understand poverty as a lived experience rather than a page of statistics and mere access to resources. In government reports the poor are constantly referred to as others. What struck Tripta, for instance, was the difference between those who were mobile (not only in the sense of transportation but also related to use of telecommunications) and those who were trapped in the ’slum’. Being the first settler in a slum makes a big difference in status, income and access to media. Poverty in this context, so Tripta thinks, is ‘displaced’ poverty and can best be measured, in relative terms, within the settlement itself. Those deprived and in crisis work inside the settlement and do not buy or rent the places they live in. They are illiterate and their children do not go to school.

Tripta Chandola is fascinated by her city. She loves the crowds and writes “the calls, missed calls, dirt and grime, romantic indulgences, despairing temptations, casual conversations, borrowed breaths, scattered lives, makeovers, turnovers, lost landmarks, missing milestones, carved corners, shared fears, scared dreams, dirty desires, the sparse places, the wide imaginations, incessant honking, deafening silence, orderly commotions, confusing conversations, comic interludes, defeating collusions and amidst this, the convoluted connections.” Whereas in the West cities are taken for granted and fiercely compete with each other, in India we find a genuine fascination for ‘the city’ as such. In China we see a similar hype around the phenomenal growth of cities. Whereas in the decade of The Club of Rome urbanization was portrayed as the prime cause of the planet’s problems (together with population growth), since the 90s there has been shift away from the apocalyptic towards the view of the city as a complex arrangement of difference. The collective imaginary that Sarai embodies is one of critical engagement or even passion for the daily contradictions they must endure. Think of Walter Ruttmann’s Symphony of a City (Berlin, 1927) and then put that frantic energy into the Indian context. Sarai artists and scholars are obsessed with capturing the spirit of this fast- changing place.

Sarai’s involvement with the Internet

Sarai’s Reader list provides an interesting read. Unlike most email-based mailing lists, it is not overly dominated by announcements or short responses. It regularly comes up with unique content that can’t be found elsewhere. The usually lengthy postings are, for the most part, essays written by the 40 to 50 Sarai independent fellows. They use the list to disseminate their research results – a sign that in India, email is still the predominant channel to exchange texts and ideas. The topics over the past several years, just to mention a few, include excavating Indian experimental film; the position of research into the lives of Kashmiris in Delhi; Dastangoi: the culture of story telling in Urdu; the cultural aspects of the finance business in Vijayawada; spooked vision: cyclists on Delhi roads; The Contribution of the Christian Missionaries in the construction of Assamese Identity; Golf in South Asia; entrepreneurship in Mumbai and railway notes from the Imperial Survey of 1881.

In the Sarai Media Lab, the room where most of the design work is done, I met Anand Vivek Taneja, a writer and filmmaker who is part of the Publics and Practices in the History of the Present project, in short, PPHP. He gives me a photocopied reader full of articles on copy culture, media markets and illegality. Since its inception, this cluster of topics has been a central topic of research at Sarai. In December 2002 there was a workshop called The Daily Life of Intellectual Property Law, followed by City One, a South Asian Conference on the Urban Experience in January 2003 and in January 2005 Contested Commons/Trespassing Publics, a conference on inequalities, conflicts and intellectual property. The background to all this is the emergence in Indian cities of new informal distribution networks. Small shops selling MP3 CDs and films on CD (VCDs) have sprung up everywhere, even in settlements. Material is also distributed through neighborhood cable networks. At the center of this research stands a dynamic ‘culture of the copy’ that started with copying music cassettes, then VHS and VCDs, MP3s and DVDs, and now moves towards downloadable digital films through peer-to-peer networks on the Internet. Each of these technologies has produced their own pirate culture. With Anand I talk about the countless small factories that assemble consumer electronics from parts they order in China or South-East Asia. Competition between these factories is tough as they often depend on orders where individuals might require a customized ‘Sony’ or ‘Samsung’. People prefer to purchase such goods during the festival seasons, and outside of these periods they can be out of work. When urban markets are exhausted, sellers carry the players on their scooters deep into the small towns and rural areas.

Information society doesn’t always mean what you expect. Taha Mehmood is a young researcher who joined Sarai in 2004. He looks into security service agencies, databases, identification practices and the Multiple-purpose National Identification Card (MNIC), which is poised at a critical juncture. He started to map the information flows from security firms in the city. Taha tells me that surveillance in India is not that technical because there is no shortage of manpower. They use people the old fashioned way. Not all of them even have a mobile phone. It’s an informal activity. The security guards map the area of the establishment being surveilled, and gate it accordingly. They keep registers of every car going in and out, what persons, at what time. That’s information society in India. Taha thinks his definition is more literal, very basic. “In every instance that you move through town, you are registered. We don’t know what the state or private companies are doing with this massive form of data collection. What’s the need to be so specific about every entry point? It looks as if we’re guilty of something, until proven innocent. With all these forms you create vicious circles. To apply for a passport, you need a driver’s license, identity cards and vice versa. The form is forming us.” Physical mapping is being done in preparation for the introduction to a smart card in India for every individual. Taha: “There is a drive in each of us to hide away from this fixation of identity into one static data body. Everyone likes anonymity. Remember, it’s not an easy task to keep track of a billion people. Tens of thousands of them have the same surname plus first name. A huge chunk of the population is mobile. So how do you fix them? It is still possible to have fake papers that can claim land property.”

As part of his MA in mass communication Taha Mehmood made a film about the topic. All of the security executives were too frightened to speak on camera, so Taha talked with them off camera. One of them is a retired colonel who has been in the security business for the last 13 years and employs a thousand guards. That’s his private army. The entire army model is replicated in his organization. Six or seven guards report to a head guard who reports to a supervisor. They wear the name of the firm on their uniform, belt and cap. They look very smart in their uniforms. Taha explained these men come from Bihar and Rajistan, the most impoverished states in India. They have little clue about much of anything and they receive no training. Nobody knows how many security personnel there are in this city. Even Sarai has one. Security guards are guarding off entire areas like public parks and streets, grabbing municipal property. This happens throughout Delhi. For Taha Mehmood security starts to look like a façade, to hide the divisions in society. And the irony is that these are the most insecure persons in the world, providing security to the richest in the city. This situation mirrors the working of the state, in terms of the fencing of the border between India and Pakistan. However, in the newly developed shopping malls, condominiums and conceptual cities near Delhi, there is a greater reliance on surveillance equipment and not the usual assemblage of guards, something that didn’t seem to be the case when he started his research. Consequently, there is an increasingly complex interplay of both technical and manual forms of control.

An important part of Sarai’s activity is to host international residencies. Sometimes artists come to do their own work, in other instances they are attached to specific Sarai programs. There have been many, so here I will feature just a few of the residencies as illustration of the program.

Sara Kolster

Sara is a Dutch visual artist with a background in design who shifted towards film and video. She was at Sarai in late 2005 for two months to work on a project called LivingSpaces. It was her aim to photograph people’s home interiors. She imagined visiting different houses of people with various socio-economic backgrounds. Sara: “During my city-journeys, a completely different view of the city arose. Soon it became clear to me that a visual of the variety of living spaces would be impossible. I however continued my collection of photographs of interiors. I focused on specific neighborhoods and localities which had caught my interest during the walks.” With the assistance of the Sarai ‘broadsheet’ group, she worked in Kilokri – a district with a chaotic stacking of houses. “Narrow paths, which sometimes make you wonder whether you are in- or outside, take you past schools, mosques, public buildings, parks and labor workshops. In residential buildings the basement is used for sewing a special kind of Indian dress, to be sold in the United States. Since the houses are so narrowly built, you can almost touch your neighbors when hanging out the window.” What struck Sara about Sarai was the broad definition of research. The final shape often varies from a documentary film, sound pieces, an exhibition and a lot of research text. Sara observes that “the Sarai researcher (artist, writer or filmmaker) mostly enjoys the ‘new’ style of expression. The exchange between research and art, seen as ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, seems to be interwoven at Sarai, although the ‘thinking’ part sometimes takes over and gets stuck in discussions.”

Sarai and ALF

The Waag-Sarai exchange program that was the financial backbone during the founding of the center had finished by 2004. Sarai then received money from a host of sources such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Dutch development aid from HIVOS, IDPAD and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Canadian Langois Foundation. Securing a multitude of donors had been crucial from early on. After four years the model of the one-to-one exchange between Waag and Sarai was replaced by the concept of the ‘platform’ in which the two original partners would, for another four years, support emerging, even not-yet-existing new media centers. The idea was to transfer knowledge on how to set up an institution. There are plenty of virtual networks, collaborations and temporary structures such as festivals and talks, but new media culture seems to shy away from the question of how sustainable organizations can be setup and support research from cultural, political and artistic perspectives.

As a first partner, the Bangalore Alternative Law Forum (ALF) was invited to submit a proposal. ALF started in March 2000 as a group of lawyers mainly involved in litigation work. Not entirely by coincidence, Bangalore being one of India’s main IT centers, the ALF was involved in a number of ‘new media’ related topics such as software piracy, intellectual property disputes, and free software/open source initiatives. I visited ALF in December 2002 on my first trip to Bangalore. ALF is centrally located, on the top floor of a private home. At that time the organization consisted mostly of law students doing litigation work. We had a meeting on their rooftop and discussed how ALF could grow into a sustainable organization. using the possibilities of the new media buzz while continuing to support people marginalized on grounds of gender, sexuality, class, and caste. ALF has taken on cases of contract laborers, women who are victims of domestic violence, divorce, guardianship and custody of children, the right to residence, property rights, child labor, bonded labor and sex workers who have been abused by the police.

By 2006 ALF had become a close collaboration partner of Sarai. Over time ALF developed an interest in the impact the technology industry was having on the city, in the way businesses grabbed land, the environmental impact of such development, and the working conditions in industry. According to its website, ALF “integrates alternative lawyering with critical research, alternative dispute resolution, pedagogic interventions and more generally maintain sustained legal interventions in various social issues.” Much like Sarai, the focal point of ALF’s activities are not labeled ‘technology’, ‘art’ or ‘culture’. Over the years the center has grown. In 2005 ten to twelve ALF members were on payroll, being able to commit themselves fully to the projects at hand. In November 2005 the Austrian new media organization Netbase showed its traveling worldinformation.org exhibition in Bangalore, co-produced with ALF and other local partners.

Sarai and Tactical Media

After an open fellowship application process in 2004, the Waag-Sarai platform chose two partners in Brazil and three of its own members to attend a meeting in Bangalore. The ‘tactical media’ scene had been very much alive there over the past few years. Until 2002, most Brazilian new media art had been formalistic, elitist and New Age, carefully kept outside of society by a small group of artists, theorists, and curators who worked with a mainly-international focus inside art institutions, festivals and universities. The rise of an independent scene of activists that were into music, street art, video, performance, and free software was imminent. Here, I will mention a few projects that are more relevant to this discussion of Sarai and Tactical Media.

The first Midia Tática event in Sao Paolo in March 2003 worked as a catalyst to bring together dispersed groups and individuals. Out of it emerged the Midia Tática group which spawned Auto Labs – three temporary autonomous media labs in the city’s favelas. Its concept was a mix between the classic telecenter work (training) facility, free software, promoting AIDS awareness, and an ABC primer of digital cultural production. Despite, or because of its ambiguous success, the project was discontinued after five months. A second event the group put together soon after was the art and activist new media festival Digitofagia (October 2004). Parallel, and in close collaboration, ran Metarecyclagem, a successful computer recycling project that opened various workshops throughout the country. Their hallmark is twofold: not only do they refurbish the hardware and install free software, they also paint the grey PC covers in flashy, tropical Brazilian colors.

The size and dynamics were such that a center would have been a logical next step, so as to consolidate and support further initiatives. Both the Midia Tática group and Metarecyclagem applied for the Waag- Sarai Platform grant that was launched in mid 2004. By the time proposals had been worked out for a center, Midia Tática had fallen apart with core members moving away from Sao Paolo to Rio de Janeiro and Belém. Simultaneously, the ‘third way’ Lula government’s plan to set up a network of so-called cultural hotspots was underway, coordinated by the minister of culture – the popular singer Gilberto Gill – and thusly taking a considerable part of the ideas, energy and people away from Auto Labs and the emerging tactical media field. A unique opportunity to work with “at most” 600 cultural centers that had to be equipped with free software computers to edit audio and video was then taken up. These so-called ‘cultural hotspots’ that had been identified were going to get funding through the Cultura Viva program of the Ministry of Culture. By early 2006 at least 250 were ‘mapped’ and 100 of them equipped with free software media labs. Similar to the case of Auto Labs – which could not really sustain itself compared to official ‘telecenter’ NGO structures – things started to become really big, fluid and messy. The shadow side of such a large undertaking was Big Politics. Corruption scandals haunted the Lula administration during 2005, which meant constant delays and uncertainties. The Cultura Digital project had reached such momentum by 2006 that any contribution of Waag Society and Sarai seemed futile.

The enormous geographic distance to Brazil and lack of local knowledge and language on the side of Amsterdam and Delhi started to kick in. What to do? The program was clearly intended to support emerging physical spaces, not networks, as there were enough of those anyway. For much of that year the confusion only grew. In October 2005 a small conference called Submidialogia took place in Campinas, near Sao Paolo where a decentralized research network proposal was discussed. At first, a serious publication in Portuguese on Brazilian indy electronic pop culture appeared, but the momentum to found a center seemed to have passed away. The euphoric tactical media phase was over.

Meanwhile the caravan Sarai moved on, to another corner of world, somewhere in- between, in Beirut. It seemed ironic, to try your luck in the Middle-East, but that’s exactly what the plucky protagonists set out to do. Initial contacts in Iran sounded promising, but proved unrealistic. Contacts were established in Beirut, however, no group (then or now) came forward with the intention to set up a center. How about Bandung? With Waag and Sarai members roaming around the world, giving talks and exhibiting work, doing screenings and hosting events, the initiative had reached its zenith, and showcased what new media was doing at a global level, with so much more to come. Was all of this only a start, a mere beginning, of international collaboration between cultural workers with radically different backgrounds, or was this the end of an era?

One of the things that I have always been interested in is organizational forms and whether or not intensive use of new media might produce alternative work forms and different power structures within projects. A member of the Sarai team wrote to me that Sarai in the ‘popular’ imagination is a space that is spread out horizontally rather than vertically. It is normal that outsiders’ expectations differ from the reality inside an organization, and Sarai is not an exception here. “In this horizontal space, the nodes are fluid and the networks constantly evolving. As it is presented, hierarchies based on backgrounds, expertise, affiliations do not form a part of this loosely yet intricately knit network. In this network, nodes exchange freely, conversations flow smoothly, one can without any inhibitions present or critique any works/ideas. This network is welcoming and constantly warming up to new nodes, evoking a romanticized flaneur set on a stroll to explore the spaces and the various landscapes. The reality is far from this representation. Sarai as a space is highly bureaucratic and sustains well-consolidated vertical networks. In essence, I prefer horizontal, spread out networks but I must admit I do not have a problem with vertical-hierarchy based networks.” Then, what you may ask, is the problem with Sarai? “It is the silence it maintains in this regard. The fact that it does not accept that the network is sustained through vertical nodes. It becomes difficult for others who can critically see the power politics as well as take the projected ‘freedom of speech and ideas’ a bit too seriously, to address this. The discrepancy of the projected and practiced remains high.”

Another sensitive topic is the question how open or closed the media labs in the settlements would have to be. Cybermohalla labs are kept relatively insulated, even from insider entries and open only for specific viewership. “I completely understand the need to not let the space become a site spectacle,” the Sarai team member continues, “but my commonsensical understanding tells me that a site becomes a spectacle when conscious attempts are made to filter/control the gaze. Cybermohallas are treated as precariously delicate spaces sustained through very delicate and sensitive networks and aspirations and the only ones allowed in this space are ‘viewers’. One needn’t step out of Sarai to see instances of this insulation. Of the entire Sarai populace, only 5% or less would have visited Cybermohalla labs. People from the Development/NGO sector who wanted to visit were supposedly denied because it was stated they will not understand the ‘creative’ ‘intellectual’ energy of the space, and would rather disrupt it. Again the Sarai member: “What needs one to have read to enter this space? Where needs one have to have visited to qualify as a visitor into the space? Why is it treated with kid gloves? A magical object becomes a magical one only when it is kept away. Isn’t dialogue, sustained and meaningful, needed to make a space more definite? What are they afraid of? By guarding them (the young researchers from the settlements) so fiercely, are they not in sense implying that they need to be guarded thus reinforcing the very insecurities of/about these spaces and people which they intend to address through their practices?”

Shveta Sarda counters this critique with a long list of encounters between Sarai staff and Cybermohalla practitioners. Cybermohalla is regularly discussed in the Sarai Monday meetings, and the internal mailing list is the first site for circulation of CM content, says Shveta. Productions like the broadsheets, radio and video (for circulation on local cable networks) often happen at Sarai itself. Members of Sarai’s network often visit the Cybermohalla labs: Lawrence Liang did a great workshop on law and juridical reason; Hansa Thapliyal, a film maker from Bombay has spent time at the labs discussing her films and stories; Samina Mishra, author of Henna in the City, came and discussed her book. On one occasion, by request from CSDS, an Australian anthropologist of Indian origin was given total access to the CM labs in Dakshinpuri and Nangla Maanchi. After a brief encounter he coldly dumped the lab. Clearly – this was not a good experience. Jaanu blogged about this occasion, describing the researcher as an absent-minded, indifferent observer. Student interns from universities and design schools have also been coming. A very successful internship, Shveta writes, was a graduation project by Lekhoni Gupto with the Dakshinpuri lab who was encouraged to blog about her research.

The pressure to receive international guests is a real concern, Shveta Sarda admits. The labs spend most of their time interacting with their neighborhoods. “They meet visitors, they go out and seek conversations, set up spaces in weekly markets and use local infrastructure for content circulation such as the suburbs’ cable networks” as well as international guests that were doing a residency, and dozens of others that came for a short visit, people from Iran to Mexico, Sweden and Israel. Shveta: “I have refused some international visitors simply because they show an entitlement to be taken to the labs. They either think that we in Sarai have no work other than pandering to their requests, and when they have done no reading, no thinking with the CM content and want to see the site for immediate gratification. This is a great imposition as a visit to a lab takes away 5-6 hours of critical lab time. The labs themselves are extremely critical of these visitors and have articulated the feeling of being ‘zoo creatures’.” Shveta also denies that Cybermohalla participants have been overly protected against the outside world. “Personally, over the last two months since the Nangla demolition, seeing CM practitioners interact with a wide spectrum of people—journalists, lawyers’ assistants, local politicians, school administrators, police, municipal workers and administrators, film makers, NGO workers—I realise how prepared and confident they are for these conversations. Surely a protective model would not have enabled this. CM now is a network of about 75 people engaging full time with a very complex weave of practices, public forms and events. They travel extensively in the city and, on invitation, to other spaces.”

Ravi Sundaram further elaborates on the politics of Western traffic: “When visitors come, they are not all like you, talking to everyone in Sarai. They sometimes assume that they will be taken to places, typically make a demand to be ’see’ the cybermohalla labs. This is part of circuit of travel culture, this rush for representation. If you do not see the Taj, then see the cool alternative circuit—Sarai. But who do we bear responsibility to—our public, or the ‘traffic cultures’ as the anthropologist James Clifford once said?”

In an update of the Fellowship Program Shveta Sarda reports that Vivek Narayanan, who joined Sarai to engage with Independent Fellows on a day to day basis in 2004, is building up a team with ex-fellows in Sarai and in other cities. To support 80 people’s intensive interactions over 8 months is a complex process. The aim is to build a researcher and practitioner community around Independent Fellowship. Shveta: “Sarai members are encouraged to engage with the fellows and everyone has few fellows they dialogue with through the period of the fellowship. This is both through personal correspondence and mails on the reader and urban study list, as well as sharing of books, articles and other resources. Sarai-txt, a collective of three women who bring out the Sarai broadsheet every three months, regularly go through all the postings and make collations for public renditions.” Needless to say, postings and discussions are discussed during Sarai’s Monday Meetings. Since 2005, Fellows in different cities have organized meetings in their own cities during the period of the fellowship for face-to-face interactions, and Sarai members have been invited to these. Recently Fellows have also become part of this process. In 2006 Fellows in different cities will play hosts to their counterparts, and be guests to others in return. Networking, Sarai style.

How new media centers should be run is not much debated, no matter where you go. There are little traces left of an active search for alternative organizational models such as cooperatives, associations or collectives. The organizations presented in this chapter are too small for trade unions and somehow already too big to be run in an informal way. These new media organizations are similar to NGOs and for-profit businesses and are light years removed from the consensus-focused autonomous movements of old and tired Western Europe. Their virtual network component is strong. Despite all cultural differences, Waag and Sarai have a similar way of running their organization, in that there is not much collective decision making. In the end, the founders are the ones in charge and have grouped a management structure around them, in the Waag case, a formal one, at Sarai a perhaps more informal one. It is not possible to remove or vote out the founders and a system of rotation of leadership is unknown. So, whereas the substance of the work has the aura of innovation, the internal structure has, in fact, regressed, to levels well before the cultural upheavals of 1960s. In certain places, if you start a cultural organization or NGO, it’s considered private property. This leaves newcomers and next generations with little other choice to either start a similar organization themselves, work as freelancers and workers underneath the existing organization, or to not enter the field in the first place.

Oliver Leistert, a West-German visitor on a three months residency in Sarai wrote down his observations in an email that was discussed amongst all Sarai staff. Oliver: “I found it unbelievable that the founding team of Sarai plus two CSDS members are selecting the stipends, even though they are doing a great job. I would love to witness an open discussion process involving anyone interested in this from Sarai. Maybe my expectations are too much shaped by my own collective experiences, which— summarized—say: the more people are part of the decision, the better is the collaborative effort. I see a paradox when peer-to-peer and collaborative software is being highlighted, without much fallout of this on the social scheme. ”

“The hierarchical model made me feel sad,” Oliver continues. “As always in such cases, it was the less people from the coordination team were present, which happened quite a few times, when the power vacuum could be felt most intensively. There was an inability to decide. Instead of sorting out the problem, most preferred to accept this as a condition sine qua non, without expressing the need to reorganize Sarai. The organizational model looks like it hasn’t changed for years, ignoring the fact of substantial changes in quantity and quality.”

His letter concludes: “The most interesting future question for a project like Sarai is how to transform, mutate, wander into a new form. Though Sarai has much interest about what happens outside of India and a lot of their people are much better informed than those from European initiatives usually are, the interest in translating this knowledge and experience into a new region has its limits. I didn’t find traces of a fascination for difference. The Western view on ‘the other’ (in this case Indian people) must have had such an impact that ‘the other’ for an Indian person is coded as ‘do not touch, don’t be curious.’ Another possible reason might be the endless research field that Delhi and India offer itself.”

There are disappointments here, but also a realization of how difficult it is to aspire to truly egalitarian global collaboration, having to take into consideration colonial history and unequal power relations in terms of money and resources. How is one to debate issues if there is no clear common political agenda and all that exists is good intentions? What is mutual aid in an equal relationship? It is questionable if such values from autonomous movements in ‘Old Europe’ can—and should—be transferred into radically different cultural contexts. But that’s what is under debate here.

Sarai members rejected Oliver’s criticism. Shveta: “His comments on hierarchy and decision making in Sarai are ill-informed, and at their best evoke a shrug.” For Shveta the frequent traveling around the world of Sarai members has not caused alarm. “My peers and I watch them critically as they move between worlds—from the Venice Biennale to the self-organized settlements with no legal claims to the land on which they emerge. I enjoy their complicated dance in multiple sites, which makes the world less abstract for me. I enjoy watching my peers take on an understanding of the world and appreciate the complexity of demands that come with having open conversations in many directions. They create a demand on each of us to take global publicness seriously and engage with it.”

According to Ravi Sundaram, Sarai’s problem lies elsewhere. “We are awful with organization and bureaucracy to our great loss at times. We do not have the heart to fire people, nor do we exert the faintest measure of hierarchy. That has been our problem. How do we come to terms with this? Part of what draws people to Sarai is precisely our reasonably open environment, but we face the aporia of unending openness. To be sure there is hierarchy of age and experience in Sarai but that is not ‘bureaucracy’. In fact if there is any self criticism it would be that we should quickly design a new organisational form that is network-based and less demanding.”

Sarai is well connected, there are thousands of contacts. The center is well known to many initiatives that work in the fields of visual arts and new media culture. And this exposure gradually might have turned into a problem. Does it suffice to open up even more Cybermohallas, have more international residencies, programs and exchanges? Growth is the main challenges for Sarai. It is not simply a question of ’sustainability’, a buzzword that often tries to discredit the temporality of project-based initiatives and tactical interventions. Nor has Sarai fallen into the ‘new media arts’ trap – so that is one less problem to worry about. Being an institution with a steering body should first of all be accepted. Studies about the history and structures of institutions could be undertaken. Where is the new media equivalent of revolutionary Third World educator Paolo Freire?

What is needed is to expand the intercultural dialogue to differences in organizational modes. Agenda setting, as used in international policy contexts, as tried with the “Delhi Declaration”, might be a promising possibility – but that, too easily, positions politics outside of Sarai and international collaborations such as the Waag-Sarai exchange. The questions I raise here are partly local but are also relevant elsewhere as the search for new institutional forms is well under way. What Ashis Nandy, eminent grise at CSDS recommends is a reorientation of Sarai’s primary concerns once the new media hype has laid down. In a private conversation, Nandy summed up the Sarai agenda: the city, media and access. Urban culture is a relatively new field of study for India’s intellectuals, he explains, as still 75% of its population is living in the rural areas and previous generations of intellectuals were mainly preoccupied with rural issues. The abstract machinery of high rises, freeways and subways have not yet been the subject of serious engagement. Sarai has to be seen as an attempt to create a rich cultural-political vocabulary to interpret the everyday of urban life, says Nandy, asking what constitutes democracy and public life in the age of the Internet and free software? According to Jeebesh Bagchi “one should not be too obsessed with the difficulties of entry and exit, which anybody which anybody will face in encountering any other spaces, institutions and networks. It is critical to understand how interesting and innovative work and collaborations happen inspite of these difficulties.” The most interesting thing about Sarai as an institution, says Jeebesh, “is the production of new critical bodies of knowledge, energies that sustain collaborations and improvisations on architectures of sharing and participation.”

Geert Lovink

3 comments September 20th, 2006

Out of Beirut: Exit Stamp July 17 2006

this report was originally posted by Nat Muller on the ‘siege of lebanon‘ blog. Nat was in Lebanon partly to do research on new media practices in Lebanon for the Waag Sarai Exchange Platform….

My Lebanese exit stamp reads July 17th; it was supposed to read August 4th. It wasn’t till the next day, Tuesday July 18th that I arrived with the second flight of the Dutch evacuation convoy via Aleppo at the military airbase in Eindhoven. My friends and family were relieved to see me “out of Beirut”, and escaping the violence. The flurry of smses with these 3 simple words “are you out?” keep coming in till today, July 20th. It is strange how an exit can take on different connotations, what is deemed a lucky escape in one context, is an artistic export product in another: “Out of Beirut” is the name of an exhibition recently held at the museum of Modern Art in Oxford. I had made a mental note to ask my artist friends in Beirut to borrow the catalogue from them. There was no time. Nor was there time to say goodbye to friends; it all happened so quickly.

I had only registered with the Dutch embassy on Friday July 14th; noone was picking up the phone so J. and I decided to go there. Very few people there, just one obviously distressed Dutchman of Lebanese origin. “I haven’t been back since 26 years, and now this”, he tells me. The lady at the counter copies my passport and asks me for phone numbers. She reassures me that now we have only reached “Phase I”, and that no evacuation plans are being made. She advises me to stay in Beirut, and not attempt to go to Syria by myself, since the embassy cannot vouch for my safety. Fine, I wasn’t thinking of leaving to Syria, despite the many phone calls of Swiss friends urging me to join them just across the border in Tartus.

In the meanwhile the situation keeps escalating, and bombs keep pounding infrastructure, the South, and the Dahiyeh; the casualties mount. We move from Qasqas to a friend’s place in Achrafieh. By now electricity is on and off. We see the first refugees wandering around bewildered in the streets of well-to do Achrafieh. Whenever electricity is on, we are glued to the TV. I joke that the only new Arabic word I learned this time around is “khabar ajil” (breaking news). One wonders when news stops being news, how long it will take the world this time to turn its head away with bored media saturation; how many more atrocities have to be committed before something can be viewed as “news”. There’s a paralysing silence on the part of the international community, especially the EU: no official or strong condemnation of the disproportionate use of force, absolutely nothing.

I am in the middle of an interview with Belgian national radio Sunday night, fulminating at how biased the media coverage is, when an sms of the Dutch embassy shows up on my phone: “Evacuation at 5.30 am at the Dutch embassy; bring money, passport, food, one piece of luggage.” I panic: to stay/to go; how can I say goodbye to my friends? I only have hours. In the middle of my panic someone from Foreign Affairs in The Hague calls me. His voice is so calm and friendly, as if he rehearsed the words and tone to perfection. He inquires whether I had received the sms, whether I was fine and had any additional questions. “Is the crossing to Syria safe”, I ask him. It takes him a few – obviously very composed moments of silence to answer me. “ Well, we cannot guarantee that.” “So the only thing safeguarding us, are a few flags attached to the buses?” “Well, yes, but don’t worry. Do you have any further questions, Ma’am?”

July 17th, 5.30am. J. and I make it to the Dutch embassy. The scene is surprisingly orderly. This has certainly changed over the past few days, as more and more foreign nationals are trying get out of the country. While queuing up to register I meet my friend Raed, an artist and musician, but now free-lancing as a cameraman for foreign TV stations. I break down in sobs; he tries to calm me down…to no avail. “We will meet again soon, Nat, in Amsterdam or in Beirut, inshallah.” I wish I could believe him. Later on, I chide myself for crying: I don’t have a right to tears, with people’s lives being torn apart, their houses and businesses destroyed, their loved ones gone. Where on earth do I get the arrogance to weep? My goodbye to J. is very short. “See you soon”, he says as he kisses me. I feel a pang; time has become suspended. Who knows when “soon” will be. We were supposed to leave together on August 4th for a holiday in Holland, now my travel companions are about 250 other Dutch nationals, many of them carrying dual citizenship.

We only manage to leave around 7.45 a.m. The coordinators had decided last minute that probably it would be a better idea to attach the Dutch flags on the roofs of the busses, rather than have them in front. Well yes, the roof is definitely a better idea for aerial vision than the windscreen. The whole flag operation takes about an hour. The irony of it all: only a week before had we smiled upon the Lebanese passion for football during the World Cup, and the exuberant flag parade in the city of favourite teams (Italy, Brazil, Germany, you name it). We had joked how easy and playful the bearing of a flag was: if your team loses, then you just pick another. How exclusive and devoid of choice the bearing of a flag has become now: it can mean your ticket out, and your only guarantee of safety, or it means you cannot get out and are fully exposed to the spoils of war.

We slowly make our way out of Beirut, passing familiar places. Many people weep; it’s heart-breaking. Once in the bus, I start hearing stories. One Dutch woman, fluent in Arabic, had come to the embassy with absolutely nothing…just the clothes she was wearing. She had fled her house in Dahiyeh with her kids, not knowing whether it was still standing. Another family had been living in Lebanon for over 5 years; doing relief work in the Palestinian camps. The decision to leave was extremely hard, but they just didn’t want their kids to go through the trauma. And then of course the Lebanese-Dutch, who leave family and friends behind. But there are also a bunch of back-packers and tourists who are pragmatically sober and unaffected about it: they aren’t leaving anyone behind. My neighbour turns out to be something of a distant colleague; he’s an art professor teaching at the art academy in Enschede where I did a few guest lectures. He just left his Lebanese girlfriend behind; they only managed to have one day together before she moved out of the Southern suburbs, to the safety of mountains. The trip takes ages, in Tripoli we see the bombed out police station or army HQ, I cannot remember. At the border we hear Tripoli was bombed again, moments after we passed it. We get held up 5 hours at the border, which seems nothing in comparison with the 9 hours of the Italians, the previous day. I see refugees pushing wheelbarrows filled with suitcases over the border; people just clutching flimsy plastic bags, with no possessions whatsoever. The line of busses and cars keeps getting longer and longer, the Lebanese as the Syrian officials have no way of coping with this. How can bureaucracy matter in times like these? At the Dutch embassy in Beirut they had distributed copies of the exit forms to us. The Lebanese officials didn’t accept the copies; they wanted us to fill in the proper forms. More delay and agitation in the heat of the midday sun. Then the Syrians make a fuss about the transit visa…I become exasperated: it was better in Beirut. We finally make it to Aleppo around 8.30pm. More bureaucracy, this time Dutch. They flew in an evacuation team. The boys of the Dutch “Koninklijke Marechaussee” (the Royal Constabulary) look fresh and cleanly-shaven. We on the other hand, are exhausted, hungry and dirty. At 3.30am, I am finally allowed to board the second plane to the military base of Eindhoven. The first plane took the elderly, families with small children and pregnant women. The Dutch have chartered a Turkish charter with a Turkish crew, since it was impossible to get a Dutch carrier on such sort notice due to the holiday season. The hostesses are made up and dressed impeccably; they smell of expensive French perfume. It seems so absurd to me. They beam benevolent smiles upon us as we scramble for seats. 4,5 hours later we land in Eindhoven. “Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Eindhoven. Thank you for flying Freebird Airlines; we wish you a pleasant stay.” The protocols of decorum seem absolutely grotesque when thinking about what’s happening in Lebanon. Everything seems trivial and meaningless, and even words have become reduced to rubble.

Nat Muller

Add comment July 22nd, 2006

Law and Media – Emerging experiments

[Fellowship report by Clifton D'Rozario] Starting in January 2004, Clifton D’Rozario was the recipient on behalf of Alternative Law Forum (ALF) of a fellowship as a part of the Waag/Sarai Exchange. The fellowship was intended to support some of the media activities of ALF, and to enable ALF to use new media technologies to expand the dissemination of its work, to engage with newer forms of communication and also to experiment with new ways of thinking of the relationship between law, culture and technology.

This report outlines some of the activities that have taken place in ALF in the past year, and what some of our future plans are. We would alsolike to take the opportunity to thank Waag/ Sarai for enabling this fellowship.

Context

In recent years, there has been a radical transformation in media practices, through low costs technology and user friendly tools. This could be an explanation for a growing interest in the use of media by various alternative organizations and groups. In ALF the interest in media at the current stage is two-fold – one is as a strategy for more effective dissemination of existing and past work in various areas (labour, litigation, intellectual property rights, sexuality etc.), and secondly to explore new and experimental forms of media (specifically digital video) that step out of the framework of conventional documentary film-making and engages with different publics.

Below is a description of the various ways in which ALF has engaged with an alternative use of media, new and old, in the past one year. This has been a valuable and enriching experience that has expanded notions of activism, research, creativity and practice in our daily work. For ease of reading the work has been divided into the following four descriptive categories, though often these are overlapping in terms of content or form.

Website
Databases and CD
Documentary films and fearless speech
Experimental forms

Website – www.altlawforum.org

ALF began its engagement with media with the creation of a website, which was a space to collect information about ALF, look at our reports on various issues, news and short snippets and also for interns to apply.

The report on KIADB land acquisition by software companies was unable to go outside of ALF and small circles of academics that were aware of the issue. There was limited public discourse on the issue of land acquisition by software companies and their re-shaping of the imagination and planning of Bangalore as a city. Often newspapers and even Tehelka (an alternative weekly) were not confident of taking up the story and being able to back it up thoroughly inspite of huge amounts of materials in terms of cases, testimonies from the panchayats/villages affected. There was also an anxiety vis-‡-vis the scale of the software companies and their stake in Bangalore as a city, and risks involved in challenging them. Hence the report on the website was one of the major ways in which it circulate to a wider public, before small newspaper articles started coming out in newspapers.

Databases

In the past one year ALF has started engaging with a wide variety of methods of distribution, and one of the ways is through the creation of CDs which are databases of legal, academic and other material. As a form, the CD database as envisaged in ALF is a precursor to the idea of a public legal database that allows a wide variety of people including activists, social movements, students, film-makers and others to access legal knowledge and to unravel its implications on their particular work. The creation of CD databases is a low cost method that allows the dissemination of valuable resources that were previously kept strictly within the domain of the law that is understood and has to be interpreted by lawyers. The public legal resource is an imagination of a physical space that can be used by various people to access information about the law, but at the same time dissemination of material through CDs also allows for reaching to a wide public.

Database CDs thus are effective for the collaborative creation and distribution of databases, and valuable resource of information on a specific area – primary and secondary material. Unlike a book on a topic, the CD also allows for access to primary materials, like cases, reports, newspaper clippings, and also to secondary materials like articles by other individuals on a topic, rather than only a treatise by one person, accommodating the use of visual and other material (photographs, movie clips, songs etc.) in our work, thus making it more engaging. It also is most conducive to being copied and spreading beyond a limited audience.

The concept of a database CD has been successfully applied for censorship and media, sexuality related issues, patent and traditional knowledge, a database on communalism consisting of materials ranging from all reports about riots and incidents in Karnataka, and look forward to using it for vendor’s manual on copyright issues relevant to them, disability and the other areas that ALF is working on.

Fearless speech v.1 and 2

We had created a multi dimensional CD database on censorship and media related laws, along with other resources including articles, texts, music, banned books etc. The database was created for the Celebration against censorship, organized by Sarai in Delhi (February 14, 2004). We worked on version 2 of the CD to release it in conjunction with the Vikalp Celebration against censorship conference in Delhi. Fearless speech v.2 saw significant additions. Apart from refining the existing material, we also added a whole range of new material including videos, film clips, European and Canadian jurisprudence as well as more high court cases etc from the Indian context. The CD also had a special section on the Cinematograph act in keeping with our experience of FFF Bangalore. We took 50 CD’s to Delhi and priced the CD’s at Rs. 50 each. All the CD’s were sold out. We have since then been distributing copies of the CD to a wide range of people, including academics, film-makers, media organizations, NGOs, institutions etc.

Queering Bollywood

The ‘queering bollywood‘ project is an exploration of representations of the queer community in Indian popular culture. queering bollywood was initiated as a research project, but grew in imagination to become a resource for groups discussions and classrooms. In addition to data CDs, queering bollywood was created as a fun/academic project which included a wide variety of movie clips, gossip snippets suited for support group discussions etc. but also articles, clippings, newspaper reports, website reports that made it useful in a classroom discussion as well.

The project is also meant to broaden the scope of discussion on representations in media, bringing within its domain the research that is taking place in the domain of media studies on issues of spectatorship, and the practical implications of impact of media representations that are derogatory or harmful to queer communities.

The queering bollywood CD was distributed at the Sexualities and Masculinities Conference in Bangalore (organized by Dharini Trust and Swabhava) and sold at the Films for Freedom seminar on censorship at Indian Social Institute in Delhi. It was also displayed in the Free Media Lounge, as part of ‘Contested commons, trespassing publics‘ organized by Sarai and ALF.

Documentary films and fearless speech

Films for Freedom – a documentary film festival: ALF’s engagement with documentary films and admiration for the tremendous enterprise and spirit involved in the making of documentary films led to our involvement with the Bangalore chapter of Vikalp, Films for freedom. The organizing group of the festival, consisted not only of film-makers but also artists, teachers, organizations such as ALF, Samvada which often use films and video as part of their work, Pedestrian Pictures, Collective Chaos and many other individuals.

The festival was meant to reinvigorate also the discussions around documentary film and to explore the different forms that get subsumed within this category and hence are not appealing to a large section of youth and college audiences The film festival has often been called as ‘foolish’ activism/speech.

Advertised as a festival that said ‘no to censorship’, FFF’s agenda during the course of the festival was to be brazen about censorship and the laws that were causing problems for the festival. Instead of stepping around the issue, and going for a smaller auditorium and screenings, the group decided fight with the censor board authorities to hold the festival. There is about an hour of footage covering the arguments that took place with individuals from the regional office of the Censor Board.

FFF also facilitated the coming together of various forms of ALF’s work – whether it was as practicing lawyers standing outside the festival venue having long coverstaions with the police, arguments with the CBFC on minor points of the Cinematograph Act, or networking with film-makers and other organizations on decisions as to what to do about the festival, organizing the new venue, or fighting and arguing with the Hindu Jagran Manch intent on disrupting the festival. A detailed account of the festival is available in the ALF reader.

A film for the pourakarmika trade union

ALF and Pedestrian Pictures helped to make a film for the pourakarmika trade union. Pourakarmikas are workers employed by the government or on contract, to do work such as cleaning streets, collecting garbage, removing posters and other work to keep the city clean. The film – the hands that protect health – is a result of ALF’s long interaction with the trade unions and their activities. The film is an account of the trade union taking matters into their own hand, and providing health services for the pourakarmikas, which is actually the job of the government.

The film was made at the request of the trade union and done with minimum resources. The objective of the film is to mobilize other pourakarmikas to form and go to the health camps. Though it can be used as a documentary film meant to raise awareness, the film works mostly within the logic of mobilization to make pourakarmikas across the city more active in the union/movement.

Experimental forms

The processes of being involved in the production of a documentary film revealed the growing limitations of this form for communicating to different publics. Apart from technical issues that it is not as easily distributed as either audio through the web, or photos through postcards, or text through reports, publications, pamphlets, a documentary film also suffers from unfortunate publicity of being ‘extremely boring’, as is often described by college students. Thus there has always been an interest in ALF to pursue more experimental and different forms of media

Thus as the process of creating the queering bollywood database was underway, the idea for a short film based on popular representations of queer lives was born. The film ‘kaun mille dekho kissko(the merry gay round of luv)’ as an experimental product has received enthusiastic reception in all its screenings.

This short film composed entirely of clips taken from a popular Hindi film, explores the accidental slippages in popular cinema that allow for narrative of a gay love story between two male characters. The short film (15 mins) also typifies the kind of interdisciplinary work that ALF engages with, being as much a part of intellectual property rights discourse as well as sexuality and popular culture. As a method of communication, the antecedents of the film (as an idea and form) are clear from the use of media in various trainings, classes and presentations undertaken by us, which use popular culture as a site of research, analysis and also as an effective medium of communication, especially to younger audiences.

The short film ‘kaun mille dekho kissko (the merry gay round of luv)’ has been screened at ‘Jagah’ – sexuality and gender exhibition organized by Nigah Media Collective in Delhi, Good as You support group meeting in Bangalore, Mount Carmel’s college session on sexuality and media (Communicative English), Centre for Study of Culture and Society (Film studies and the disciplines reading group), Asian College of Journalism, National University of Juridical Sciences and Centre for Civil Society in Calcutta, film festival at the Human Rights Festival, Christ College, Free Media Lounge at the Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics conference and also through private screenings.

Another form that we are experimenting with is that of a timeline of events related to censorship and repression. Fearless speech calendar was part of the plans for the FFF festival in Bangalore, but because of the problems with the festival, could not be displayed then. It is a calendar of events related to censorship and acts of fearless speech from around the globe. The research for the calendar took off from the resources contained in the fearless speech CD, but also sought to include an equal balance of stories that are infamous and those that are not well known and specific to Bangalore or Karnataka. The form that it was to take changed from a printed timeline in the brochure of the festival, to a video loops that could be played outside the venue. The eventual media product is not the complete timeline, but a video loop lasting 45 minutes. The fearless speech calendar is slated to become part of the website of FFF, Bangalore and also to be displayed at different venues where several organizations and movements congregate so as to collect and include stories of censorship and repression that are not well known.

Conclusion – Plans for ALF

Media related activities and plans of ALF are gradually getting integrated into various aspects of our work. The most intriguing aspect about media in ALF is that it is not isolated from our work whether litigation, research, networking with communities and individuals, but embedded in these practices. Our involvement with the nation wide campaign against censorship, along with documentary film-makers, artists, activists and others has led to a project that explores historical and conceptual terrains of censorship in India. The complex narrative of censorship and obscenity laws in India is not contained within a linear narrative of increasingly progressive laws, but reveals the use of censorship against social movements, by corporations against individuals and labour, by police against bar girls, by the State and the right against film festivals and documentary film-makers. We plan to develop a media product that allows censored images, words, acts and sound to enter and exit from the bare bones of the text of the law, thus allowing a fuller account of censorship to emerge and to destabilize the self-referential world of law and the autonomy of bare acts such as the Cinematograph Act or penal provisions on obscenity.

The emerging patterns of ALF’s engagement with media over the past year were tentative steps trespassing into a new terrain. In the next six months, we want to be more daring and experimental, and especially more confident of involving the people and communities we work with in experimental projects; at the same time, to also be more willing to negotiate media as a conceptual space rather than only as a medium of dissemination, though that too forms an essential component of our work. What is of interest to us now is to explore the common person’s experience of law, which is not restricted to courtrooms but permeates into daily lives of people. This experience is in fact integral to the work of ALF that deals not only with litigation and alternate dispute resolution mechanisms, but also is part of processes, movements (trade unions, coalition against communalism) and collectives (sex worker’s collectives, sexuality minority support groups). Hence an account of the law in terms of daily lives of people is something that we hope to bring out through narratives of people, objects and fragments from their lives.

As part of our ongoing work as part of the Films for Freedom and Campaign against Censorship we are looking at developing exciting media products for events and seminars around the issue of censorship that will be taking place next year. One aspect of this is to fully develop an interactive calendar of acts of fearless speech, which will allow people from their local contexts to include lesser-known stories of repression, along with acts of fearless speech that reverberate nationally and internationally. One of the most active forms of media production from ALF has been in the form of databases that include useful legal information, often with summaries, articles and current reports allowing for the circulation and accessibility of legal knowledge beyond the domain of lawyers. Database CDs, apart from being easily copied and distributed, also allow for the inclusion of a wide variety of material such as image, text, sound and video thus generating different entry points into the subject matter, whether salacious gossip leading to a serious examination of representations of queer lives in mainstream culture, or an interest in music leading to an exploration of censorship laws and copyright laws.

Add comment January 3rd, 2005

Waag Sarai Exchange exposed

In 2002 two organisations dedicated to researching, analyzing and changing the new media landscape, one based in Amsterdam and one in Delhi, started the exchange program that is the subject of this text. Funded by the Dutch Ministry of Development Cooperation, “the Exchange” between De Waag in the Netherlands and Sarai in India began with expectations and ideas, many of which bore fruit, while some of the plans never materialized, and while other things happened which had never been conceived of. After almost three years of exchanging views, knowledge, experts, arguments, e-mail, reports, experiences, De Waag wanted to have a report about the results of the Exchange. Here it is:

Delhi’s unseen landscape of bits and sounds

Courtesy of information and communication technology the World is shrinking – but Delhi is still huge. Concerts of honking horns accompany endless, chaotic, winding flows of traffic, often more than a dozen lanes wide, embedded between age old monuments, shopping malls, markets, side walks full of street vendors outnumbering their clients, military barracks, posh office blocks, not so posh office blocks, so called colonies for the rich, shanty towns for the not so rich. The real have nots sleep under fly overs or in parks that double as camping grounds. Fourteen million people, forty percent of them migrants, try to survive in this harsh climate, full of pollution, unsafety, beauty, poverty, despair, hope, pride, fun.

In ways that hardly meet the eye this urban landscape is changing rapidly. Ten years ago you would find hundreds of government controlled phone shops – deregulation boosted their number to thousands while voice was largely supplemented by internet services, e-mail in particular. At just twenty rupees ( 40 eurocents) an hour almost every citizen can afford to use them. For five rupees, the price of a cup of tea in a street restaurant, you can check your yahoo or hotmail account. During the same decade television became a commodity for all. Cable tv can be found in even the poorest basti’s (slums) : one small entrepreneur, one satellite dish, a band of small boys to do the cabling, and one tv-set per extended family plus all their neighbours, and off they go. In addition, India at large has embraced ICT as much as any other developing country: not just the famous software production and repair business in Hyderabad and Bangalore, which cater to a large extent for Western needs, but also a huge software industry for the domestic market. All of this and more happened against a backdrop of well developed traditional media, like film and newspapers.

Sarai

A quiet residential neighbourhood with villas and big gardens, close to Delhi University, is home to the national Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), founded in 1964. In 1998 two of it’s fellows, Ravi Sundaram and Ravi Vasudevan, joined forces with Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Jeebesh Bagchi of the Raqs Media Collective and formed Sarai – The New Media Initiative, housed in the basement of the CSDS building.
In the vision of Sarais founders, the speed of ICT developments and the way they interact with traditional media loomed large as a research subject. But Sarai was meant to be much more than just a research institute.
As far as others in India, Delhi in particular, were investigating the new media landscape, the results often remained obscure or inaccessible. In the words of Ravikant, who joined Sarai later on and whose focus is on the use of indigenous languages like Hindi in ICT: “I am an academic, we all are at Sarai. But we are also weary of the way academia works. It has been quite lazy here, apparently unable to use technology. Not even tv or radio they use. The University Grants Commission does have a tv-program, but it’s the kind of program no one watches. There have been plenty of experiments in distance learning in India, but that is very much one way. New media are interactive. Sarai is an interface basically, where different people can have a dialogue with the Sarai core interest.” Or as Ravi Sundaram puts it: “All our material goes into the public domain. We are building an archive, which anyone can access here, via the net or on CD. That is our mandate. Traditional research will produce a book, whereas we have a commitment to make everything very accessible.”

So, for Sarai the public domain and the media that shape it are not just the focus of attention – the public domain is also the receptacle of its work and the theatre where Sarai acts out it’s mission. What’s more – less, if you like – “all of Sarais work and practices is without copyright and put in the public domain for free distribution and re-interpretation”, according to one of it’s publications. And all of this primarily in an urban context. Delhi alone is big enough for the time being. Monica Narula explains: “We at Sarai love the city and we hate it! There are a billion people in India, four hundred million live in cities. Yet the world sees India primarily as rural. There isn’t much reflection on the city dwellers. A lot of people work on the ecology – but few work on urban media.”

At Sarai, exploring the new media landscape goes way beyond just mapping it and making the results available to all who care to know. Sarai also seeks to change that landscape by organizing workshops, media labs, speaking out on political aspects of media developments, and even providing ICT access in some of Delhi’s poorest neighbourhoods.
According to Ravi Sundaram, nothing like Sarai had been done before in India, or, indeed, in the entire Third World. “Similar research institutions hardly exist, it’s so sad. If the focus is not on media research and feeding the results into the public domain, what you get is a cultural ICT-centre, looking for big grants, and only surviving on having public events. We are committed to serious, stable research, and having a critical relationship to what we are talking about. Just setting up a network and having events will lead to nothing.” Ravi Vasudevan adds: “You have to develop and make accessible a body of knowledge. How do I access your archive?” Sundaram: “We have been deluged by requests for interviews. But we haven’t accepted any because we ourselves are part of the media. And we are not comfortable with tv – more so with print.”

Yet all these good intentions can lead to perceived or even real vagueness. “Many people here in Delhi don’t understand what Sarai is about, it’s hard to explain at times”, says Ranita Chatterjee who coordinates and manages a lot of what Sarai does. “And in India there is a lot of emphasis on output. Therefore it’s good to have, for instance, our publications, which people can see.” Others confirm that there is some pressure on Sarai to come up with tangible results like books you can pick up and read and gatherings you can visit. So here goes:

- Sarai has produced three paperback sized readers in English, with contributions from all over the world: “The Public Domain” (Feb 2001), “The Cities of Everyday Life” (Feb 2002) and “Shaping technologies” (Feb 2003), as well as one reader in Hindi, “Collection of Sarai”, about the Public Domain – Sarai hosts as a service several mailing lists, like Solaris which is “an initiative for discussing critical issues on the Internet and development.”

- Sarai organizes a whole range of workshops and seminars with subjects like “The Production of Crises in the Media” and about intellectual property rights and culture.

- Presentations at international gatherings like Documenta in Kassel (2002), at the New Media Festival (2002) in Sao Paulo

- The Tactical Media Laboratories, a series of smaller and larger gatherings in places around the world (Amsterdam, Delhi, Barcelona, Ney York, Sidney) that address pragmatic issues as a run up to the fourth edition of Next Five Minutes, in Amsterdam in 2003. In November 2002 Sarai organised a TML on the use of local scripts like Hindi and Urdu on computers, with participants from India, Nepal, Iran and Australia.

- Weekly film viewings, open to all, at the CSDS/Sarai building

- Allocating seed grants to researchers, usually for six months, to stimulate media research

- A commitment to open source software, and social software

- Building a media archive and an index which tells what can be found where in Delhi, media wise

- Two “Cybermohalla” centres in Delhi where very poor people are brought in contact with ICT on a daily basis
The financial irrigation of Sarai comes from several money flows. The CSDS helps by providing housing, staff, experience and direct contributions. The Dutch Ministry of Development Cooperation channels about 100.000 euros a year to Sarai via HIVOS in The Hague. The Rockefeller foundation foots about xxx of the bill. Money comes in via Hivos, a Dutch NGO working in south south cooperation. Then there is Waag Society, Institute for Technology and Culture in Amsterdam, which receives some 70.000 euro a year to pay for the Waag-Sarai Exchange program. And finally, some of Sarai’s activities bring in small money, e.g. the sale of the Readers.

The Exchange

In 2000 Sarai – The New Media Initiative embarked on an ambitious exchange program with Waag Society /for Old and New Media in Amsterdam. The name refers to a beautiful remnant of Amsterdams defense system, a tower built in 1488, as well as to the organisation that has been based there since its foundation on 21 June 1996. Currently De Waag has about 35 full time employees plus a band of more or less loose associates.

While De Waag lacks the links to the academic world which lie at the root of Sarai, the two organisations share a strong focus on the media, internet in particular. According to it’s mission statement, De Waag is “a knowledge institute operating at the cutting edge of culture and technology in relation to society, education, and industry. [...] The interplay of technology and culture is the driving force of all Waag Society’s activities.”
Now that we are into official documents, here some lines from the original mission statement of the Waag/Sarai Exchange: “The mission of this partnership is to explore and demonstrate new possibilities of collaboration in a cross-cultural/trans-national context. [...] a series of Sarai-Waag workshops and other joint exercises will be held in India and the Netherlands [that will] focus on the sharing of knowledge and develop collaborative projects in new technologies, the media and internet culture [and will] open up issues of public practices in the new media.”

After listening to this statement being read, Marleen Stikker, director of De Waag, says: “That’s jargon to a degree! It really makes me laugh now – all those concepts!” So what is her own line now? “What makes the Exchange interesting to me, is our shared focus on certain issues – how to understand them, and how to deal with them, which interventions to make. We share a way of reflecting on the information society and information technology. And we both bring the results out in the open, albeit each in our own way.” Talking about her personal motivation Stikker mentions the very different working environments of the Sarai crowd and the people at De Waag. “Knowing and thinking about the situation in India throws a new light on what we ourselves are doing, on our own context. It results in clearer views and more awareness about the world at large.” The world at large is exactly what is at stake. Geographical borders seem to be of no importance whatsoever to the new media – they simply haven’t been invited to the global ICT party. So, yes – it is cross-cultural/trans-national after all.

Equality as a key stone

“Without internet the Exchange could not have happened”, says Ravi Sundaram at Sarais New Delhi premises. “The old aid model is nation to nation, For instance: Holland help India. Now it is possible for Waag Society and Sarai to collaborate at an equal level. We both learn through the collaboration: we work together, set up events together. We spoke very little about the aid implications, the formal aspect. We never talked about it at that level. The most important thing about the Exchange is that, for the first time, it is possible to speak at an equal footing. People from Sarai and Waag Society thought about the same issues and so we said: Let’s do it.”

The equality between Waag Society and Sarai – rather than “development cooperation” which involves a donor and a receiver and, unavoidably, a hierarchy between them when decisions must be made – appealed to the Dutch Ministry of Development Cooperation. They liked to have an experiment of sorts with equality, although it wasn’t quite the first. (In 1994-2001 the equality-in-development-thinking led to “ecooperations” with farmers in Nepal, Benin, Buthan and Costa Rica; eventually some of these farmers were invited to come to the Netherlands and to hand out subsidies, provided to them by the Ministry of course, to what they saw as suitable projects. The experiment was never repeated.) Marleen Stikker believes that the strong ICT component of both partners was an added reason to fund the Exchange, because the “ICT in development” debate kind of engulfed the Ministry in those days.
On May 4th 2000 82.000,- euro a year was granted for a three year period. Even so, the Minister herself, Mrs Eveline Herfkens, grilled some of her civil servants on the reasons for this expense after she heard of it. Why spend money on ICT in a country which has such a thriving ICT industry, notably in Hyderabad and Bangalore, she wondered. The reply was that the places mentioned, along with a few other Indian ICT centres, are primarily annexes of the West while Sarai was dealing with ICT in the lives of ordinary or even underprivileged Indians, and that Sarai dealt with all media, old and new, not just those clustered around the internet.

To the people involved, the equality is more than just an interesting experiment. In the words of Sarais Hindi expert Rhavikan: “We are not into traditional development mode. It would be too presumptuous to think that Sarai or Waag Society can help other people develop. In Sarais focus on opening up the public domain, there is an inbuilt critique of development as well: we don’t believe in a developmentalist paradigm. All Indian governments have been trying to develop India with a mix of socialist and capitalist politics – and they failed. Now there is talk about catching up in ICT. Still we are critical of looking at ICT as development. We think much more along the lines of Waag Society: getting together, tradition and practitioners, who can think critically about the public domain.”

Sarais appeal to De Waag and vice versa

So what drew De Waag and Sarai together, apart from the equality and ICT as their common turf? The chemistry can be analyzed to an extent.
Somewhat surprisingly, Ravi Sundaram and others at Sarai identify an aspect of Dutch ICT life that never really fulfilled it’s promise as one of the Netherlands most appealing: the “digitale stad”, the “digital city” which prospered in Amsterdam in the mid nineties and which was initiated in 1993 by Marleen Stikker and others. Ravi Sundaram explains: “In Holland – at least in Amsterdam – more than in any European country, there has been a tradition of public initiatives. Setting up networks of your own. Building communities that are independent of the state. There also was public research, people investigating what is going on around them. That is why the idea of the Exchange started.” Patrice Riemens, free lance author working on and off for Waag Society visited Sarai twice and remembers well how the “Digitale Stad” fed into the imagination of the Sarai team: “They fully understood that Delhi was not Amsterdam, that the digital city could not be repeated – but the idea behind it, the culture of the Digital City influenced them deeply. And though the Digital City was a failure in the end, it left a positive legacy: the idea that pc-networks aren’t necessarily commercial, the idea of a digital commons, a digital public domain.” As Sundaram says: “The Dutch idea of sharing knowledge helped us find our own forms.” Ravi Vasudevan stresses the importance of Waag Society – as part of Dutch ICT landscape and in its own right: “De Waag is very important to us as a model, and as an image.” Sundaram adds: “De Waag linked to public initiatives in Amsterdam like we do around here.”

In Amsterdam, Marleen Stikker looks at the Exchange from the opposite point of view. She regards the Sarai crowd as “inspiring and interesting, because of their background of documentary making, their urban context, their social knowledge and scientific approach, even though Waag Society is not academia related – we operate between ICT and the arts: culture, education and the bridges between.” Just as important was Sarais commitment to open source software: “Crucial, even though we don’t use it to the extent Sarai does. Open source, Linux based software, enriches your network, it opens doors to unexpected domains.” (More about open source below.)
An important theme throughout the Exchange program, but especially so in the beginning, at De Waag as well as Sarai, was just watching, trying to understand what the other party was doing, discussing each others work, and reflecting upon what you saw. Ranita, who coordinates a lot of Sarais activities: “In the first year we just tried to understand what was going on. Which was very good. For instance: the Digital City – we discussed that at length even though we don’t try to copy it here in Delhi.” In a similar vein, Patrice Riemens stresses the importance of freedom at the core of the Exchange. “The Exchange program doesn’t obey orders. Most if not all that comes out of it is accidental. It’s very basic: Sarai is Indian, Waag Society is Dutch, they come together – and what happens? At least something, the contacts will enrich both. When in Delhi I often just tell how we do things over here.” Marleen Stikker: “The people at Sarai and Waag Society are dealing with more or less the same issues, but the Indian context is very different from ours. As a result, we see our own actions mirrored in theirs, and we become more aware of what we are doing.”

Common grounds

Sarai and De Waag share some interests that lie at the root of their cooperation: the public domain, open sources and social software. Westerners (and others) who find it hard to understand Sarais preoccupation with the public domain should understand that in India the public domain in the new media is hopelessly underdeveloped. For those who became aware of that void, it can become a hot issue. Given all that was said and written about the public domain in theDutch context under the auspices of Waag Society, the Exchange certainly makes sense. As already mentioned, the ideas behind the blending of ICT and the public domain in Amsterdam, known as the Digitale Stad, appealed very much to the people at Sarai. At De Waag the public domain is definitely an issue, especially after – in the words of Waag associate Geert Lovink – “the hostile take over of the internet by commercial interests” in the late nineties. A difference worth noting: while at De Waag worries about the public domain are mostly about the internet, at Sarai the worry about the public domain encompasses almost anything related to the media, with a heavy focus on print, film and other traditional media. Sundaram elaborates: “We push the idea that all publicly funded institutions should make information public: government data, laws, regulations… There is very little available. E-governance is more talk than reality. It is our tax money, the information should be made available to all. But instead, private companies get government information and sell it! Especially in the academic community research information should be made public. Online, in the public domain. But libraries here are in a very serious crisis, and often there are insane copyright regimes.”

While trying to extend and illuminate the public domain in Delhi and India at large, Sarai resisted the temptation of beginning with a definition of what it really was, despite the production of an entire book about the subject, Sarai reader number 1. Ranita explains: “By just having something that reflects on various aspects of the public domain without telling: this is the public domain, you allow people to reflect on it.”

Then there is “open source software”, a somewhat technical subject but closely related to the public domain. The big name here is Linux, the nemesis of Microsoft. In the Linux universe anyone who wishes can have access, on a pc than runs a piece of Linux software, to see and change the codes that constitute the program. Anyone who improves Linux software does so for the betterment of all, free of charge. In the Windows software family all you see is ones and zeros, in other words: the source code is secret. Only Microsoft knows how to mend codes or create new ones. The other major difference is financial. Bill Gates, the man behind Microsoft, is the richest man on Earth while Linus Thorvald, from Finland, who thought up Linux, wanted software that was as freely available as air. Says Shuddabrata Sengupta, briefly: Shudda, co-founder of Sarai: “Linux is like a restaurant where they serve meals and give you the recipes if you are interested. In the Microsoft restaurant the recipes are secret.”
That philosophy was embraced by Sarai to the extent that almost their entire outfit runs on Linux, even though Linux has far fewer applications than Microsoft. The Cybermohalla centres use both Linux and Windows. Linux offers unlimited possibilities to fill in a big void in Cyber India: much more use use of local scrips, Hindi and Urdu to begin with, on pc’s. So that’s one of the things Sarai is working on. This particular problem seems to have little bearing on the Dutch situation. But Shudda thinks that the Netherlands, or Waag Society rather, can learn from Sarais experiences if integration of the minorities, some of which use the strangest of scripts, is the goal. Would that not encourage segregation rather than integration? Shudda doesn’t think so: according to him, more and more people in Holland will be speaking one language at home and one outdoors. (He himself had to learn four languages.)

In a broader sense, Sarai’s dedication to Linux tallies nicely with the philosophy of De Waag, even though many pc’s in the building run on Windows and use MS-software. However, the core of the Waag computernetwork runs on Linux.
Thirdly there is social software. Whatever it actually is it’s important. In the words of Monica Narula, who runs Sarais media lab where a lot of experimenting with social software takes place, here are some of the basics: “What is social software? It is essential because it can change the future. How can we to push ways of looking at it? You know we are very interested in Linux plus technology, like the Opus Commons software we are working on and the Nine software that is being developed by Graham Harwood who is associated with De Waag and who is working with minorities in the Bijlmer in Amsterdam. Both are networked, easy to use, Linux based, creative software packages. How are they related? How do De Waag and Sarai want to look at it? One answer: social software is being made with the community of users. Others say: it is any software for a network in which a community is created and propelled.”

Concrete results of the Exchange and how to measure them

“Networking is easy”, says Ravi Sundaram, “you take cards and write e-mails. The exchange programme with De Waag opened up the whole European experience for us. We got visitors from Zurich, Berlin, England, Holland of course, all under the umbrella of The Waag. The Exchange is very relaxed about organizing these visits – some come independently, some directly via De Waag. But the Exchange isn’t just networking, it is collaboration.”

As concrete examples, he singles out the three Readers, and a sub-exchange programme of media theorists from both countries visiting each others country, and giving lectures of course.

The readers each contain a couple of dozens of essays centred around a main theme – The Public Domain (1), The Cities of Everyday Life (2) and Shaping technologies(3) – and they are jointly published by De Waag and Sarai. The contributors come from everywhere, amomg them Patrice Riemens and Geert Lovink from the Netherlands. The editing work is all Indian. Despite Sundaram’s stress on cooperation, the border zone between cooperation and networking seems to yield bigger results. A clear example is the cooperation between De Waag and Sarai as they are both involved in organising Tactical Media Labs, get togethers of like minded experts to work out specific issues. Officially these TMLs are extensions in time and space of the Next Five Minutes tactical media festival that is staged once every three years by a number of institutions from Amsterdam, De Waag among them, involved in tactical media. As opposed to a project for installing waterpumps, it’s in the nature of the Exchange that many results take a long time to become manifest; once they do (if at all) their provenance will be unclear at best. That’s the way networks work, particularly in ICT domain. Marleen Stikker, for one, hardly deplores it. “I really hope the results of the Exchange will be diffuse.” That can lead to problems, notably with the funders of the project. Patrice Riemens articulates it as follows: “I strongly believe in informal, qualitative, unconcrete, non operational cooperation – and then, hell, you must write a report about what you’ve been doing! Due to cultural differences, to different ways of thinking, the results can often not be identified properly. To me, just getting to know each other, taking notice of how the other deals with issues that are also crowding your agenda, could well be enough.”

Or take it just one step further and comment upon each others projects. Shuddha relates how Sarai is working on an issue which is not so hot the Netherlands: international law, intellectual property rights and culture. “We work with software people and a group of lawyers in Bangalore. Intellectually this work will be noticed and will be in demand, we think, and De Waag can help create a critical climate for what we are doing.” According to Marleen Stikker, this project could well be co-financed by the exchange fund.
Taking notice or creating critical climates may be worthy goals, but few providers of funds would go along with such a target. So the parties – wishing to extend the programs duration and its funding – are somehow compelled to look for real, tangible, sexy results of their project. In a case like the Waag-Sarai Exchange, such an attempt can be dangerous, Riemens thinks, as it might hamper the spirit and the sense of freedom that are the very engine of the Exchange. Funders should also realize that some results are great and very tangible, but hard to understand. Both De Waag and Sarai have a ‘techies’ band of the guys and the odd girl who handle the computers, do the programming and fix the system crashes. They too cooperate and they often do so with success: version 6.2 has been replaced by the far better 6.3, in another software package alpha had to make way for the cool beta edition, or a glitch in Delhi’s system was sorted out, online, in Amsterdam. For reasons obvious to those who understand how the internet works, the mail-server and the web-server of Sarai are located in the building of De Waag, which has a stunning one gigabit per second link to the Nets backbone. Except the “techies” involved, few can really fathom the extent of these successes – the literati and others using the system will just notice that the computers continue to run smoothly, or even more smoothly than they used to do – and funders may just take it for granted.
So, in order to understand what makes the Exchange worthwhile, one simply has to accept that when two networks meet a lot of new networking will be generated, which in turn will lead to new ideas and actions – and that the Waag-Sarai Exchange is a good example.

Cybermohalla and what it could mean for the North

In May 2001 Sarai opened it’s first Cybermohalla centre, and a second one followed a year later. In both cases it’s a big room with a few computers, a dial up internet link, a printer, a scanner and some additional hardware. And both are located in poor neighbourhoods of Delhi. Local people can visit the centre, every day if they wish, and use the computers. The centres are co-funded by Dutch Sponsors, through Hivos and Sarai, and Ankur, the Indian Society for Alternatives in Education.

This is a rather formal description of what is an unusual and very informal project indeed. Here is one of the key ideas, as formulated by Suddha: “Poor people in this country have to find information about their situation. Ignorance is a luxury that only wealthy people can afford.” And so the computers at the first Cybermohalla centre are used in all sorts of ways – sound, photos, cartoons, text – to record what is going on in the surroundings. About fifteen women and some five men, most of them in their early twenties, turned barefoot journalists and report about their surroundings: their basti of dust, makeshift houses, corrugated iron, mud walls, narrow lanes, lots of petty trading, smoking fires, noisy roosters, crying babies, playing children and lots of people generally, that is in constant danger of being bulldozered because the entire settlement of a few thousand people is illegal, whatever that means. The main outlet of their work is a wall paper in Hindi that informs about the things the passers by may speak about, but about which they never read. And in 2002 the Cybermohalla group produced a book about their life called By Lanes, jointly published by Sarai and Ankur. As Monica Narula observes: “The Basti people never get their own voices back. Now they do, in a wall paper and with the By Lanes book. Readers always say that they didn’t expect this to come out of the project.”

The book is in Hindi on the right hand pages with the english translation on the left hand, and as a result ordinary intellectuals, in the West for instance, who thought they knew a lot about development issues, can suddenly read texts written by the people it concerns – not just texts about them, written by other intellectuals. The book is a stunning read: about a stabbing incident, about a dead body in a gutter, about the use of lipstick, a conversation between a husband and a wife, an analysis of a photograph, worries about water and electricity.

The hindi texts were translated by Shveta, Sarais liaison officer with the highly independent Cybermohalla centres. She also translates when we sit down and speak with a young woman, Azra, and some of the other authors of By Lanes.
Q: “People at Sarai stressed the importance of creativity at this place. Aren’t you much more interested in learning skills on the pc in order to get a job and make money?”
A: “The limitations of life at home is a bigger concern to us. While here we can think about many things. At home the mind is limited, much more tied – here it can unfold. Money is not our prime concern. But the possibili-ty of thinking, living outside my daily concerns, enables me to reflect on the life at home.”
Q: “So where does that lead? Are your reflections useful to others?”
A: “Any individual has thought processes going on all the time, in any case. What is important is to find a space for conversation where those daily reflections can be drawn out. Similarly, our wall magazine offers others a possibility for conversation.”

To more than a few in the West the idea of bringing pc’s to a poverty ridden shanty town is crazy enough. But the answers just given might drive utilitarian development experts into sheer madness. So let’s switch back for a moment from the basti in inner Delhi to a broader perspective. The prevalence of creativity and communication over bare economic needs is slowly becoming a theme now in the ICT for Development debate, but it was by no means an idea the economists of The World Bank came up with first. If ICT is good for development – and that idea is now widely accepted, albeit after years of hefty debate – there has to be a direct link to economic output, to a concrete betterment of life. The wider notion of ICT, or communication, as a basic human need, along with food, water, shelter and sanitation, was put on donor agendas by representatives from the poorest corners of Africa – not by the donors themselves, most of whom still find it a very strange idea.

The link to between Cybermohalla and the Waag/Sarai Exchange is limited, though Sarai people gave various presentations about the project in Amsterdam and elsewhere, and several people from Waag Society paid a visit to Cybermohalla-1. (Cbermohalla- 2 just started and is still in it’s infancy while being trained by members of the first centre.) In a very concrete way, Henk van Buursen, system administrator at Waag Society, developed a very handy button at the Cybermohalla centre: just press and all that is needed to make an audio recording on a pc is set in motion at once.

Much further reaching is the plan, vague at this stage, to export the Cybermohalla concept to Europe. “It might be interesting to get a book like By Lanes from Amsterdam”, says Monica Narula. “From very ordinary people, about living in their city! I would love to read it!” Without getting the pronunciation enirely right, she refers to the “digitale trapveldjes” of the Dutch government, where underprivileged young people can get acquainted with ICT. “We discussed the possibility to analyze the difference between these centres and Cybermohalla in detail – see what the set up is over there, in The Netherlands. I could write an article and compare the two projects. In Liverpool there is a place called ‘Fact” a centre for artistic and creative technology located in a highrise flat in a ‘problematic niegbourhood’. We were talking about Cybermohalla – and they wanted to actually start one.” Marleen Stikker confirms that there are plans to bring one or two people from Sarai to Amsterdam to review the ‘digitale trapveldjes’, despite all the differences between Delhi and the Bijlmer. Looking at Cybermohalla already gave Stikker a clue of what caused the failure of some similar Dutch projects, also intended to give access to people in the margin of society: “The ownership-aspect is lacking. It is all being done and set up for them by welfare organisations.”
In a broader sense, Shudda considers “taking some of the energy of a public electronic culture from here to the Netherlands, and see what happens. Sarai and Waag Society are now two years into the Exchange, and there is something everyone who has to do with Sarai’s work looses sight of: In these two years we reached a certain level of achievement, and now we can begin to think of these things. We can now say: yes, these are practical directions to go into. But first we had to think about digital online culture in the most difficult cultural and social circumstances.”

Marleen Stikker, too, believes Europe might benefit from Cybermohalla and other Sarai projects which can get disadvantaged people, youngsters in particular, online and on target societywise. She mentions a by gone project in London, Artech, a medialab for drop outs, most of them black “They could just join, build websites, burn cd’s, et cetera. The starting point was always: what do you want? What plans are dear to you? They could just toy around with in the medialab – and afterwards many of them went into business! Nothing similar has ever been done in the Netherlands. Here, in training centres, the focus is always on skills – and not on: what motivates you? What is pivotal to you? That’s how they started at Cybermohalla. You see – India has huge ICT proletariats, nowadays the Indian proletariat is making and repairing our software. At Sarai, they want to transform technology in such a way that people will create their own world. It’s a huge step – and it’s a philosophy that unites us – us and our networks.”

Michiel Hegener

Add comment March 23rd, 2004

Sarai Waag Exchange in the news: Global Activism, WWW-style

In the quest for global peace and social justice, the Internet and other emerging network technologies provide powerful tools to support our work. But most organizations have not moved beyond e-mail and basic websites–they haven’t yet learned truly strategic uses of these technologies. Put simply, the tools are in our hands, but most of us have not yet decided what to build. Below, we present a glimpse of what the future might hold based on our research on organizations that are out front in their innovative use of these emerging technologies.

OneWorld: A Voice for Civil Society

At first glance, OneWorld.net looks like a straightforward news website focused on civil society issues. It contains compelling and professionally presented articles on HIV/AIDS, sustainable development, human rights, peace, and the digital divide.

Under the hood, however, the London-based OneWorld is a very different kind of site. It is a network of civil society content producers from around the world all working to paint a collective picture of a better world. Almost 100 percent of the content is drawn from the websites of OneWorld’s 1,500 partner sites. In creating “the news” for a particular day, OneWorld editors pull the best material from this pool of partner sites, write new headlines and précis, and publish the material to the front page. At a global level, the coverage is in English. Regional coverage in five additional languages is provided by more than 10 regional and country sites.

While most civil society websites tell stories from a single organization’s perspective, OneWorld presents the perspective of multiple organizations according to theme. The result is a diversity of opinion and content driven directly by the work and interests of civil society organizations.

Indymedia: Grassroots Open Publishing

Since starting as a single Web site and media production storefront set up for the Seattle WTO protests in 1999, Indymedia has grown to more than 100 sites covering all continents. A single international site collects the best content from all of the locals.

Indymedia is among the best-known examples of open publishing. A typical local Indymedia site consists of a “wire” section that automatically presents open publishing material as it is posted to the site. In addition, the site contains a “news” column consisting of stories chosen or written by the local editorial team. Whether news or wire, all of these stories come from grassroots media activists.

“While other online alternative news sources often fill their Web pages with editorials, commentaries, and news analysis,” writes Gene Hyde, in an article published at www.firstmonday.org. “Indymedia’s primary emphasis is in providing a Web outlet for filing original, first-hand coverage online through print, photos, audio, and video.”

Biwater Censorship Case: Online Activism

Online tactics can reverse corporate decisions in a few short days, as business interests scramble to avoid negative press. A good civil society example is the Biwater censorship case.

In the late 1990s, Biwater, a privately owned British corporation specializing in water privatization, tried to take control of a number of water concessions in South Africa. This led to public criticisms from the South African Municipal Workers Union, South Africa’s Mail and Guardian newspaper, the LabourNet.org website, and others.

In April 1998, Biwater threatened legal action against the nonprofit Internet service providers (ISPs) that hosted the LabourNet and Mail and Guardian websites. Unable to afford an expensive legal battle, both ISPs removed the material critical of Biwater.

The removal of the pages turned out to be the beginning, not the end, of the fight against Biwater. LabourNet webmaster Chris Baily called on activists to use the Internet to fight back against BiWater’s use of restrictive libel laws to throttle democratic debate. Two European ISPs dedicated to working with civil society — Antenna in the Netherlands and Inform in Denmark — responded.
Antenna and Inform, both member of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), mirrored the removed pages on their own servers. This meant that the pages were still accessible to the public but they were no longer housed within the British or South African jurisdictions where the “cease and desist” orders had been served.

Another eight APC members agreed to mirror the Biwater material, spreading the articles across servers in Europe and the Americas. With so many groups involved that were located in so many different countries, Biwater’s legal challenge became almost impossible. Biwater sent no more letters on the issue.

Sarai/Waag: North/South Collaboration

The Sarai/Waag Exchange provides a good example of how two civil society organizations — one from the North, the other from the South — use the Internet to collaborate on an equal level. The Exchange is an open-ended research partnership and series of fellowships aimed at getting to know one another by being immersed in each others’ experiences, practices, and locality.
Sarai is a Delhi-based new media initiative that explores the new media landscape and seeks to change that landscape by organizing workshops and developing media labs and community projects.

One such project is the Cybermohalla computer centres, where people in the poor neighborhoods of Delhi record and communicate what is going on around them. “About 15 women and five men, most of them in their early 20s, turned barefoot journalists and report about their surroundings: their basti of dust, makeshift houses, corrugated iron, mud walls, narrow lanes, trading, smoking fires, noisy roosters, crying babies, and playing children that is in constant danger of being bulldozed because the entire settlement of a few thousand people is illegal, whatever that means,” writes Michael Hegener. “The main outlet of their work is a Hindi newspaper posted on the walls that informs about the things the passers-by may speak about, but about which they never read.”

The Amsterdam-based Waag Society shares Sarai’s interest in seeing media from a variety of angles, carrying out research, developing software, and pointing out the connections between technology and culture. The Delhi and Amsterdam groups both have a passion for technology that is “open source”–placed in the public domain so it is available for anyone’s use. This interest led the Exchange to hold an “open source and development cooperation” workshop in Amsterdam during the summer of 2003 involving practitioners from both South and North.
“The old aid model is nation to nation, for instance, Holland helps India,” writes Hegener, quoting Ravi Sundaram of Sarai. “Now it is possible for Waag Society and Sarai to collaborate at an equal level. We both learn though the collaboration: we work together, set up events together. We spoke little about the aid implications, the formal aspect. The most important thing about the Exchange is that, for the first time, it is possible to speak at an equal footing.”

The potential of the Sarai/Waag Exchange is significant enough that others have asked to join, and the partners have agreed to open it up–albeit cautiously. Only one new organization – — the Alternative Law Forum — will be joining in 2004. If this goes well, another organization may join in 2005.

Citizen Lab: Detecting Hackers

As more civil society organizations go online, the importance of network security increases. Citizen Lab is developing a Secure Scan research project to help non-governmental non-profit organizations (NGOs) detect hackers and improve security on their networks. It plans to investigate the widespread anecdotal evidence that NGOs are being subjected to hacker attacks.

Human rights organizations appear to be especially likely to be targets of such attacks. For example, in January 2001, the Argentine human rights group Las Madres de la Plaza del Mayo reported being hacked for the third time and having information destroyed on their hard drives. The attacks were attributed to a group called Jorge Videla, the name of a military official who was part of the 1976-1983 dictatorship that was responsible for the disappearances of 15,000 to 30,000 people.

Citizen Lab works with NGOs in the South, auditing their network security and patching up any vulnerability. It plans to seek permission of the NGOs to install tools that allows the network to be monitored and any intrusion to be detected.

Exception, Not the Rule

In these organizations, we see a world where technology is at once central and forgotten. E-mail lists, websites, and databases are so deeply ingrained into the DNA of these organizations that they are no longer the point or the problem. The fluidity and flexibility of these technology tools have become the natural raw material from which more important things are built – coalitions, campaigns, knowledge, networks. They, in turn, create new forms of organization and ways of working together that are changing the terrain of civil society and giving a glimpse of an uncharted future. As this terrain starts to emerge and come into focus, we see glimpses of the future.

Mark Surman, president of Commons Group, has been developing community-based media projects for the past 15 years. Katherine Reilly is an independent researcher and consultant. This article was adapted from the report of the Information Technology and International Cooperation Program of the Social Science Research Council.

Katherine Reilly and Mark Surma

Reprinted with permission from the authors from YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, PO Box 10818, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110. © 2004 All rights reserved by the publishers.

Add comment March 4th, 2004

New Media Culture in India – a Visit to the Sarai New Media Initiative

A year and a half after the new media centre Sarai opened, I returned to Delhi, curious to meet new staff and see how projects have evolved.[i] The centre is a buzzing hub, full of energy. During the six days of my stay I only got a glimpse of what is going on. I will not attempt to sum up all the projects that Sarai is initiating and facilitating but will briefly go through a few of the activities and feature a subjective melange of projects — and people — that I became familiar with during my stay.

Delhi, as hot and polluted as ever, is undergoing a major transformation. The construction of the subway is well underway. The first line will be opened late this year. Due to the tense situation in Gujarat and Kashmir, Delhi feels under a siege. Surveillance and control have been stepped up; there are police roadblocks here and there. Politically the week was marked by the elections in Jammu and Kashmir, which resulted in a defeat for the ruling National Conference. This party is a partner in the Hindu nationalist BJP led National Democratic Alliance coalition, the current Indian government. Positioning itself ‘off the radar,’ so far Sarai did not have to deal with state interference. The impression one gets of Sarai is that of a dynamic cultural centre where new media are centre stage but not the sole denominator. Instead, what Sarai drives is a passion for cosmopolitan intellectual debate on contemporary city culture. The central concern of Sarai is the connection between urban culture, media and daily life. The annually published Sarai Reader is proof of the strong ties to book culture. At the same time the Sarai server is host to a range of electronic mailinglists, from the South-Asia IT list ‘Bytes for All’ to a discussion forum on community radio in India.

At Sarai there is a weekly public screening program, using easy to obtain VHS and DVD copies of feature films and documentaries, not 16 or 35 mm. On the program this week an Iranian film (Kandahar by Mohsen Makhmalbaf). The day I arrived Michael Saup of ZKM gave a workshop, which was supported by the Goethe Institute, which itself could not host such technological events. Also there were two Australians doing a residency. In the midst of it all, staff meetings, heaps of them. And yes, there were the occasional electricity cuts. Because of road construction the ISDN connection to the Net had been down for a while but this improved later on in the week.[ii] One of the Sarai founders, Ravi Sundaram, said bandwidth could have been better but that the government was holding up connectivity because of the post-911 security clearance of cable landings.

Let’s look into some of the projects. Ravikant, a former historian, is responsible for the language and popular culture program. Hindi is perhaps one the largest language in the world but the illiteracy is also one of the highest.[iii] However, the best books on the Hindi public domain all are written in English. Experts on Hindi film only publish in English. Ravikant’ s research looks at the implications-and possibilities-of new media for Hindi popular culture. He is the editor of the ‘Hindi Media Reader,’ a Sarai publication due to come out in November, arguably the first new media publication in Hindi with commissioned articles on free software, satellite channels and tactical media. The reader also contains specific essays about the Indian context. As a first book on these issues, the reader celebrates new media. Ravikant: “The Hindi world has been obsessed with print culture, which rose in the late nineteenth century. Related is the love for literature. But in our age they’re more ways of looking at the world. Film and television now constitute language.” In the Hindi context it is important to discuss the anxiety between ‘high’ literature and popular media. The Hindi media reader discusses the relation between the book and the computer. Sarai wants to play a mediator role and lift the knowledge of one sphere and transfer it into another. Ravikant knows only of a few Indian media theorists; post-Marxist scholars and writers who have been struggling against the dominant trend that treats audio-visual media as suspect. New media are usually seen as part of the package called globalisation.

Over the last few years considerable progress has been made concerning the introduction of Hindi as a computer user language, both on the level of software interfaces and on the Net. But still a lot of work needs to be done. Like Japanese, Hindi has its own set of characters. Both programs and the keyboard need to be adjusted. Ravikant: “At the moment there are three levels at which work is being done. There is the font solution, in which you have to install fonts within the application you use. Then there are the dynamic fonts. Thirdly, there is the Hindi Unicode (the extended standard of ASCII), which will be the long-term solution. However, you can’t use it yet for the Linux-based Star Office. Compared to open source programs, Windows has a much better support for Hindi Unicode. The BBC Hindi site has started using Unicode. You can download fonts from there, which are for free. But keyboards have not yet been adapted.” For those interested, there is a yahoo group that deals with Hindi and computing. Lately, Linux groups in India have woken up and start to deal with the language issue. Ravikant: “I just came back from a conference in Bangalore that dealt with all the issues of standardization-mainly visited by Linux users.[iv] Whatever input devices we use, we should give people choices. In India old school typists turned DTP operators do most of the work. Their needs should also be taken into account. Many are bi-lingual workers. But there are also those who only speak Hindi. For them we should also offer the phonetic choice at the QWERTY keyboard level.”

Despite rampant nationalism, the Hindi part of the Internet is much more tolerant than one would expect. Ravikant: “We learned to live with the tension of hate sites. There are limits to what you can do against them. There is such an obsession in India with the protection of the ‘purity’ of culture. We therefore have to find ways to talk about other topics. There is always the danger that the Hindi language agenda gets hi-jacked by the guardians of cultural purity but that should not stop us from getting involved. I am hopeful. The Hindu right wing forces are losing one election after another. The ruling class is in fact not following the nationalist economic agenda.”
Cybermohalla is perhaps one of the Sarai’s most impressive projects. In May 2001 a media lab was established in a slum called ‘LNJP,’ a ‘basti’, next to a hospital in central Delhi. The settlement is living under the permanent threat of eviction. Bulldozers could come at any time and force the inhabitants to resettle on the outskirts of the nine million people metropolis. The project is based in a small room nicknamed Compughar, has three computers (two of them Linux), mainly used by a group of young people most of whom are young Muslim women. Shveta, who trained as a social worker before coming to Sarai to work on the Cybermohalla project, has taken me to Compughar and translates from Hindi to English the many stories the youngsters have to tell. The co-coordinator Azra Tabassum, a lively 20 years old, shows us around. Compughar is a self-regulated space. Azra looks into the everyday functioning of the lab. Monday to Saturday everyone meets from 10 to 4. There is lots of laughter-and expertise. The Cybermohalla project is now well under way. The frequent visitors, most of them school dropouts, have quickly learned to master word processing (in Hindi), drawing and animation programs (Gimp), games, the digital camera and a scanner. There is even a phone and email access via a modem but the connection is not always that stable. At length we discuss the use of Hindi fonts, compare chemical processed pictures with digital ones, and go through of the countless computer animations the children have made of their computer drawings.

Cybermohalla is not just one out of many Digital Divide projects. Together with Ankur, the Society for Alternatives in Education, Sarai has developed a unique methodology. Ankur’s philosophy is to give young people what they are deprived of in schools. Prabhat, who works for Ankur, writes: “What is needed is that we be excited by innovation, but not get swept away by blind faith in it. That there be creativity, along with a critical attitude.” Unlike most projects in this area the focus is not primarily on (Micro)software training. It takes courage to step outside of the development logic that IT is solely about bringing prosperity etc. Cybermohalla is first of all about digital story telling. The participants go out, into the small lanes, and bring back what they have heard and seen. Technical training is only one aspect. The ability to tell stories is as important. Prabhat: “Within a month the children understood that they were not doing a normal computer course.” A community media memory was in the making.

Shveta tells me more about the way Cybermohalla works. “We use a variety of media forms, from wall magazines to html pages, animation, stickers and diaries (texts, audio recordings, photographs). The participants write about the basti, about the neighbourhood, they make excursions into Delhi (short walks, for instance), as well as to other cities. Excursions are often in small groups. The texts — narratives, reflections, descriptions — written individually, are shared within the group. It is through this loop of writing, readings and sharing, and very significantly, the conversations these engender, through the words and ideas that they move through, that Azra, Nilofer, Shamsher, Suraj, Babli, Shahana, Mehrunisa, Yashoda and others discover and evolve the various concepts we engage with.” The conversations, Shveta explains, are critical to the process of ‘concept making’ at Cybermohalla. Ruchika, another researcher at Cybermohalla, brings, through readings and discussions, into the labs her own narratives about the city, narratives she is currently working on through her interactions with ’scavengers,’ people who live on streets, ’street children,’ the ‘invisible margins’ in the city.

Besides Shveta, there is Joy, who is a web designer the Sarai media lab, provides support and shares skills in text editing, image manipulation. Also part of the team is Ashish, who oversees the technical skill sharing for the use of low-end consumer technology (camera, dictaphone, sound equipment, microphones). Ravikant, involved in Cybermohalla because of the Hindi language aspect, agrees that the project has a ‘post-educational’ emphasis. “The mainstream understanding is that there is a direct link between technology and development. And between education and employment. We could say that at Cybermohalla these kids gain critical skills. But we should pretend that we provide existential comfort to the people associated with us.” Shveta: “It’s not just the mainstream understanding of a link between technology and development, or between education and employment, but also the notion, a class-based bias of looking at certain peoples as culture deficits, waiting for a delivery system of ideas, words, concepts and skills, that invariably gets articulated under the garb of the language of ‘lack’ and ‘empowerment’. Sadly, this masks the significance of ‘cultural creativity’, or that of users and producers contributing to and guiding (technical) innovation.”

One year into the project the produced material was brought together in a beautifully designed, bi-lingual book. On July 11 2002 the ‘By Lanes’ publication was presented at Sarai.[v] All the children, parents and others came to Sarai. The place had never been that packed. The Compughar group read their stories. The response of the basti community was mixed. Ravikant: “There was some opposition, but now there is openness about what the women are doing. For the first time there are reports coming in from the basti citizens themselves. Before reports were usually written by outsiders.” The Compughar group made an animation about the fierce debate within the basti community. Why would the outside world be interested about the everyday life of the slum, some asked. The style of the diary-type entrances in By Lanes about daily life in the settlement is reflexive, poetic, and at times nostalgic. The online stories in Cybermohalla’s ‘Ibarat’ newsletter, for instance about a train journey to Mumbai, are more fragmented and narrative.[vi]
In the afternoon we visited the second Cybermohalla media lab in the Dakshinpuri resettlement district. The lab had opened only two months ago. Pinki is the co-coordinator. The growing group of participants was still in the process of finding out about the possibilities of the software. Both exhausted of the encounters and the long journey through town by car, Shveta and I returned to Sarai.

In an email exchange, a few week later, Shveta writes: “What Cybermohalla creates is a context for researchers, media practitioners, web designers, programmers-from different contexts, with our specificities, pursuits, subjectivities-to interact, to collaboratively, dialogically create and transform our own, and one another’s’ practices through an awareness of and a critical engagement with one another, to participate in the process-as Jeebesh puts it-not as unequals. It is a dialogic reflection among peers. The processes are not determined by their ultimate purposes. Skills, forms and materials are not introduced into the labs with a fixed, predetermined purpose or instrumentality. We’re not working with or within a curriculum, or ‘evolving’ one. Otherwise where would the room exist for experimentation, or a playfulness with forms, an interrogation of these?”
Let’s switch to Sarai and the arts. Sarai is by no means a national centre. >From the beginning it has been embedded in regional and international networks. The exchange program between Sarai and the Amsterdam-based Waag Society for Old and New Media is one example.[vii] The Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh, Monica and Shuddha), founding members of Sarai who have been working together for a good ten years, have been showing their work abroad for a long time. Recently, Raqs had an installation work at the Documenta 11 art exhibition in Kassel, Germany.[viii] A year before the opening of the show one of the ‘platforms’ (D11 curator Okwui Enwezor’s term for public debate), had taken place in Delhi.[ix] Raqs’ installation, ‘Coordinates of Everyday Life,’ consists of two parts. The video section, using a few projectors in a dark room, engages with Delhi urban culture. Shuddha: “Many hours of shooting were done over a period of one and a half years. It is 90 minutes of video material if you want to see everything. We engaged with the city in a systematic way, each week identifying an element of city life. We would then go to that particular spot and shoot. There is for instance footage of us in the fog, standing on a bridge at one camera angle for one and a half hours. We learned a lot from that discipline. In filmmaking you are always under the pressure to move your camera and yourself. This shift is related to our move into the arts. It is a move away from the ‘universal clock’ of television. At the same time it is a more serious engagement with documentary filmmaking. Before, the ‘clock’ of television was running in our heads. Now, there is no search for any spectacular, decisive moment. We did not look for the significant shot. In that sense creating a work for an arts context allowed us to re-engage with the documentary sensibility.”

The work also looks at law, the legal regime that governs space, the textual component of the work. Shuddha: “Certainly the presence of rules and regulations in urban space has increased dramatically. The first piece that you see in the installation is the law on land rights, dating back to the 19th century. It defines what is property in land. What matters here is not so much the codification as such but its precise articulation in todays context through regimes of surveillance and urban relocation.” The paranoia about security is significant in Delhi. For the installation Raqs also produced stickers. They contain simple messages such as ‘look under your seat’, ‘do not touch abandoned objects’ or ‘missing persons report immediately’.

The second part of ‘Coordinates of Everyday Life’ at Documenta 11 was a piece of open source software, presented on PC monitors. Opus (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification) is a web-based database structure for shared content.[x] Opus is an attempt to create a digital commons in culture, based on the principle of sharing of work, while at the same time, retaining the possibility (if and when desired) of maintaining traces of individual authorship and identity. I asked Shuddha to what extend the conceptual nature of the Opus database was related to the precise nature of the Delhi everyday life imagery. Shuddha: “Both are about inhabiting space in a different way. One is about being restrained by legal regimes in offline space, the other reflects on the possibility of sharing space in a much more free-floating, dispersed fashion. We started to be interested in work that enables work. Opus means work. It’s a work about work. It’s not an object that can be contemplated. Rather, Opus is a playground. I look at Opus as a building or architecture, a blueprint. It is like a building waiting to be inhabited. It takes some talking to communicate to an art audience what the implications of Opus are.” Those familiar with free software immediately understand the basic ideas behind Opus. But they would ask: ‘why label it art’? Shuddha: “Certainly. Software questions the boundaries of art. The most interesting response came from a group in Brazil called Recombo who were doing something similar with music. They take the idea of the remix culture literally and built an online architecture for people to make collaborative music. In this way peer-to-peer distribution is extended with peer-to-peer creation. Others are interested in the source code. Now we are translating the Opus ideas into physical space. It is a work commissioned by the Walker Art Center, in collaboration with Atelier Bow Wow, a group of Japanese architects. The show opens in February 2003. We are trying to figure out what kind of analogue manifestations Opus can have in a gallery space.”

In August 2002 a delegation from Sarai flew to Sao Paolo to install a work of Raqs Media Collective at the new media arts exhibition EmoÁ„o Art.ficial.[xi] The installation called location (n) has eight clocks and eight monitors. Shuddha explains: “The crucial idea is one of time zone. The clocks represent different cities such as Sao Paolo, New York, Lisbon and Delhi. Instead of hours the face of the clock has emotions such as epiphany at 12 o’clock, anxiety, nostalgia. The fun of the work is that visitors can compare the different states of being in each city. The whole room is filled with the sound of a heartbeat, layered on to which are the sounds of global electronic transactions, modems, fax machines, and phones. On the monitors you see a face slowly moving from left to right. It’s a mysterious image because it looks like as if the face disappears on one and then reappears on another monitor. The face seems to be travelling between the time zones. We are playing with the Kulishov effect in early cinema where expressions and objects each produce different emotional effects. In our case it was about the expression of the same emotions in different time zones. Globally speaking we always had the same emotions. It’s just that there is no singularity. Everyone feels the same but at different point of time.”

My round along the Sarai projects ends with an interesting exchange on free software and open source and the Indian context. Tripta is responsible for the free software public outreach project of Sarai.[xii] Before stumbling into the Linux scene she studied ancient Indian history. In retrospect, Tripta explains, she already encountered open source issues during her study, as she could not access the artifacts and primary sources. Six months ago she became a member of the Delhi Linux User Group.[xiii] At the first meeting she was appointed general secretary. In the beginning her curiosity was born out of activism. The group brought out its own distribution CD and went to schools to give presentations. Tripta: “After a while I realized that the group did not manage to penetrate into the schools and break through the barriers of preconceived ideas. Microsoft is the software that authorities use.” In a response to this impasse, the Delhi group decided to put up a website and post research outcomes of each of its members. The main issue is: how can Microsoft’s hegemony be broken in more than technical ways? The aim of Tripta’s research is to get more people interested in the cultural aspects of free software related issues. Without research such work cannot happen, she says.

Tripta: “For me open source and free software is not an isolated body of knowledge. It should be placed in a specific context. In my research I am not only looking at the rival factions between the free software purists and the open source pragmatists. I am mainly looking at the Indian context. I am also interested in the media representation. I asked Tripta what the specific situation of Linux in India is. “Programmers here are not into the development of Linux itself. They are more involved in the service industry. Linux is new here and only few people have expertise in this field. So Indian programmer do not change the source code (despite the philosophy). They even develop code and then release it as proprietary software, parallel to their free software activities. This does not only lead to a personality split between the daytime and the evening. Also, the overall development of open source stagnates. There is certainly the image that Indian programmers are not designers. They are not good at conceptualizing software. Instead you tell them to do a certain thing and they will program it. This is might be a caricature but there is some truth in it. There is a sense that Indian techies cannot penetrate other disciplines. In order for this to change a difference sensibility towards technology needs to be developed. For most of us technology is still this overwhelming thing. The distance between us and technology needs to be broken down.”
Then there has to be a viable business model; a universal problem with significant local consequences. Tripta: “Free software cannot be isolated from the social reality in India. I don’t want to see our efforts as a hobby. That wouldn’t bring us very far. Maybe within programmers’ circles it might be a heroic thing to do to sit through the night and hack the code but in the larger picture it reduces its own importance.” Another global trouble topic is the total absence of women. Tripta: “Recently I visited one of the colleges. There were lots of women around in the computer science department. Later I realized that all these women, after their graduation in computer science will either study psychology, do an MBA, history or whatever. But none of them will pursue programming. They said that men were better at it. There is the widespread idea that women cannot think logically. The issue is not that women are not using computers. What we should do is break down the barrier between users and programmers.” A cultural turn seems inevitable.
The cultural change we speak about here will not come overnight and might have to be accelerated by conflicts and dialogues. Hackers vs. artist types is a conflict that also exists within Sarai, like in so many new media arts organizations. There are tensions with the first generation of young programmers and the artists/intellectuals. Tripta, trapped between the two, explains: “In both ‘camps’ there is this arrogance: what I know you won’t be able to understand. Then the conversations cease to happen. Techies should be involved on all levels. Programming should not be seen as a commissioned job. Techies have to be fully aware what the ideas behind a certain project is. The problem is: techies at Sarai do not see why technology should be used within arts and culture. They do not see the point of net art and prefer to do ‘more substantial’ stuff. It is important that these issues are addressed in this space, because if they are not discussed in Sarai, then where would they? Businessmen wouldn’t even bother to look into such issues.” For Tripta the conflict is all about sensitivities and the backgrounds people come from. She stresses the importance of going to schools. “We are building a web portal for students to put their open content on. That could be a beginning. The continuing use of Microsoft products has led to a closed sensibility towards software. In that sense, the use of open source software in daily life would indeed make a difference. But that’s only a long-term solution. For artists and critics it doesn’t really matter what software they use. What counts is the openness towards the ideas and the willingness to start the dialogue with programmers.”

When I leave Sarai, the staff is examining 120 applications that have arrived for the second round of the seed grants program for students and young researchers. Sarai is committed to generating public knowledge and creativity through research. The Independent Research Fellowship Program is one of Sarai’s most successful initiatives. In particular Bangalore initiatives have benefited. Sarai does not just support Delhi-based individuals and initiatives. Themes are as diverse as habitation, sexuality, labour, social/digital interfaces, urban violence, street life, technologies of urban control, health and the city, migration, transportation, etc. Operating within limited space it was clear from the start that Sarai would not be able to expand dramatically in terms of staff and offices. Around 20-30 micro grants will be awarded. Also, preparations are underway for three conferences: a meeting in December about intellectual property rights, a groundbreaking conference about the city in January 2003 and one about ‘crisis media,’ early March.[xiv] Dazed and encouraged about Sarai’s activities, debates and contradictions, I leave Delhi.

Geert Lovink (Edited by Linda Wallace)
this article was first published on the nettime-l mailing list

[i] A report of my visit to Sarai was posted to nettime, March 23, 2001. A
slightly different version can be found in Dark Fiber (MIT Press, 2002).
Sarai’s website: Sarai
[ii] Supreet, one of the Sarai programmers explains: “We have a PII 400 Mhz
with 56kbps dialup which I think is pretty decent config for a machine
connected to net. It requires 333.916 secs this particular page to load
which is AFAIK is graphics which shows all the projects inside the OPUS
database. See:
index A few more numbers are
available at usage
[iii] More than 180 million people in India regard Hindi as their mother
tongue. Another 300 million use it as second language. Source:
hindi
[iv] See: sourceforge
[v] Online version available at
bylanes
[vi] URLs of the Cybermohalla Ibarat newsletter:
cybermohalla
02
03
[vii] URL: WaagThe Waag Society has been instrumental in the
founding of Sarai.
[viii] See:
Kurztext
[ix] The platform took place from May 7-12, 2001. See report:
report
[x] URL: opus. Silvan Zurbruegg and Pankaj Kaushal did
coding. See also Sarai’s posting to nettime, July 2, 2002.
[xi] Raqs Media Collective @ Sarai: The New Media Initiative, EmoÁ„o
Art.ficial Exhibition, Itau Cultural Centre Sao Paulo, Brazil, August 2002.
URL: Itau
[xii] Lap
[xiii] Linux Delhi
[xiv] If you wanted to keep informed about Sarai’s activities, please
subscribe to their electronic newsletter. Email: Sarai

Add comment October 26th, 2002

Sarai: A New Media Center Opened in Delhi

During the last weekend of February, Sarai, arguably the first new media center in South Asia of its kind, opened its premises with a three days conference on the Public Domain. Sarai, which means an enclosed space, tavern or public house in a city, or, beside a highway, where travelers and caravans can find shelter in various South-Asian and Middle Eastern languages, is located in the basement of a newly erected building in Delhi (India). The Sarai initiative describes itself as an alternative, non-commercial space for an imaginative reconstitution of urban public culture, new and old media practice and research and critical cultural intervention.

Sarai receives key additional support from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Research Division of the Development Aid Section), the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology and the Dutch aid organization HIVOS. The inception of Sarai coincides with a three yearlong exchange and collaboration program with the Society for Old and New Media (www.waag.org), Amsterdam. The Dutch Foreign Affairs Ministry also supports this partnership. Sarai is in the process of developing local links with initiatives in Delhi and India and international links with partners in South Asia and elsewhere. Significant amongst these is an effort towards the setting up of an informal South Asian New Media Network to collaborate with like-minded initiatives in the region as well as an emerging relationship of partnership and cooperation with the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT).

Sarai is a unique blend of people and disciplines. The main background of the initiators of Sarai is in documentary filmmaking, media theory and research. Historians, programmers, urbanists and political theorists have subsequently joined them. One of the founders, Jeebesh Bagchi, describes Sarai as a “unique combination of people practices, machines and free-floating fragments of socially available code ready for creative re-purposing. Here the documentary filmmaker can engage with the urbanist, the video artist jam with the street photographer, the film theorist enter into conversations with the graphic designer and the historian play conceptual games with the hacker.”
Sarai is a program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, an idendepedant research center, founded in 1964. CSDS funded by the Indian state and a range of international donors. The center has welcomed dissenting voices in South Asia and it is well known for its skepticism towards received models of development. Sarai is a pilot project for the Dutch ministry of foreign affairs. So far most of the money was spent on building water pumps in rural areas. For decades Dutch policy had been to only support the poorest of the poor. However, recently more and more NGOs in the field started using Internet. There is a growing awareness of the importance of IT-use within development projects-and society as whole. New media are becoming an important part of the rapid growing and diverting process of urbanization.

With a public access space full of terminals and a cafe, Sarai neither has the feel of an isolated research facility, nor does it have the claustrophobic agenda like many new media arts institutions, let alone does it equal an IT-company, even though the place is flocked with young computer hackers. Monica Narula, (another co-founder of Sarai, member of the Raqs Media Collective) is a filmmaker, photographer, and in charge of design at Sarai. She is responsible for the look of both the website and the internal network interface. She says: ” Delhi is a polarized space. Young people and students have nowhere to go. Either place for them is expensive or nothing is happening. People can come to Sarai and use the internal network interface via one of the terminals in the public space, have coffee and also interact. The internal Sarai interface is much more sophisticated compared to the website. In India download time means money; people don’t have the necessary plug-ins installed. After a fierce internal debate we decided to develop a more interesting, creative interface for the public terminals and have the website really light.”

The atmosphere during the opening was one of an exceptionally high intellectual level, the air filled with lively debates. The Sarai community, now employing 13 staff members, is open for everything, ready to question anything. Jeebesh, himself a filmmaker and another member of Raqs Media Collective says: “I was not happy with the way in which classic research feeds back into society. I don’t like being specialized. The idea is to proliferate and multiply, creating a new hybrid model in order to discover something and not get stuck with the form in which we are producing it.”

Sarai has five research areas: ethnographies of the new media, the city and social justice, film and consciousness, mapping the city and language and new media about the role of Hindi. The Internet provides an occasion for a new form of Hindi language expression, different from the culture of the Hindi literary establishment. Apart from research programs the “CyberMohalla” project is under construction. It will focus on tactical, low cost hard and software solutions for web authorization, scanning, streaming of audio and visual material. Sarai will provide schools and NGOs with solutions that are resulting from this project. From early on, Sarai has been collaborating with the Delhi Linux user group which led to the Garage Free Software project whose aim it is to set up a gift economy, working on alternatives to expensive proprietary software. It will also develop user-friendly interfaces and develop Linux based applications in Hindi.

Over the last half year all those working at Sarai members have been busy creating the space, installing computers on an entirely open source network, designing and uploading the website (www.sarai.net), doing basic construction work in order to prevent the monsoon storm water from entering, and setting up the groundwork for the Sarai archive so as to enable it to hold a variety of platforms, from books to DVDs, and connect it to a database with material accessible to visitors of the public access area. The Sarai database is best accessed via Sarai’s internal network interface.

Monica Narula: “We have been working on three versions of the site. The second one was slick but slow. The new one is faster and more complex. What I will start working on is the idea of multi perspectives. We want to combine elements from traditional work with the contemporary street feel with its bright colors. Here we are experiencing simultaneous time zones. Old representations show up in the most unexpected places. Here we have a non-perspective approach to representation.”

Already before Sarai started, Monica had the idea of the computer taking you on a journey through the city. Monica: “The experience would be interactive but also would give you a path. Icons representing concepts would lead you through a narrative space. That idea was a little ambitious. We started to realize that such a difficult design was all about coding. A sense of discovery remains important. You click on a certain motive and get somewhere else. You think you know the city, but you discover you don’t. By looking at it you start seeing new elements. That’s the motivation behind the Sarai interface.”

For the handful of international guests visiting the opening, the quality of the Internet connection was a surprisingly stable 128K ISDN leased line, supported by back-up battery systems in case of “load shedding” which indeed frequently happens. At one occasion, last year, North Delhi had a 36 hours electricity power cut. The batteries for the Sarai servers is worth more than the servers themselves and can hold for up to 4 1/2 hours. Apart from that each PC has its individual USP system.

Using both old and new media is a key element in the design philosophy of Sarai. Monica Narula: “It’s all going to be interpretive and subjective. Our “Mapping the city” project is not going to give a demographic or ethnographic account. Our question is: how does the city feel to us? Questions of class and gender are involved in this. There are so many untold stories, from people that usually do not matter. I like reading but I much prefer talking, and listening. We will focus on the dialogue aspects, looking into storytelling and oral traditions. Using film, photography and sound we would like to do an anatomy of one specific location, a little zone, making a cross section from the rich trader to the man who is pulling the street car, all within a square kilometer. Take the example of Old Delhi, where at one place someone registered twenty-one different ways of transport.”

The city of Delhi, with its approximate ten million inhabitants, is an endless source of inspiration for the Sarai members, lacking the disgust for poverty, pollution and noise of the elite and innocent Western tourists. The setting is post-apocalyptic. Shuddha, also a member of the Raqs Media Collective and one of the Sarai founders: “In Delhi we are in some ways living in the future. In a situation of urban chaos and retreat of the public and the state initiatives. Tendencies that are currently happening in Europe. The young generation in Europe will face some of the realities that many of us are accustomed with in India, whereas we may leave some of these realities behind. The difference between a contemporary moment in India and Europe is one of scale rather then of an essential nature. There is more of everything here. More people, more complexities, and also more possibilities.”

Geert : Would you therefore say that Delhi is a global city as Saskia Sassen defined it in her book “Global Cities”? Delhi more looks like a national metropolis rather then a node for global finance.

Shuddha: “Earlier Delhi was not considered a global city because it did not have a harbor, unlike Calcutta and Bombay. In global capitalism that doesn’t count any longer. What’s important is the capacity of a city to act as a network with other cities. Delhi is a center of the extended working day, providing the global market with back office accounting and call center services. There is an emerging digital proletarian class which is connected to the world.”
Ravi Sundaram, a Sarai founder and a fellow at CSDS adds: “Saskia Sassen’s book “Global Cities” came out right after the rise of finance capital in the late eighties. I think we have to rework that notion. The new phase of globalization in the nineties does not only depend on financial nodes anymore. They are complex network of flows. Delhi is a new global city and there are many of them. In the new economy people are trading in global commodities, using global technologies, increasingly using the Net, surrounded by an empire of signs. Delhi used to be like Washington DC. That was 15 years ago. Now it is a mixture more reminiscent of LA South Central with its urban chaos, migration, and uncontrolled growth of suburbs, informal networks and capital flowing everywhere. In that sense I would not limit global cities to financial nodes and labor flows. The narrow definition of global cities borders the sociological. We should move to a more cultural, political and engaged form.”

I met Sarai co-director Ravi Sundaram for the first time in June 1996, at the fifth Cyberconf in Madrid. He delivered a paper about the difference between coming of cyberspace in India and previous national industrialization policies such as the building of dams. Ravi’s research topic within Sarai is electronic street cultures, the grey economy of hardware assembly and the role of software piracy and cyber cafés in the spreading of PC usage and the Internet. The aim of Sundaram’s investigations into the local “ethnographies of new media” is to add complexity to the elitist view that computers are a conspiracy of the rich against the poor with only the upper class benefiting from information technology. Sarai rejects such clichés. Ravi: “The elites in the West and India share a culture of guilt. In the view of these elites, “their” technology and creativity cannot be a property of daily life. Rather, the domain of the everyday is left to state and NGO-intervention for upliftment. Sarai does not share that agenda. “We live in a highly unequal, violent society. But there are very dynamic forms of technological practice in that society. We speak to that, and not just in national terms. We speak equally, within transnational terms, which marks a difference to earlier initiatives in cinema, radio or writing. We are not the third new media (like in third cinema).”

How does Sarai look at the development sector? Jeebesh: “Development often implies the notion of victims of culture. I don’t think in those terms. People live, struggle, renew, invent. Also in poverty people have a culture. I feel a little lost in this terrain, knowing that Sarai, to a large extend, is financed through development aid programs. I would never use a term like “digital divide”. We have a print divide in India, an education divide, a railway divide, an airplanes divide. The “new economy” in India is definitely not conceived as a divide. It is a rapid expansion of digital culture. The digital divide is a ’social consciousness’ term, born out of guilt. We should interpret the media in different terms, not just in terms of haves and have not.”

Sarai rejects the “Third World” label altogether. Jeebesh: “Within arts and culture, the human interest story usually comes from the Third World whereas formal experimentation is done in Europe and the United States. That’s the international division of labor between conscience and aesthetics. It would be unfortunate if this would happen with Sarai. Working within the Net, with different forms of knowledge, no longer can have discrete spaces. Working from a so-called developing country means that you are constantly put under the techno-determinist pressure to be functional. At present there is no other domain to be creative outside of the development realm of sanitation, water and poverty. The pressure will always be there. But what worries us more is what discourse critical minds in Europe and the States will construct around Sarai.”
Being the South Asian early bird on the global screen comes with certain responsibilities–and pressures. The thread of being instrumentalized, having to act within Western parameters is a real one. Sarai members are aware of the danger of exoticism. Jeebesh: “I am afraid of over-expectation and over-burning. Ideally Sarai should not become representative of its country or the region it is located within. We should break with the tradition of national cinema and the national filmmaker going to international festivals, saying “I am from India, I am from Germany, etc.” We can lose focus if that’s happening. We are interested in a dialogue amongst equals and do not want to get caught in the curated festivals of the world.” Monica: “Showing work abroad has a good side. It gives you deadlines. But I am not interested in becoming the authentic Third World voice. The aesthetics have to be driven from here. An equal collaboration has to integrate the smell and texture of a city like Delhi. For Sarai there is a danger of supremacy of the text. This has to be fought. You can say a lot with images. Images are either highbrow art or kitsch from the street.”
The balance between developing new media and doing research is a delicate one. The exciting and demanding production of new media works can easily take over from theoretical reflections. Sarai is in the first place a research facility, but the pressure will be strong, from both in and outside, to show concrete results in terms of interfaces, software and new media titles. I asked Jeebesh how he would stop a hierarchy between new media production and research from happening. “It’s a deep, institutional tension. There is an academic codification of research. In India there are only a few independent researchers. The academy here is creating systematic knowledge, but it’s not creating dynamic public forms. In the early 20th century most of the brilliant thinkers were independent researchers, creating a dynamism of thought which we still carry on.”

According to Jeebesh Bagchi, Sarai should create media forms, which the academy cannot neglect. “Feature film has been respected as an equal, artistic art form, whereas the documentary form has been patronized by the academy. We should create such a dynamic tactical media form that it becomes equal to academic knowledge.” Sarai intends not become a production house. Jeebesh: “We are into experimenting. Still, there is certainly slackness amongst documentary filmmakers. We shoot and there is an equation between what has been shot and the film itself. The claim to be the makers of reality bites has created a climate, which is not very self-critical. There is a crisis of representation. I do not want to represent anyone. So what then is an anti-representational documentary? With new media we would like to emphasize that intellectual crisis.
Where in Delhi does Sarai look for collaboration? Jeebesh: “Some of the intellectuals are experts, a technocracy which is being taken serious. After 1989 you can more freely say what you feel because the burden of state socialism and communism is no longer there. We will therefore see more interesting things happening. It will not only be about talking but about doing. From the beginning Sarai did not want to network with people who have already established themselves. We can collaborate with individuals, on a mutual basis. More challenging is how you engage with the popular design sensibility. What kind of dialogue with this strange and eclectic world do we want to create, not based on domination or populism. How does a programmer create software for a non-literate audience?”

So far in India popular culture has been defined by film. There is a tradition in India to interpret society through film. Jeebesh: “Film will remain an important reference. Till the mid eighties film was looked down upon. In the nineties different readings of film and social inequalities were created. These days film has a strange presence through television culture. The music video clip does not exist here. What we have is television relaying film songs. India is a song culture and visual sign board culture. It is deeply embedded in the stories you tell. New media are reconfiguring narration and codes of self-description. There is interesting science fiction now. The problem is that film and television may be imaginative but it is not creating a productive culture. There is a tension with new media, from which potentially something new could grow. We are still surrounded by 20th century broadcasting concepts: inform, educate and entertain. New media should not follow that rubric.”
There are numerous obstacles for Sarai in building public interfaces. Will the general public finds its way to Sarai and how will Sarai reach out? Jeebesh: “Let the practice speak over time. We must become a place where young people feel at home and become confident so that they will start using it. An intellectual place where different opinions can be articulated, not a ghetto where people feel they have to say correct things.” The balance between dissent and power is a delicate one, constantly having to question and re-invent ones self while slowly becoming an institution. Co-director Ravi Sundaram: “One has to be deeply skeptical of all institutions, including our own. Being part of an institution means being part of power, whether we like it or not. Both universities and arts institution are strong nodes of power. In India both of them are in a financial and intellectual crisis. For a long time arts institutions were a monopoly of the state. That’s over now.”

Jeebesh: “Recently an American media artist was visiting Sarai and at a certain point the conversation focused on the question how to map a database onto a surface, if I want to see the content of a database as an image? What is the aesthetics of a database? That’s productive discussion. If people that takes an art form, and see it as an art work, that’s fine, as long as it comes from an internal curiosity. In a non-visual, non-literate culture we have to somehow work out how the database relates to the surface, which is not text based.”
Shuddha: “People may be interested in such arts-related issues on an individual basis. There should be an open space for the creative pursuits that people wish to follow on their own instinct, without taken away the concerns that Sarai has as a collective body. We are not here to provide a platform for Indian new media artists to engage with the international community. Nor is it in our interest to stop it.”

It is Sarai’s explicit wish not to create a new discipline. A brave statement in times in which artists either have to buy themselves into the IT-industry or, as in the case of net.art, are bailing out by writing themselves into art (history) discourses and their institutions. Shuddha Sengupta: “Sarai is not going to become an arts institution. There are many of us who are practitioners, working with images, text and sound. We look at those practices from different points of view. We would like to find hybrid forms, beyond the categories of the artist, activist, theorist or critic. Some of the work will take on the form of the aesthetic. Other work will engage with the realm of the political, of knowledge, and with the realm of understanding. None of these elements will have a primacy because we don’t see it in those terms. Which is not to say that we will not have an engagement with the aesthetic or the realm of pleasure. We certainly will.”

Jeebesh does not want identify himself with any artist specialization. “That’s the problem of net art or net culture. It limits cross conversations. We will be very sensitive about that. We should not establish formal identities and disciplines. This can create structural divisions between us. That’s why I like to call Sarai a post-institutional space where the public is always present, pushing you to be different.”

Ravi Sundaram: “I never understood most of net art. I have always been interested in avant-garde practices but I have not yet identified net art as such. These are complicated aesthetic translations and we at Sarai still have a lot to discover. Two years ago we never imagined what and where we would be today. We have a shared language and a lot of creative disagreements and we would like to share that with outsiders too. If dialogue is a transparent, honest process, not rendered in national, Indian/Western terms, it becomes easier. It is a cruel, historical baggage that we are born into. It is marked on us that you are from the Third World. We abandon that old baggage.”
Shuddha: “Working with sound, text and images over the past years we have found that the taxonomic regime of people being described as writers or film makers has been an inhibition of our work. We wanted to do more interesting work than filmmaking allows. Funding wants to classify your practice and organize it in certain modes of qualifications. Having said that we do not want to enter into another regime of qualification of ourselves as net artists. One of the reasons why we entered the new media is because we felt that it allows for a certain liberation in which qualification regimes can be put aside.” Ravi Sundaram adds: “All of us want to break out of disciplinary forms. I come out of formal academic institutions. Yet, Sarai is a program of an academic research institution, CSDS.” Jeebesh interrupts: “I like the tradition of public intellectuals, such as Ashis Nandy of CSDS who has a disdain for academia. He says: ‘I don’t write, I think.’” Ravi Sundaram interrupts again: “There might be an avant-garde urge to mock institutions. But the money and recognition will come from that very same place. We have to recognize that tension. If we do not recognize the tension we will become rhetorical. We want to be in both places. We are not innocent of power. We live in a highly unequal society. But it is important to render this public, straight.”

Let’s go back to Sarai’s original drive, to develop its own language of new media. What would it be based on? Shuddha: “The communication imperative is an important one for us. Media technologies in India so far have only been one to many. That should not happen to the Net. The relation between communication and power should be investigated, and challenged, even only conceptually to begin with. In order to get there we need to establish a truly international sensitivity. With that I do not mean national or regional identities. New media culture is not yet international. What goes on elsewhere has to be taken into account. When I used to look at the Internet and the new politics of communication that emerged earlier, I thought: our space, our city should be able to create this. I hope it will be possible for someone living in Teheran or Rangoon, parts of Asia and Africa to think that something like Sarai should also be possible here. At one time it was impossible for us to imagine a Sarai. For me, after coming back from the Next Five Minutes Conference (Amsterdam, March 99, www.n5m.org), it seemed possible. Before we were unable to bring together the energies that were necessary. There is a process of discovery of such energies.”

Geert Lovink – this report was first published on the nettime-l mailing list

Add comment March 23rd, 2001

Live from Bangalore

It’s an interesting time to be a Brit visiting India and writing for a US magazine. In many parts of the world, the US “elections” have been creating a gleeful schadenfreude, whilst meantime in the UK the rail system is grinding to a halt due to some rain, and a hysterically risk-averse press. I, on the other hand, am sitting on a train, in a comfortable second-class seat reserved by computer from several thousand miles away, eating great food, and watching oxen plough the soil. The journey of 2,472 km from Delhi to Bangalore started on time, and arrived 20 minutes early. These comparisons may explain the shamefaced huffiness with which Britons and Germans recently greeted the news that their countries needed to shape up in order to import the much-needed skills of Indian computer programmers (perhaps the exporting of our drugged-out hippies was thought to be fair exchange enough).

Any comparisons between UK/USA/Indian uses of new media are therefore likely to be less contrasting than expected. What the three countries share is a basic structure of sharp socio-economic divides, so that leading Indian artists are likely to have access to much the same ideas and facilities as leading Western ones (the former, however, will know much more about the latter than vice versa). The well-established artist Vivan Sundaram, for example, has been making video installation and site specific work for many years, and is now also working with CD-ROMs. Although installation work is rather controversial in India (see Anjolie Ela Menon’s article), Sundaram’s approach, which often combines solid engineering with the hand-crafted and the electronic, seems to echo the startling visual hybridity of Indian city life. His Journey Towards Freedom installation in Calcutta, for example, featured metal railway tracks, handpainted lettering, and video references to classic Indian films, using the huge venue both as “… studio and exhibition space.” The ability of mixed media to present many views and many parts was also exploited in the exhibition Figures, Facts, Feelings by Parthiv Shah, showing at the British Council gallery in Delhi. Shah used digital prints to combine portraits, graphics, and texts from questionnaires given to the photographic subjects about their experiences of diaspora. He felt that this combination presented a more “approachable” or street-poster-like face than conventional portraits in frames.

Leading artists in Delhi seem rather notable for also exhibiting a social conscience. Both Sundaram and Shah are active in donating their time and support to Sahmat, an arts organization dedicated to combating religious and social conflict, whose work has included street theatre and cassettes of songs (rather more accessible to the masses than any newer technology). Shah has participated in photography projects in slum areas, where children were given disposable cameras in order to document their lives. Obviously, the average pavement-dweller in Mumbai will tend to have just as little access to anything technological as your average street-person in Detroit. There is, however, an interesting exception to this rule in Delhi, where Dr. Sugata Mitra, who works for a commercial Internet-qualifications company, has been experimenting with installing “hole in the wall” computers in slum districts, where children with no training or literacy have been teaching themselves how to use the Internet very quickly (the hourglass icon they dubbed a “drum” of the waisted kind which summons people to an entertainment).

This crossover between commercial, social, and educational ventures seems to typify the highly fluid and active nature of the scene, seasoned by an enthusiasm for high and low culture, and internationally well-informed by the press, media and by personal diasporas. Shankar Barua’s Indian Directory of Electronic Art CD-ROM magazine is produced on a shoestring in Delhi and distributed widely to those active in media art. The organization Sarai also typifies this dynamism, and is currently very busy building one of the first media workshops for artists in Delhi. With government and other funding, Sarai combines academic research about Indian new media with production expertise from the Raqs Media Collective, which has an established history of documentary film, photo and video. As well as working with programmers to develop Hindi language freeware for the Internet, they have already produced a CD-ROM which “appropriates” images from old printed handouts concerning health and the body, and images from their modern equivalent – the Internet. This high Indian comfort level with the concept of hybridity is perhaps one of the reasons why new media seem very at home in India. According to Shuddhabrata Sengupta of Raqs, “… all our gods are cyborgs.” He also points out that there was cinema in India a matter of months after the Lumière brothers’ first ever showing. Ravi Sundaram, another Sarai participant, stresses that the ubiquitous, tiny, manned telephone booths have been making access to telecommunications possible to anyone (literate or otherwise) for many years, and now also sometimes offer fax, email and Internet (always with a helpful human interface). Monica Narula of Raqs is busy working with organizations in the Netherlands, and is planning workshops with international activists/artists ranging from radio streamers to hackers.
Most new forms of entertainment and communication technology have been quickly appropriated, adapted, and re-invented on the subcontinent. The particularly Indian stamp often seems to be one of adding a human interface: Indian movies often have complex plots centered on relationships between people. There are people to help you use telephones and calculate the cost to the second. There’s a booming trade in Internet personal ads. From my limited experience, Indian art audiences love to talk, and are highly skilled and critical in their debates. There seems little danger that Indians will fall prey to sitting alone in their rooms with a computer, despite raging traffic and trying environments outside. It’s difficult to think of any aspect of life that is not publicly visible in India. Death, chess, bodily functions, devotions, manual labor, debate and television all take place on the street, but this seems to encourage rather than dampen a wide cultural curiosity that is often absent from Anglo cultures. Dr. Pradeep Yammiyavar of the Center for Product Design and CEDT of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, was more than willing to encourage his students to attend a debate on new media art, although in the midst of exams. He was rather rueful, however, about the unwillingness of software companies in Bangalore to develop an interest in and support for contemporary new media art, a situation which sounds more than a little like Seattle. Technological universities such as IIS, and IIT in Mumbai (Bombay) are doing very well indeed, thank you, and are not afraid to include visual and “community art” skills within their remit, as in the excellent Internet projects instigated by Ravi Poovaiah of IIT amongst others. Art colleges have had much less access so far to the necessary equipment, although the number of multimedia courses is growing, and the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda appears to have a recent special interest in new media art and theory, including museology at a postgraduate level.

Crossovers between art, education and science seem to be common, and having a “portfolio” of jobs will be familiar to many artists in the West. Of a group of five friends who went to art college in Bangalore some time ago, Ravishankar Rao is a multimedia computer programmer, N. S. Harsha is an artist who draws on walls (recently in an Iniva show in London), Mamata is a graphic designer for print, R. Kalkur is a painter who did postgraduate at the RCA in London, and M. C. Ramesh is a sculptor and teaches art at a high school. Several of them also make web sites for organizations. At a basic level of “where, what and who,” art galleries and organizations are well represented on the Internet, and there are portfolio sites such as Saffron and Vis-a-Vis, that promote and sell artists’ work in various media, although as in the West, the commercial sector tends to have different values than those held by college-educated artists. If you’re talking about networking, then it looks like new media might always remain just one of the many strands in the Indian web. As an audience member at my talk at the Sakshi Gallery in Bangalore pointed out, “multimedia” actually only addresses two human senses, which means that it is a rather pale and feeble tool for dealing with Indian reality. Being in India has made me question the whole issue of visual appearance versus function. India is an eye-bogglingly visual culture, and the technology often looks as if it shouldn’t work. However, appearances can be deceptive: the bamboo stepladders bend and wobble, but don’t break; small women carrying bricks on their heads build software office towerblocks; the PCs are grimy with cigarette smoke and pollution, but work; the waiting list for telephone lines is long, but there are ways around, legal or otherwise; the traffic looks utterly impossible, but keeps moving. Perhaps the skills developed in finding creative solutions to large problems are another reason why India has bonded so well with new media. The difference between appearance and workability might be usefully borne in mind by those countries whose slick surface might lead you to believe that they never had problems getting their trains to run or their presidents elected.

Beryl Graham is a curator and educator with a special interest in new media. She is currently Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sunderland, and is co-editor of CRUMB new media curating resource. She started this article on a train between the first two cities on a research trip to Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai, in December 2000. It was emailed from the Cyberia web cafe, Bangalore. Her further material from India will also be put on the web.

Add comment March 1st, 2001

Inauguration of Sarai: the new media initiative, Delhi – India

Sarai is a programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, one of India’s best known research institutes.

Sarai will open its doors to the public on 23 February 2001 with a festive three-day programme of presentations, informal workshops, screenings, lectures and panel discussions on old & new media and urban culture. The event will feature encounters and dialogue between media practitioners, scholars and activists, from India and abroad, around the theme of “The Public Domain”.
The focus of the Sarai’s activities will be on innovative research and cultural practice across old and new media forms . At its well-equipped location in Delhi, Sarai offers an environment for innovative encountersbetween media practitioners, software programmers, theorists, social activists and the public.Sarai’s primary aim is to engage with the creativity of the broad and diverse spectrum of media practitioners from non-elite backgrounds and address contmeporary popular urban culture. Sarai also aims to establish a new media network in South Asia with strong global links. Projects will be initiated on media history, urban culture and politics, new media theory, Internet and software culture, documentary film, digital art and critical cultural practice.

Sarai emerged from a unique form of collaboration between media theorists & practitioners.The initiators of the Sarai Programme are : Ravi Sundaram & Ravi Vasudevan, fellows of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, and Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta of the Raqs Media Collective.

Exchange Programme

The Society for Old and New Media (de Waag) have been partners of the Sarai initiative from its inception. The Waag and Sarai have jointly formulated a three year exchange programme, running from 2000- 2002. The mission of this partnership is to explore and demonstrate new possibilities of collaboration in a cross-cultural context. Professionals associated with the Waag Society and Sarai participated in workshops designed to help set up the technical infrastructure at Sarai in the run up to the opening. In the coming two years a series of Sarai-Waag workshops and other joint excercises will be held (both in India and in the Netherlands).These encounters will focus on the sharing of knowledge and develop collaborative projects in new technologies, the media, and internet culture.

Online journal Topical articles and reports concerning the Sarai-Waag collaborative initiative will be made available online in the Sarai-Waag Journal. Users of the Journal will be able to input their comments and discuss them with the writers and each other in this online magazine.The Journal will be available from 23 February onwards on the websites of the Waag and Sarai.
The two partners aim to strengthen the relationship between the new media cultures of South Asia and Europe. With the opening of Sarai and the start of the exchange programme, an important step forward is being taken in the forging of a new network for knowledge sharing, cross cultural communication and empowerment.

Sarai iis supported by the dutch ministry of foreign affairs, the daniel langlois foundation (canada), the hivos culture foundation
and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (India)

Add comment February 23rd, 2001