Ectropy Index, a hyperlinked, multimedia CD produced by the Sarai Media Lab and first exhibited and distributed at the World – Information City event in Bangalore in november 2005 is now available online.
The word “ectropy” means a general increase in organization. It appears to have been developed by Willard V. Quine, a philosopher and mathematician in the course of a series of discussions about information in 1969. It is now understood as an antonym of “entropy”, If entropy is the net increase in the tendency towards chaos within a system, then ectropy being its opposite, suggests a congealing and thickening of information from a mass of things known, half known and unknown.
While imagining ectropy it helps to think of a circle, that denotes a neutral state. Any inward collapse of the circle in a cardioid fashion denotes the loss of the order. or entropy, and the outward radiation of the circle, leading to an increase in it’s circumferential arc , is ectropy. An ectropic index then would be the measure of the increase of information, or of order, in a given system.
‘Ectropic Index‘ takes these meanings to create its own tension between entropic and ectropic impulses, between forces that tend to increase and decrease the levels of order and systematization (as opposed to randomness) within a system.
Interestingly, ectropy is also a disease of the eyelid, which especially afflicts hyper-thoroughbred (or inbred) hunting dogs and people who have artificial eyes. In this disease, the eyelids do not close satisfactorily, leading especially to a slackening of the muscles of the lower eyelid, so that the orbit of the eye comes loose, and portrudes, ectropically, from its socket. Eyes that do not blink, or sleep, or never shut to occasionally ‘not see’ something, tend towards ectropy. The eye that wants to be all seeing, that wants everything in order, all the time, better beware of ectropy.
It is said that we live today in a social realm increasingly marked by activities that have to do with information. Identity cards and identity theft, fingerprints and forgeries, surveillance cameras and shadows , data bodies and data crashes, biometrics and body sculpting seem to define significant features of the topography of contemporaneity. Here, in this zone falls the glare of the searchlight, surrounded by the thickening fog of the unknowable. A host of everyday practices, ways of make do and make believe provoke the anxieties of agencies deeply invested in knowing all that can be known. And all that can be known takes recourse and refuge in the unknowable. This is the ground that this work walks through. Here you can find logs of ongoing research at Sarai on information and society, and a random harvest of images and fragments of information, from the world wide web, from the street nearby, from far away shores, and from right under our noses.
Welcome, enter, and take your own measure of the ectropy index.
Ectropy Index is the third part of an ‘Infoface’ which also includes, ‘The Global Village Health Manual’ (2000) and ‘The Network of No_Des‘ (2004).
Credits:
Produced at the Sarai Media Lab, Sarai-CSDS by Mrityunjay Chatterjee, Raqs Media Collective and Iram Ghufran with research notes by Taha Mahmood. (November, 2005)
As part of the project ‘Towards a culture of open networks‘ Ectropy Index has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Unions EU-India Economic Cross Cultural Programme. The contents of this work are the sole responsibility of Sarai Media Lab and its Partners and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union.
February 21st, 2006
Queering Bollywood is a playful, experimental and interpretative CD database that explores queer representations in Indian cinema. It also contains the short film that is a re-edit of a popular mainstream film as a tale of queer desire. Queering Bollywood is a playful, experimental and interpretative CD database that puts together a range of materials including articles, web sites, film clips etc on queer readings of Bollywood films.
Queering Bollywood has been compiled by Namita Malhotra, Lawrence Liang and many others at Alternative Law Forum and in Bangalore.
July 16th, 2005
Media practices in South Asian streets have a history of using the edit, copy and record/paste function to celebrate a culture of shared usage, gifting, reproduction and low cost distribution mechanisms for high value information goods. Backstreet CD burners and basement hard drives combine to produce a thriving network of unofficial info trade. This is one of the reasons why a lot of people from South Asia (those teeming brown billions that are taking over the planet and swiping all the software) are so dangerously clever. They pay less to go to school, they run away from school, and end up learning more than those who pay more to go to school. We call this the ecological and economical utilisation of knowledge resources. Some people call this piracy.
“Lightning Raids in New Delhi Basements” reveals a web that spans the world and fits into a CD. Films, music and information proliferate faster than the vectors of an epidemic.
The exhilarations and anxieties that mark this phenomenon are poles that orient us to the compass of affect that frames the map of information in our time. You are either in the hemisphere of joy or in the latitudes of anxiety, when you come face to face with the glut of information. The user/producer’s sudden joy of coming upon a stash of images or texts, ripe for interpretation, ready for sharing, is offset by the anxiety in the guardians of a knowledge system that their data hoards are being ‘liberated’ by hacks that erode the high walls of the citadel of decryption.
The Network of No_des uses driftwood from web searches, messages in data bottles, re-mixed fragments of Hindi and Bengali film scenes and research notes from Sarai’s ongoing exploration of new media street culture in Delhi to present an array of associational possibilities. We are weaving threads that connect basements in Delhi to depots for migrants in Ellis Island, theology to pornography, lost and found notices to the drying up of a sea, Goethe to (desi) Spiderman, food to forgery and death sentences to internet matrimonials. The paths that you take as you travel between the nodes in the Network of No_des bring you surprises, confirmations and detours and makes you come face to face with the fact of yourself as a forager in the undergrowth of the information economy. Next time you hear someone being accused of forgery, remember that they were probably foragers who had somehow lost an ‘a’ during a rough day out in the data forest.
This work considers remixing, which is just another word for foraging in an electronic mode. Remixing, repurposing and re-editing are facts of life, as simple, as pleasurable and as necessary for the reproduction of knowledge and culture as foraging, feeding and fornication are for the reproduction and survival of our humanity.
To forage is human. Everyone forages – we store a fragment of a story, hum a cadence in a song, scratch a text into a notebook and put all that that through the blender in our mind. One thing leads to another, a story fills a space in a song, a piece of code gathers patches. And in time a re-purposed remixed media work is released into the peer-to-peer network called conversation.
This conversation, the one that you enter into when you plug in and press ‘play’ on this ‘info-face’, emerges from a fluid info-sphere made up of the most mundane of media materials – newspaper cuttings, video grabs from late night cable tv, downloads, scraps of paper, floating bits of history, besides original research material. Each bit of material adds incrementally to the ‘facticity’ of the work, not because everything you read here is true in some indexical sense, but because the elements emerge from and fall back into the acts of electronic and data foraging that we do each day. Reality haunts this work like the ghost of a dead pirate sitting on a piece of lost treasure. The info-face of this work is nested within the matrices of the everyday life of the media in our city.
What is an info-face? It is the form that weaves its way into the making of a work such as this one. An info-face is what we are calling an interface made entirely out of pieces of previously extant information, treated to constitute (together) a completely new informational entity, which while it uses various informational bits contained within it as sources, links and annotations also makes sense as a re purposed whole. The fragment of information then does two things: it points to what it contains within itself, and it also acts as a lever into the design of the way the different pieces of information dovetail into each other. In the case of this work, the info-face is both the rough index of the entire contents of the work, as well as the surface that you first encounter, and the architecture that holds all the fragments together within one frame.
We would like to thank the authors of the films, texts, reports, websites and other messages that we have re-purposed in this work for their conscious and unconscious acts of generosity towards our enterprise. As a colony of conscientious parasites (like the ones that inhabit your gut and keep you healthy by helping you digest your food) we welcome all further re-purposing of what we have produced so as to keep the epidemic alive. Come, be infected, and spread our contagion.
Share what you know and enjoy! Please copy, build and distribute freely!
enter the network of no-des
No_des is an HTML based audio and visual work. You enter the network of No_des through its interface. A lot of words from the text are linked to HTML pages and these are linked to other texts/ photographs/videos. The hand icon on a text/ photograph is an indication to explore further by clicking on it. Please cose all pop-up windows when you finish.
Credits:
A project by the Sarai Media Lab:
Jeebesh Bagchi, Mrityunjay Chatterjee, Iram Ghufran,Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Additional Research:
Bhagwati Prasad, Lokesh, Rakesh
Acknowledgements:
Ashish Mahajan, Moslem Quraishy, Shveta Sarda, Anniruddha Karim Shankar, Rana Dasgupta, Vishwas Devaiah, Vivek Narayanan
Designed and Produced in August 2004 at the Sarai Media Lab, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi, India. As part of the project ‘Towards a culture of open networks‘ the network of no_des has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Unions EU-India Economic Cross Cultural Programme. The contents of this work are the sole responsibility of Sarai Media Lab and its Partners and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union.
September 1st, 2004