Posts filed under 'sarai readers'
We are happy to announce the print and web publication of Sarai Reader 06 : ‘Turbulence’. This year, the Sarai Reader 06 is one of the participating publications of the Documenta 12 Magazines Project.
TURBULENCE (from the introduction):
If there was ever to be a ‘weather report’ for our times, an audit of the climate in which we have grown accustomed to live, it would use the word ‘turbulence’ often. Turbulence is a practice for and of a time that has no name. This book, embodying that practice, is an eclectic index of an uncertain age.The Sarai Reader 6 uses ‘Turbulence’ as a conceptual vantage point to interrogate all that is in the throes of terminal crisis, and to invoke all that is as yet unborn. It seeks to examine ‘turbulence’ as a global phenomenon, unbounded by the arbitrary lines that denote national and state boundaries in a ‘political’ map of the world. Sarai Reader 6 surveys areas of low and high pressure in politics, economy and culture that transcend borders, investigates the flow of information and processes between downstream and upstream sites in societies and cultures globally, witnesses surges and waves in ideas and practices in contemporary art, culture and discourse as they crash against the shorelines of many dispersed locations.
How do we anticipate, recover from and remember moments of sudden transformation? How do we look at the debris of the past and brace ourselves for the whirlwind coming our way from the future? How do we deal with the simultaneous pressures of knowing too much or the anxiety of knowing too little about the world? How do we cope intellectually with the sudden dissolution of established ways of knowing and doing things? What does it mean to know and experience the pull of undercurrents – in society, politics, the economy? How do cities deal with the accumulation of complex infrastructural uncertainty? What happens when urban chaos strikes back at urban planning?How can we map the subterranean tectonic shifts and displacements that occur in culture and intellectual life? What are the histories of anxiety, exhilaration, dread, panic, ecstasy, disorientation and boredom like. How can we begin to narrate these histories? What does it take from us to tell stories, read poetry, make images and record experiences in the wake of turbulence?
We would welcome responses, reviews and critiques of the publication, and discussions based on its contents. If you would like to write a review of the book, and wish to obtain a review copy, do write to publications@sarai.net, mentioning details of the publication where the review will appear, and when it is likely to be published. The contents of the book may also be translated into other languages, and published elsewhere. We, and the authors, would like to be informed.
Editors for Reader 06: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, Ravi Sundaram, Awadhendra Sharan + Geert Lovink
Published by the Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of DevelopingSocieties, Delhi, 2006 [cc]Produced and Designed at the Sarai Media Lab, Delhi ISBN 81-901429-7-6608 pages, 14.5cm X 21cmPaperback: Rs. 350, US $ 20, € 20
The reader editorial collective
September 20th, 2006
This is the fifth book in the Sarai Reader Series. The book is a collection of articles, photo-essays, and image collages that take a critical and reflexive look at the law, and practices, codes, norms and customs within which the bare act of the law is located. Unlike conventional books of legal theory/history which speak only to the law as encoded/enshrined within court judgments etc, the Reader seeks a dialogue between the law, and the practices of a social world within which the law is nested.
‘Bare Acts‘ looks at ‘Acts’- at instruments of legislation, at things within and outside the law, and at ‘acts’ – as different ways of doing things in society and culture. The Reader foregrounds explorations of borders, surveillance, claims to authority and entitlement, the legal regulation of sexuality and trespasses of various kinds.
March 30th, 2005
Edited by – Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, Awadhendra Sharan, Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram [Sarai-CSDS, Delhi] and Geert Lovink [Amsterdam] ‘Crisis/Media’, the fourth publication in the Sarai Reader series, examines issues of global crises – (war, civil conflict, terrorism and state terror, the deep instabilities of everyday life, technologies of surveillance and political life, threats to the freedom of expression) – and critically analyses the representation of these crises in the media.
Are the crises in the media also instances of crises of the media? Have current forms of media practice lost the ability to articulate questions of conflict and contention, other than in terms of crises ? Can media practitioners evolve forms of practice that are not beholden to the idea of Crisis?
The Sarai brings together several distinguished critical voices, as well as new, emerging writers from all over the world (and especially from South Asia) to attend to ideas, situations, contexts and dillemmas related to crises and the media. Authors include : Arundhati Roy, Ranjit Hoskote, Taslima Nasrin, Geert Lovink, Soenke Zehle, Nandita Haksar, Toby Miller, Martin Shaw, Ravi Vasudevan, Shahid Amin, Ivo Skoric, Nancy Adajania, Raqs Media Collective, Nitin Govil, Ranjani Mazumdar, Shohini Ghosh and others.
Published by the Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, 2004
496 pages | Paperback €15 | ISBN 81-901429-3-3
For the complete table of contents, and the text of the introduction, see below. The complete text of Crisis/Media, like the entire contents of previous readers, is available for free browsing and download as pdf files at: www.sarai.net/journal/reader4.html For Purchase, Distribution and Other Enquiries, mail to publications at sarai.net
March 30th, 2004
Sarai/CSDS and the Waag Society for Old and New Media announce the publication of Sarai Reader 03 : Shaping Technologies. “Shaping Technologies ” sets out to ratchet our engagement with the contemporary moment a notch higher, in directions that are sober, exhilarating and discomfiting, all at once. The book brings to the fore a series of situations and predicaments that mark the encounter between people and machines, between nature and culture, and between knowledge and power.
The issues covered span a wide range – from the cognitive and ethical dilemmas that beset the engineer, to the legal and cultural implications of copying in a digital realm, from software as art to the history of science fiction, from wireless manifestoes to the domestication of photography, from kitchen utensils to airplanes, from mobile phones to kerosene lamps, from body nets to biotech, from reproductive technologies to technologies of reproduction, from computers to radios and from coal mines to call centres.
A cutting edge collection of original writing and images by theorists, critics, photographers, philosophers, engineers, activists, artists, designers media practitioners and programmers from many parts of the world.
Published by: Sarai, CSDS, Delhi + The Waag Society for Old & New Media, Amsterdam 2003
For orders: email publications@sarai.net or write to Sarai, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India
March 17th, 2003
This year’s Sarai Reader brings together a range of critical thinking on urban life and the contemporary, marked by spreading media cultures, new social conflict and globalisation. Scholars, media practitioners, critics and activists use a flow of images, memories and hidden realities to create a fascinating array of original interventions in thinking about cities today. In the context of India, where a large part of this reader has been edited, this is significant, given the frugality of writing on city life in this part of the world.
With essays, images, analyses, and manifestoes The Cities of Everyday Life reflects on the contemporary urban condition, detours into the back alleys of the global city, takes on media representations of terror and war, examines the politics of information, anticipates the futures of digital urbanism, registers the details of media flows, explores representations of the city, and looks at globalisation from below.
Editors : Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Geert Lovink, Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Published by Sarai, CSDS & Waag Society for Old & New Media 2002
For orders, email: reader@sarai.net or write to Sarai, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India, ISBN 81-901429-0-9
February 11th, 2002
A Sarai is an enclosed space in a city, or, beside a highway, where travellers and caravans can find shelter, sustenance and companionship; a tavern, a public house, a meeting place; a destination and a point of departure; a place to rest in the middle of a journey.
Sarai: the New Media Initiative, Delhi, works with these readings of the word Sarai to create a space where old and new forms of media, their practitioners, and those who reflect on, or critically examine these practices, can find a convivial atmosphere, and enter into shared pursuits that will create a renewal of public cultures within and across city spaces.
The Sarai Reader (which is the first of what we hope will be more such collections) can be seen both as a navigation log of actual voyages and a map for possible journeys into a real and imagined territory that we have provisionally called the “Public Domain”. This republic without territory is a sovereign entity that comes into being whenever people gather and begin to communicate, using whatever means that they have at hand, beyond the range of the telescope of the merchant, and outside the viewing platform of the microscope of the censor.
Our Public Domain has no borders and issues no visas; it has no legislators or chambers of commerce and elects no presidents. Our Public Domain has dispensed with a standing army but it does maintain a guerrilla air force that protects and safeguards the freedom of the both analogue and digital airwaves as public property!
The offices, ministries and embassies of the Public Domain are located throughout the world in cafes and public libraries, in the lobbies of cinemas, in theatres, in obstinately independent radio stations, in websites, between the pages of free zines. The source code of its constitution, written in free software, is open to all to amend.
This collection of texts can be read as one amongst many attempts to design Public Domains. Today’s electronic street cultures, active in ‘invisible’ yet terribly real cities, are crying to be shaped. Their chaotic and often contradictory forms do not have to be scaled down or tamed. Instead, they can be taken further, into eccentric orbits of freedom and solidarity, even if the possibility of spiralling into dystopias of violence never seems far away. The architecture of existing hybrid environments demands to be questioned and overruled by a wave of creative and borderless imagination.
The Reader is an invitation, and a haphazard tourist guide to the real, existing, contemporary Public Domain. It contains travellers’ tales, information about routes that are free of watchful eyes and other dangers, fragments of itineraries, and notes on modes of transport, as well as a gazetteer of rest stops and sarais on the way. Within it you will find, articles, photographs, essays, manifestos, fragments from e-mail discussions, downloads from websites and pieces both found and especially commissioned for this publication. Many of the authors are known to us only as entities in cyberspace, and we have happily pillaged websites as well as earlier collections that have inspired us. (Readme! ASCII Culture & The Revenge of Knowledge – The Nettime Reader, Published by Autonomedia, 1999 is an inspiration that we would like to especially acknowledge). Occasionally, we have hectored and harassed friends and comrades into writing or revising pieces we felt we could not do without. Our heart felt thanks to all those (friends as well as strangers) whose thoughts, ideas, images and rants have made their way into this collection.
The Sarai Reader 2001 – The Public Domain
Editorial Co-ordination: Raqs Media Collective (for Sarai) + Geert Lovink (for Waag Societys)
January 15th, 2001