From jeebesh at sarai.net Mon Jan 5 21:57:41 2009 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh) Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 21:57:41 +0530 Subject: [cm_public] Cybermohalla 2009 / Proposal Next Phase Message-ID: Dear Friends, Warm greetings for 2009. We are now looking for an expansion of the Cybermohalla experiment and share with you an extended new proposal. Please do circulate this and also suggest to us grant making bodies and individuals who will be able to support the initiative. A detailed proposal is at http://www.sarai.net/practices/cybermohalla/proposal Warmly Jeebesh Bagchi ---------------------------- Cybermohalla is a network of young researcher-practitioners in different urban neighbourhoods in Delhi, who work out of self- administered media labs and studios in their own neighbourhoods. In the last 7 years, close to 450 young people have constituted the Cybermohalla network. Innovating a diverse range of minor practices between them, through which they create, gather, share and transform materials, they have immanently built conceptual resources and vocabularies by which to think the contemporary urban. An infrastructure made possible by digital technologies forms the backbone of Cybermohalla – as a site of experimentation, linkage to others in the network, and a space which keeps the archive of the environment alive. Cybermohalla practitioners have produced a body of works – books, broadsheets, installations, radio programmes, blogs about the city, etc – which have found circulation in different locations through diverse circuits, both local and international. During this period they have dialogued with coders, architects, writers, scholars, new media practitioners, designers, legal researchers, urban researchers, translators and sound artists from various contexts from across the world. Over the last five to seven years of their practice, the senior CM practitioners have held long conversations with people with different textual, technical and artisinal practices in their neighbourhoods – poets, diarists, painters, photo studio operators, videographers, collectors, performers, storytellers, cinephiles, masons, dancers, librarians, singers, musicians, writers, readers, and more. For some among these, their practice is tied to their vocation, while others have cultivated their interests in very personal capacities, with a small fraction among them having managed to create micro-contexts of occasional meetings with a self-selected group of like-minded people. All of them seek contexts where they may gather newer publics around them and find and produce new encounters. This desire remains entirely beyond representation in the larger social and cultural fabric of the city. For Cybermohalla practitioners, their realisation of this dispersed yet intense reality, that the biographies of hundreds of people in their neighbourhoods are intertwined with a crafting of and commitment to, or a postponment or impossibility of their intellectual pursuit, has a very powerful presence. It throws up difficult questions about the knots formed by the intersections between individual biographies, possibilities inherent in urban neighbourhoods, the broader question of bringing into expression and visibility these realities, and potential interventions into knowledge and cultural infrastructure and networks of our present times. With this as the background, in the next phase we will expand and deepen the Cybermohalla network and practices, by realising an infrastructure for cultural expression, intellectual life and creative encounters in the neighbourhoods. This will include, in the next one year, a neighbourhood hub (1), studios (2) and temporary structures (3-5) alongside locality labs (we hope to set up 5 new labs in the next 4 years). A number of long-term neighbourhood studies, including one on media environments in the neighbourhoods, will also be conducted by the practitioners to produce a critical discourse within which to nest their own practice. This will mean that in the next three years, about 1500 young people will be directly involved in Cybermohalla, building a range of voices and articulations. We will also expand into a knowledge sharing dialogue and exchange with like-minded initiatives all over the world. A detailed proposal is at http://www.sarai.net/practices/cybermohalla/proposal Cybermohalla is a collaborative project of Sarai-CSDS, Delhi and Ankur: Society for Alternatives in Education, Delhi. For further queries, contact jeebesh at sarai.net January 2009