From newsletter-admin at sarai.net Wed Jun 13 19:49:51 2001 From: newsletter-admin at sarai.net (newsletter-admin at sarai.net) Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 14:19:51 GMT Subject: Sarai Newsletter 03 Message-ID: <20010613.14195100@saumya.sarai.kit> Dear Friends Let me first extend a warm welcome to all the new members who have subscribed to the Sarai newsletter. I also thank all those who forwarded the newsletter to these friends and to those who wrote back appreciating the list. The Sarai newsletter list has now close to 800 members. For this reason, and also because primarily it has been envisaged as an informative list about Sarai, we do not post responses on the list. Please address any responses to the newsletter to saumya at sarai.net or dak at sarai.net. If you wish to involve a wider audience, please subscribe to the Reader-list, which is a discussion list that grew out of the responses to the Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain. (http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader1.htm). The Reader list has grown into a lively community of programmers, web designers, artists, academics and media practitioners, and anybody is free to post on any issue related to communication and media technologies and urban space. To subscribe, please go to the url http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list, or mail monica at sarai.net. Workshop Report Sarai was a lively space the whole of the month of May. The Cybermohalla workshop - a collaboration between Sarai and Ankur, Society for Alternatives in Education - was attended by ten children between 14 \15 years, and what a time we all had. The adeptness with which the children took to the computer, the camera, the audio recorder was truly amazing. The work generated by the workshop will soon be uploaded on to the Sarai website. The project is now on at the Ankur Centre at the Basti Vikas Kendra, J.P. Colony, Turkman Gate, New Delhi. Hindi Sarai For those of you who are comfortable in Hindi, please go to the url http://www.sarai.net/hindiweb/index.htm for the Hindi Sarai site. You can also go to the Hindi Sarai by clicking on 'Sarai' written in Devnagari script on the Sarai homepage. Hindi Sarai is an offshoot of the Language and the New Media project at Sarai, and is still under the process of development. An independent Sarai Hindi site is on the cards. In its current structure, apart from two introductory articles (one inhouse, the other by an observer, published in a newspaper), the Hindi Sarai Home page carries a small statement of intent, facility for font(Shusha) download, and links to its three constituent segments: Sancharkosh, Websadhan and Muktsoftware. The first is a lexical resource, of new media and humanities terms, to be developed by contributions from the contributions from the public domain. We have made a start with a list of 200 words, and in future, we plan to make it interactive by allowing for space for language users to write in the words, meanings and quarrel over these. A discussion list will also be initiated. The Sancharkosh carries an article by Aditya Nigam on problems faced by Hindi. The Websadhan page provides linkages to some important Hindi sites and portals - literary and journalistic - some newspapers and lexical resources. The Mukta software page will carry documents/articles and manuals on free software that Sarai will develop. The page on the popular culture is much more substantial: a couple of articles by Sanjeev Kumar, Tarun Bharatiya's poems on Shillong, some couplets of Firaq Gorakhpuri with translations by Prof. Noorul Hasan, and a note on the Hindi public sphere by Ravikant. Sanjeev Kumar's memoir on the Vaishali Cinema Hall in Patna is hilarious. And the poems by Bharatiya convey a different sense of 'touristy' Shillong. We could be glad to receive your comments, criticisms, suggestions and contributions for any of the themes/pages. Please mail your responses to ravikant at sarai.net Event at Sarai A Discussion Meeting on Information Technologies, Regulation and Civil Liberties June 15 (Friday) , 2001, 4:00 pm Sarai will host an introductory discussion meeting to examine the implications legislation on new communication technologies As you may be aware, in India legislation such as the Information Technology (IT) Act 2000 and other extraordinary legal measures that have been implemented recently to restrict access and freedom on the internet. The draft Communications and Convergence Bill (2001) which has received the assent of the Group of Ministers (GoM) promises to further attack freedom of expression. Concurrent with this are plans to create massive citizen databases and identification mechanisms to erode privacy and increase surveillance. We hope that this meeting can initiate a regular process of interaction and dialogue between people working in civil liberties and democratic rights related issues, information technology and new media practice and research. Films at Sarai Sarai starts a weekly film series from the 22nd of June, 2001. The films will be screened every Friday at 4:30 pm. We start with a series of Japanese films and the first two titles are: Akira 1987, (animation, directed by Kutushiro Otomo)and I Live in Fear, 1955, (directed by Akira Kurosawa) Akira Friday, 22nd June 2001, 4:30 pm, Seminar Room, CSDS, Delhi - 54 Akira is a brilliantly drawn tale of impending apocalypse set in 2030 Tokyo. A brilliant flash envelops the city eleven years after World War III. Teenage gangs, psychic children with devastating powers, government agents and underground resistance groups course through the city's dilapidated visceral landscape. Compared by critics to classic masterpieces such as Bladerunner, Clockwork Orange and Mad Max, this anime or animated film derives from comic artist Otomo's six volume cartoon strip epic or manga, a widely translated work which won many awards, spawned video games and merchandise ranging from t-shirts to lunch boxes and toys. Otomo's current work is the six part The Legend of Mother Sarah (with Nagayasu Takumi ) and Hunchback (with Alexandro Jodorowsky) for comics and Roujin Z and Memories as film director. I Live in Fear Friday, 29th June, 2001, 4:30 pm, Seminar Room, CSDS, Delhi - 54 Toshiro Mifune, almost unrecognizable under layers of make-up, stars as a graying patriarch whose fear of nuclear annihilation leads him to make plans to move his large family from Tokyo to a farm in Brazil. Thinking his fears irrational, and expressing grave concern over the dispensation of his estate, they take him to court and, like a good judge, Kurosawa lets both sides exhaust themselves without drawing a premature judgement. Fear offers a hugely compelling glimpse at the post-war Japanese mindset, and at the Cold War mindset in general. Thanks Saumya ------------------- If you received this in error or would like to be removed from our list, please return us indicating: remove or un-subscribe in 'subject' field. From newsletter-admin at sarai.net Thu Jun 21 17:37:36 2001 From: newsletter-admin at sarai.net (newsletter-admin at sarai.net) Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 17:07:36 +0500 Subject: Sarai Newsletter Film@Sarai: Asian Film Cultures Message-ID: <3.0.6.32.20010621170736.007a3d90@mail.sarai.net> Film at Sarai : Asian Film Cultures A Series on Japanese Cinema Sarai inaugurates a series of weekly screenings devoted to the film cultures of Asia. The series will seek to develop reflections on film industries, auteurs, genres, film styles, national concerns. While we would like to keep discussions informal (our café re-opens with the university), we hope to address some of the thematic focuses that particularly animate the Sarai programme: urban social experience, the mediatized experience of time, space and speed, the culture of technology, the materiality of media practice, the relationship between media representations and social and political history. We begin with a series of Japanese films that move between the work of the classic auteurs Kurosawa and Ozu and contemporary film-makers such as Itami. We are particularly pleased to present two animes or animated films that are central to the visionary and often apocalyptic dimensions of contemporary Japanese perceptions about technology and the city. Amongst the other screenings planned for the Asian film cultures series are The Herd (Yilmez Guney, Turkey), City of Sadness (Hou Tsiao Sen, Taiwan) and Farewell, My Concubine (Chen Kaige). -------------- Akira, 1987, (animation), 124 min. Director: Kutushiro Otomo Friday, June 22nd 2001, 4:30 pm Akira is a brilliantly drawn tale of impending apocalypse set in 2050 Tokyo. A brilliant flash envelops the city 31 years after world war III. Teenage gangs, psychic children with devastating powers, government agents and underground resistance groups course through a ravaged and visceral cityscape. Compared by critics to classic masterpieces such as Bladerunner, Clockwork Orange and Mad Max, this anime or animated film derives from comic artist Otomo's six volume cartoon strip epic or manga, a widely translated work which won many awards, spawned video games and merchandise ranging from t-shirts to lunch boxes and toys. Otomo's current work is the six part The Legend of Mother Sarah ( with Nagayasu Takumi ) and Hunchback ( with Alexandro Jodorowsky ) for comics and Roujin Z and Memories as film director. I Live in Fear, 1955, 113 min. Director: Akira Kurosawa Friday, June 29th 2001, 4:30 pm Toshiro Mifune, almost unrecognizable under layers of make-up, stars as a graying patriarch whose fear of nuclear annihilation leads him to make plans to move his large family from Tokyo to a farm in Brazil. Thinking his fears irrational, and expressing grave concern over the dispensation of his estate, they take him to court and, like a good judge, Kurosawa lets both sides exhaust themselves without drawing a premature judgement. Fear offers a hugely compelling glimpse at the post-war Japanese mindset, and at the Cold War mindset in general. A Taxing Woman, 1988, 127 min. Director: Juzo Itami Friday, July 6th 2001, 4:30pm Many of Itami's films are exhaustive but entertaining looks at various professions or businesses. Restaurants, hospitals, the geisha trade, and even supermarkets have been placed under Itami's cinematic microscope. A Taxing Woman follows the activities of a crack tax investigator, played with a characteristically offbeat charm by Itami regular (and wife) Miyamoto Nobuko. Even tiny intricacies of Japanese tax law become interesting as they are used to construct an intriguing plot involving a crooked love hotel king. Good Morning, 1959, 93 min. Director: Yasujiro Ozu Friday, July 13th 2001, 4:30 pm The film is set in a tidy Tokyo neighborhood of close-quartered homes where everyone runs in and out of each other's houses and pries into each other's business. Salesmen creep in and out of doorways with an array of American convenience products. Minoru and Isamu are schoolboy brothers obsessed with sumo wrestling, which they watch religiously on a neighbor's TV. Eventually they want a set of their own and when their parents refuse, they take a vow of silence not only at home but in school. Besides sumo wrestling, Isamu and Minoru's other interest is farting contests. Ozu contrasts this "childish" activity with the banal conversation and foolish concerns of the adults. Good Morning is an eccentric, satirical portrait of family life strewn with gags about social formality, romance, gossip, and the consumerism of modern Japan. Patlabor (animation), 1989, 100 min. Director: Oshi Mamoru Friday, 20/7/01, 4:30 pm In the late 20th century, highly advanced robots, known as Labors, were developed for construction work, in the military, for under sea exploration and even recreational . The suicide of a mysterious man on the massive Babylon Project construction site sets off a cascade of events that may signal the destruction of Tokyo. What is the connection between the suicide, the new Mobile Police AV-XO Zero Labor, and a berserk prototype tank? When Patlabor (mobile police) cops investigate an unexplained wave of rogue Labors' rampaging across the city, they uncover a sinister revenge plot to infect Tokyo's eight thousand Labor population with the deadly BABEL virus. The first in a highly acclaimed series, PATLABOR 1 Mobile Police is a science-fiction police drama set against a tale of danger and high-tech revenge.