From dak at sarai.net Sat Sep 8 21:16:48 2007 From: dak at sarai.net (dak at sarai.net) Date: Sat, 8 Sep 2007 21:16:48 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] Newsletter- September 2007 Message-ID: <2216.203.196.168.77.1189266408.squirrel@mail.sarai.net> Newsletter- September 2007 Dear all, This September, we first bring you news about last month’s events at Sarai. AUGUST REVIEW: Student Stipendship Workshop Each Year Sarai provides stipendships to research scholars from different academic institutions working on urban and media experiences. In the course of nine months of the stipendship, these researchers are also invited to three workshops to share their research with senior scholars. Researchers presented their work at the second such workshop held on the 3-4th August. Issues discussed in the workshop were writing and research techniques, modes of expression and theoretical debates on urban life. The final workshop will be run by the researchers themselves. Wikipedia Conference, Taipei Ravikant from Sarai visited Taipei in the first week of August for the annual Wikipedia conference, Wikimania '07. Wikipedia has come to acquire a cardinal place in our thinking lives, producing a certain way of life in terms of generation, archiving and distribution of knowledge in diverse languages. What is equally significant is that Wikipedia has become a broad platform for those who believe in the practice of free sharing. The three-day event in Taipei was packed with parallel sessions of big, small and impromptu talks, workshops, poster sessions and artwork exhibitions. The evenings were marked by a heady mix of film and remix music shows and dinners at public spaces in different parts of the city. The political and logistical significance of opting for a stranger-friendly capital city of Taiwan cannot be overstated. Lawrence Liang of the Alternative Law Forum, collaborator of Sarai, made a presentation on the historical notions of authorship and Achal Prabala who has been a Sarai Independent Fellow, spoke on patent regimes, especially the current controversies in the Indian pharmaceutical industry. Ravikant spoke about the state of the Hindi Wikipedia which crossed the mark of 10,000 articles shortly before the conference. One the sidelines, some people did manage to see a kind of perspective emerging from India, in that all of us were trying to argue for a flexible and informal regime of sharing that is very much extant in India and therefore Wikipedia should not assume that each culture has to go via the copyright-copyleft route. Upcoming Events We have a variety of events and information lined up this month. These include a talk at CSDS by French philosopher Etienne Balibar; screening of Praveen Kumar’s National Award winning film Naina Jogin and Kavita Joshi’s Tales from the Margins; details about an ongoing online exhibition by Raqs Media Collective and Mrityunjay Chatterjee and news about the release of Media Nagar 03. Hope you will make yourself available for the events and access the particulars announced to you. Best, Mitoo Das (Programme Coordinator) Sarai, CSDS Email me at: mitoo at sarai.net -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [[CONTENTS]] Films at Sarai Naina Jogin Director: Praveen Kumar Tales from the Margins Director; Kavita Joshi ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Talk "Eschatology versus Teleology: The Suspended Dialogue between Derrida and Althusser" Speaker: Etienne Balibar ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Online Exhibition Global Village Health Manual Contributors: Raqs Media Collective and Mrityunjay Chatterjee ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Publication Media Nagar 03: Network Sanskriti Editor: Rakesh Kumar ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Films: Naina Jogin (2005) Director: Praveen Kumar Length: 59 mins Language: Hindi/Maithali. Subtitles in English 2:00 pm, 14th September, 07 Seminar Room, CSDS In Madhubani, people struggle against trying circumstances to eke out a living. Many have taken to painting to survive. They paint the traditional motives (erstwhile painted on cow dung textured walls of huts and closely associated with ritual) unto paper. These paintings are then sold in markets in India and abroad. While many painters repeat certain traditional motives, other artists boldly expand the scope to include contemporary themes. The film is about these painters, their circumstances, their inspirations and their works. The film grows to completion by a criss-crossing of narratives stitched together by sights and songs of the milieu that births these artists. The central line of the film is the Kohbbar ritual in which a newly married couple spends three days and nights in the painted Kohbbar Ghar before they may consummate their marriage. This vigil over desire provides the film with a mysterious energy... Praveen Kumar is a graduate in Economics from Delhi University (1985) following which he did a Diploma in Film Direction from VARAN, Paris (1987). He subsequently worked with educational TV in New Delhi, producing short videos on various issues before directing the documentary Unto the Fold in 1996. It was screened at several International film Festivals including at Mannheim and Cinema du Reel. Naina Jogin (The Ascetic Eye) is his latest work. It has won the National Award for the Best Arts/Cultural Film of 2005. Tales from the Margins (2006) Director: Kavita Joshi Length: 24 mins Language: Manipuri Subtitles in English 4:30 pm, 21th September, 07 Seminar Room, CSDS Twelve women strip themselves naked on the streets of Manipur, in protest. For five years a young woman has been on a fast-to-death demanding justice; she is kept under arrest and is forcibly nose-fed. Why are the women of Manipur using their bodies both as their last weapon and as a battlefield? The state of Manipur, located in India’s North-East region, has been driven for decades by insurgency and violence. The Indian government has attempted to crush the insurgency through its military might; shielded by undemocratic laws. Arrests, torture, extra-judicial killings — Manipuri people have faced them all. Yet, little is heard about Manipur and its troubles across the nation’s landscape. This is a place that mainland India has marginalised; that the world has forgotten. ‘Tales from the Margins’ travels to this remote, strife-torn corner of India to seek out stories of uncommon courage in the face of despair, to help articulate the anger and anguish of Manipuri women and to document their extraordinary protests and through their lives, to focus the spotlight on a vast human tragedy. Kavita Joshi is an independent documentary filmmaker and TV Producer based in Delhi. Her works have spanned diverse subjects – conflict, the arts, people, environment, gender etc. They have been broadcast by NRK of Norway, BBC World, SBS Australia, Star and Doordarshan; and screened at several international film festivals. Apart from filmmaking, Kavita Joshi also conducts workshops on video / film making, documentary, and participatory camera practices. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Talk: French philosopher Etienne Balibar speaks at the CSDS, Programme on Social and Political Theory Lecture. Title of Talk: "Eschatology versus Teleology: The suspended dialogue between Derrida and Althusser". Date: 18 September 2007 Time: 3.00 pm Venue: CSDS Seminar Hall, New Building Etienne Balibar is well known as a philosopher, collaborator and former student of Louis Althusser. He has worked in the last two decades on Spinoza, Fichte and other philosophers in the course of theorising on mass politics and the problem of race and nationalism. He has also written extensively on issues relating to European and transnational citizenship in the last few years. The present lecture was initially presented at a Conference in Berkeley in memory of Derrida and at a conference on Althusser in Italy and is part of his forthcoming volume Ecrits Pour Althusser. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Online Exhibition: Global Village Health Manual, version 1.0, Raqs Media Collective with Mrityunjay Chatterjee, 2001 The Raqs Media Collective collaborated with Mrityunjay Chatterjee to create the Global Village Health Manual, version 1.0, a project which creatively conflates the corpus of a library and the corpus conceived in the post-medicalized body. Historically, the relationship between the body and the measurement of time shifted when the labourer became embroiled in the assembly line. The mechanical understanding of the body further contorted with the introduction of 'virtual space' as one in which bodies of data, synthetic prostheses, cloning, and torture or injury leapt from the pages of 19th century print culture into the realm of virtual reality. The GVHM splices together a diverse range of web search-derived material to give a tour of the body's location and fragility in cyberspace. This work is available on the internet as part of the online exhibition by Touring Show. Touring Show displays artists’ maps and 'virtual tours' of contested spaces, ranging from the Military Industrial Complex, to the US-Mexico border, to the body. The mapping and social organization of spaces has not only had a profound impact on the cultures that inhabit them, it has also contributed to the development of a number of artistic traditions, including cartography, drafting, and landscape painting and photography. More recently, the emergence of the artists' lectures and tours as artistic media has coincided with the practice of 'radical cartography,' which in its most elemental terms is the charting of a space's relationship to the empire or ideology that governs it. Also significant to the specific cultural moment traced here is the mingling of technology's impact on our landscape and the use of technologies to explore and document this terrain. The artists here offer a combination of web-based and public projects that can be interpreted as tours in this vein. While some of the projects read as interventions, others simply present the information needed to navigate viewers' own subjective traversals. To view please visit http://rhizome.org/events/timeshares/touring.php ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Publication: Media Nagar 03: Network Sanskriti Media Nagar 03: Network Sanskriti will be out this September. The link for the book will be available once it is put online. The Media Nagar is one of the publications of Sarai based on research around media and city and is published in Hindi. It was initially part of the research project “Publics and Practices in the History the Present (PPHP)” based at Sarai. The first issue in the series Media Nagar 01 focused on Delhi and the next, Media Nagar 02, looked into emerging urbanism. The current edition, Media Nagar 03 deals with the concept of network culture in detail. Besides there are articles on films, newspapers, television, advertising, city etc. END OF NEWSLETTER. ----------------------------------------- This email was sent using SquirrelMail. 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