[Reader-list] Report on the launch of pad.ma (Public Access Digital media Archive)

[Lawrence Liang]

*Report of Pad.ma Launch
*
On the 16th of February 2009, we officially opened out Pad.ma to the general
public, and as a part of the launch we had a stimulating day-long event with
various people who have been engaging with pad.ma. This report attempts to
capture a sense of the day, as well as the various questions and concerns
that were raised. We were very excited by the range of responses, and ways
in which people had used pad.ma in interpreting their own footage,
revisiting their earlier work or annotating archived material, and we wanted
to share our sense of excitement, as well as the newer ways in which the
possibilities of pad.ma was revealed for us through its use by all the
participants.

Shaina Anand began the day by providing the background to pad.ma, and how
the various organizations involved (Oil21 from Berlin, Alternative Law
Forum, Bangalore, and three organizations from Bombay: Majlis, Point of View
and ChitraKarKhana/CAMP) came together to conceptualize pad.ma. In its one
year of making, pad.ma had already inculded over 150 events from Majlis's
Godaam, Chitrakarkhana's collection of micro media and other contributions
including that of Point of View, Alternative Law Forum and footage by
filmmakers such at T. Jayashree and Saeed Mirza. Shaina said that the main
reason for the day was to get a sense of how people from different
disciplinary backgrounds from film makers to artists, and scholars to
activists could use pad.ma to explore the relationship between text and
image, to examine the possibilities that it opens up, and also to look at
the blurring lines between those who produce images, those who interpret it,
and those who are supposed to consume it.

The first presentation of the day was made by Aagaz, a voluntary youth group
from PremNagar, Meghwadi and SanjayNagar bastis of Jogeshwari. Members of
Aagaz including Shaali Shaikh, Durga Gudillu and Ismail Sharif spoke about
their contribution to pad.ma. About 15 hours of footage from their video
project Ek Dozen Pani was collaboratively annotated to describe some
relationships between infrastructure, water and the city. While
infrastructure is hyper visible in most cities in their diverse forms, from
high rise shining malls and multiplexes to decaying pipes from which water
and electricity leaks to poorer neighborhoods, the members of Aagaz used the
layers of annotation in pad.ma to go deep into their own histories of how
infrastructure gets to be made and unmade in urban experience. (
http://pad.ma/find?l=Lj)

Sanjay Kak spoke about his own relationship to found footage after the
experience of making Jashn-e-azadi, and he was invited to write over a
two-hour long tape of found footage, "Flight Over the CFL". In what can only
be described as an ethnography of a media event, Sanjay Kak's reading of
this film opens out for us the historical and analytical possibilities that
lies in material which may seem completely ordinary and uneventful.
Combining the skills of a film maker with that of the historian, Sanjay's
contemporatry reading of the material  opened out ways in which we can think
the relationship between events, fragmentary material and contested
political histories (http://pad.ma/Vg92c17o/info)

Priya Sen, a film maker from Delhi revisited a film that she had made six
years ago "The Knower of Secrets" about Qawwali singers in Hazrat
Nizamuddin. In her annotations, Priya looked at what it would mean to
capture the experience of the film maker in the making of the film, an
experience which is never exhausted by the end product that emerges in the
form of the finished film. Her annotation moves between the personal, the
affective, the theoretical and the analytical. On Pad.ma, the knower of
secrets emerges as a text which opens out to different registers of
experience and reflection which were not immediately available at the time
of the making of the film. (http://pad.ma/Vu5mgs8w/info)

Nida Ghouse's presentation raised the critical question of the difference
between seeing an image, reading and image and understanding the experience
of pad.ma which attempts to bring text and image together. Nida located the
development of the various versions of pad.ma andf its implications for
newer forms of reading that are made available. Finally, Nida looked at the
idea of the electronic archive not just as an archeological site for data
mining, but also as a construction site of ideas and possibilities.

Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber looked at 10 remarks about video and the
internet, which balances between the exhilaration about video on the net and
the material realities of low bandwidth etc. They distinguished between open
source as a 'cool attitude' and openness as a form of practice that
constantly requires interventions that reframes the ways we think of our own
practices. They also argued that licenses are 'real', in that issues of
format of videos, inter-operability etc are all affected by proprietary
licenses and the future of video on the net is also an issue about closed or
open systems.

Kaushik Bhowmick was invited by pad.ma to be a guest annotator, and Kaushik
took up the challenge by trawling through all the events and settling on ten
of them. But rather than choosing to annotate them through information or
analysis of the events (which ranged from bar dancers to the item song in
hindi films to the lumpen audience), Kaushik chose to read and write across
them. Drawing from mythology and film theory, Kaushik chose to make poetic
connections across images. Arguing that film eventually relies on the
production of sensibilities, Kaushik' sannotations sought to capture the
evocative feel of the videos and the ways they spoke to each other. (
http://pad.ma/Vejbx6uz/00:02:54.000)


Desire Machine Collective from Guwahati chose to focus on the idea of the
North East as it emerges in popular discourse and in the news. They curated
a set of items which provided a name and place to the idea of the north
east. In their curation they sought to raise the question of how an idea
like the Northeast comes into being, where it finds form in media discourse,
and also ways in which a counter archive that displaces one central idea of
the north east could emerge. They chose to read one segment of a film Tango
Charlie and its hugely stereotypical image of the north east and contrasted
this with videos that looked at the Bnei Menashe, the lost tribes of Israel
from Mizoram.  ( http://pad.ma/find?l=Ll)

Lawrence Liang made a presentation on the relationship between the image,
politics and the distribution of the sensible. Drawing form Jacques
Ranciere, Lawrence argued that politics was already aesthetics, in that
ideas of the political often draw from sensorial metaphors such as
visibility and invisibility, and politics may consist of
interruptions/interventions in the distribution of the sensible, which
modify the Aesthetic-political field. He tried to link this to an
understanding of the political which is not dependent on a pre determined
political field, but which is open to redefinition through a reversal of
assumptions of social roles. In the case of pad.ma, the blurring of the
lines between image makers and image readers would constitute such an
aesthetic-political interruption.

Ayisha Abraham who has made a film Straight 8 using found footage chose to
look at rare films made on Ram Gopal, a dancer who became famous in the
mid-twentieth century. Using the footage of Ram Gopal that had been shot by
an amateur film maker Tom D'Aguiar, perhaps the only existing fragment of
moving image of Ram, Ayesha posed questions about the relationship between
the materiality of film, the role of archives and the reconstruction of
histories.  (http://pad.ma/Vsnjewdj/info)

Ranu Ghosh has been working on the changing urban landscape of Kolkatta,
looking at the emergence of new high rise apartments against the decaying
landscape of factories that have shut down. In her presentation she spoke
about the south city project which has emerged on the lands of the Usha
sewing machine factory. She has used Pad.ma to annotate the history of the
struggle of an individual against the acquisition of his housing quarters,
and he was given a camera to document what was happening, since there are no
visitors allowed inside the premises. The annotations become another layer
through which the relationship between the film maker, footage shot by the
subject of the film, and the audience interact. (http://pad.ma/Vfsgvjes/info
)

Nilanjan Bhattacharya has been working on questions of traditional
knowledge, and biodiversity. He presented an interview with Madhav Gadgil
and related Prof. Gadgils view points on rituals and superstitions and myths
as essential to the maintaining of sacred forests and knowledge systems
through footage from his older films that included exampled of buddhist,
hindu and animist rituals.
http://pad.ma/Vs6e8x5j/00:13:51.000

Sadanand Menon showcased two films on Chandralekha. The first was part of a
program made for a cultural show on Doordarshan, and the only footage
available of it is the versions recorded from television. In an example of
how text/image and histories (personal and public) interact, Sadanand's
annotations on the Tanabana program takes us through an intimate journey
with Chandralekha. Moments that would otherwise be missed (a dog passing by,
Chandra making Rangoli), if we were just watching the film, are re-read by
Sadanand to create a shared space where we begin to understand Chandra's
philosophy of creativity and the body.

Ghar Bachao, Ghar Banao Andolan is an organization that has been working on
housing rights, particularly against corporate privatization. They took an
existing footage in pad.ma "One Day in the Life of Niranjan Hiranandani" and
re' read it against information that they have been collection for a few
years (through the use of RTI as well as investigative journalism). The
grandiose vision of Hiranandani is read against the material conditions of
housing for the poor, while his statements of corporate responsibility are
read against the corrupt practices prevalent in the real estate industry. In
a playful manner, GBGB completes the incomplete narrative of images through
sharp political satire.  (http://pad.ma/Vtowua9j/L2kv9)


Once you enter a pad.ma event, you can use the 9 and 0 keys ( and ) keys to
advance to next clip. You can register to ad your own annotations. Pad.ma is
now open to external contribuitons and also invites in annotators. write to
pad.ma at pad.ma

For more details feel free to contact kalakamra at gmail.com


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