[Reader-list] Fwd: Pad.ma News Update , July 2011: City in Archive

[shveta at sarai.net]

Pad.ma's news update explores a series of expansions, collapses,
demolitions, leakages and erasures in the archive. We continue our
exploration of the city and its micro-universes through footage, and
through essays by scholars, researchers and young writers, that are linked
to video material. The essay+video format in Pad.ma allows you to link to
videos and annotations that play simultaneously in the right side of the
frame.

Fleeting impressions of contemporary city life find their archive, not
only in the planned city of architects and builders or the imagined city
of cinema, but in a wide range of sensorial stimuli in the urban. This
ranges from the leaking of private conversations, to sounds and images of
slum demolitions and protests. The archived city can be glimpsed in the
recording of a dance performance on a terrace that reveals in the
background, the skyline of Bangalore in 1938
<http://pad.ma/Vsnjewdj/00:00:20.278-00:00:26.958>, or the city that is
chanced upon in the periphery of an event, as the cutout of a superstar
travels through the roads and flyovers of Mumbai
<http://pad.ma/Vfbtmuxn/info> .

In July's news update, we include an essay on the destruction and
regeneration of a city after a bomb explosion by Taha Mehmood, and an
essay on the destruction and rebuilding of Mandala in Mumbai after each
cycle of demolitions by Simpreet Singh, who is a member of the Ghar Bachao
Ghar Banao Andolan. Another essay, by Nisha Vasudevan takes us deep into
the recorded conversations of the Radia tapes. The essay and accompanying
diagram catalogue and map out the nefarious connections between big media,
big politics and big money.

In this newsletter, we also include a video series that will continually
be added to, on "Freedom of Expression", which includes interviews with
activists, filmmakers, academics and others on repression of free speech.
Of special interest is the interview with scholar Danny Butt on discourses
around the internet, and the interview with Bharath Murthy, a filmmaker
based in Coimbatore, on the flagitious aura of video pornography. In this
spirit, we also include video clips from Sharjah, after the removal of an
artwork from its 10th Biennial for purported blasphemy.

We also explore the making of playlists in Pad.ma; these playlists are a
playful way to combine text searches across the archive with manual
selection and "curation". This is the result of an intuitive and
in-progress software application written by Sanjay Bhangar (CAMP, Pad.ma).

<<ESSAYS>>

Mandala: Simpreet Singh

"Take whatever you're getting, or else we'll send you to Mankhurd,"
Maharashtra state authorities and builders say. Mankhurd, a north-eastern
suburb of Mumbai, is where the city's 'dregs' are washed to shore - its
garbage and its oft-resettled working-class population. In this essay,
activist Simpreet Singh of the Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan (GBGB)
narrates the history of Mandala, a slum settlement in Mankhurd. The essay
contains a timeline of demolitions carried out by the state in the name of
urban development, and within that is embedded Singh's stirring, personal
account of the protests staged by residents and activists. This account
exposes the violence that marks perennial displacement in the city, and
builds a convincing argument for the proposal for community-led
redevelopment.
http://essays.pad.ma/mandala

"The Bomb That Saved the City": Taha Mehmood

Taha Mehmood's essay is about spatial politics and policies at work in a
city such as Manchester, often set into motion by destructive events. He
says - "If on the one hand the bomb explosion at the city centre of
Manchester in 1996 wrecked the social, entrepreneurial, symbolic and
spatial heart of the city, then on the other it gave an opportunity to
planners to create a new narrative of space in Manchester." The
regeneration of the city as a safe, orderly space also led to the
increasing use of CCTV surveillance. Mehmood draws interesting and
relevant correlations between the city of Manchester and Mumbai, indeed
any city that has seen terrorist attacks and how that has re-ordered the
city. The essay traverses through CCTV footage of the bomb explosion and
footage from CCTV control rooms in Manchester.
http://essays.pad.ma/bomb-saved-city

Powertapes: Nisha Vasudevan and Zinnia Ambapardiwala

Nisha Vasudevan, a student of journalism currently interning at Pad.ma,
delves into the Radia tapes (all transcribed and available at
http://powertapes.pad.ma/) and gives an evocative and detailed account of
the recorded conversations between Niira Radia and journalists,
politicians, party representatives and other power brokers. "Niira Radia
takes calls while in transit, immediately after a workout, panting, in
between meetings, sometimes sick, sniffling, when in Mumbai, when in
Delhi, giving directions to the driver, not fully awake, just about to
make coffee; no-nonsense from dawn to dusk while conversing with over 75
people regularly... . She is reverent when talking to Ratan Tata but
ruthless with her employees and rookie journalists. She gossips and flirts
but gets the job done. Her caller-tune is 'Pal pal pal pal...' from the
Bollywood film Parineeta."
http://essays.pad.ma/radia-ga-ga

The essay is accompanied by an interactive diagram, which links to
sections of the Radia tapes archive, designed by Zinnia Ambapardiwala
http://files.pad.ma/Radia/gram/

<<VIDEOS>>

Cityscape: With the Superstar

A giant cutout of the superstar Amitabh Bachchan, in his iconic
proletarian avatar from the film Deewar travels through the city of
Mumbai, on an early Sunday morning. This piece of footage is annotated to
describe the city that this icon travels through - mill lands, flyovers,
older settlements in Bombay. While the cutout looms over traffic and
crowds, people react with surprise, bafflement and indifference.
http://pad.ma/Vfbtmuxn/info

'Terrorised by Legislation?' - A talk by Vrinda Grover and Saeed Mirza

The aftermath of the November 2009 attacks in Mumbai was marked by an
increase in tough legislation, in relation to speech, performance and
mobility of ordinary people. Vrinda Grover in her talk on the stance of
the government says, that even though the attack by gunmen in hotels was
described as different from previous attacks in Bombay or elsewhere in
India, the response of the State was an old response and the legal changes
proposed were "nothing more than regurgitating the past and spewing it
back to us". The next speaker at this event, Saeed Mirza berates the
narrowness of vision, in the contemporary, of what a country like India is
about, in spite of its rich legacy and past.
http://pad.ma/Vsme1x9e/editor

"Sharjah Heritage Area"

A brief video of a whitewashed court where Mustapha Benfodil's artwork is
no more, with some surrounding atmosphere.
http://pad.ma/Veiu0n56/info

<<LISTS>>

Freedom of Expression (Asia)

This is an ongoing series of interviews with academics, scholars,
researchers, activists, film festival organizers and others, speaking
about the precarious state of the right to free speech across Asia. This
current series of video looks at the status of free speech in Myanmar,
Singapore and India. Martyn See speaks of his experience of censorship of
political films in Singapore, Bharath Murthy who is a filmmaker speaks of
practices around amateur pornographic videos in India, Ronald Diebert
gives an overview of censorship practices regarding internet in Asia and
Nishant Shah examines the tropes of good and bad citizenship in public and
legal discourse, that allow for the State to continue repression of free
speech.
http://pad.ma/find?l=L34

Once upon an Intellectual Property

Intellectual property has been at the heart of many debates on knowledge
and cultural production in the recent decades. These videos comprise a
range of voices and concerns about the role of 'intangible property' in
the information era.
http://pad.ma/find?l=Ln

<<PLAYLIST>>

or, a stream of (mechanical) consciousness in the age of digital manipulation

The digital archive in particular is an interesting space for the
exploration of unforeseen, accidental, and machine-made connections across
a vast range of material. Are automated mash-ups or keyword-films, which
are produced "mechanically", inferior to the subjective authorial
productions of artists? Examples of recent films that could have been
"made by keyword" include Chrisian Marclay's 24-hour cinema cut-up "The
Clock" and Maha Mamoun's film on the pyramids as they appear in diverse
scenes in Egyptian film, "Domestic Tourism-II". Here archival objects are
being given new form that combine, and make it impossible to distinguish,
computed and "thought" relations. The artist or editor does not disappear,
but neither does the computer.

If one were to exacerbate this situation of the distribution of the role
of the author, rather than resist or critique it, we could begin to
explore the possibilities posed by something like these playlists,
generated by keywords and searches in an archive.

The playlists consist of high quality video and might take some time to
load (Firefox)

Playlist on rickshaw, in its various avatars (10 videos)

http://playlists.camputer.org/C
Playlist on archive as footage as city (14 videos)

(excerpts of talks or interviews with Niranjan Hiranandani, Adonis,
Lawrence Liang, Tom D'Aguiar, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Rick Prelinger, Shahid
Amin, Shakeel Bakshi, Friederich Engels)
http://playlists.camputer.org/L

<<SOFTWARE>>

We share the application for creating playlists within Pad.ma, here -
http://camputer.org/padmaPlaylist/. It functions within the Firefox
browser; the search results for any word or keyword can be stretched,
re-ordered or deleted, to manually create a final playlist. This can then
be exported as an html link that also plays in the browser.

<<EVENTS>>

Screening of Documentary Films and Footage from Cairo, Egypt
15th July, 2011
1 Shanthi Road, Bangalore
http://tinyurl.com/3lwcx2v

PAD.MA, and the Possible:
presented by Ashok Sukumaran and Shaina Anand
28th July, 2011
7:00 PM
New Museum Theater, New York City
http://www.newmuseum.org/events/564

_____________
Pad.ma is an interpretative web-based video archive, which works primarily
with footage and not finished films. Pad.ma creates access to material
which is easily lost in editing processes, in the filmmaking economy, and
in changes of scale brought about by digital technology. Unlike Youtube
and similar video sites, the focus here is on annotation, cross-linking,
downloading and the reuse of video material for research, pedagogy and
reference. For more, see http://pad.ma/about.

This newsletter is put together by Namita A. Malhotra, Ranjana Dave and
Shaina Anand and appears once in two months.
_____________

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