[Urbanstudy] pad.ma news update

[shaina a]

This months newsletter will be of interest to some on this list. apologies
in advance, if you have already received it.

x

shaina

http://pad.ma/news

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 <
http://essays.pad.ma> .

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 *Lage Raho Munna
Bhai*."
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>> '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.


-- 
camputer.org
pad.ma
chitrakarkhana.net
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