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Sarai: the New Media Initiative - a space for research, practice and
conversation about the contemporary media and urban constellations.
How Sarai happened
Sarai began to take shape in the summer of 1998 in Delhi.
The summer of '98 was a time for many new beginnings in the city of
Delhi. The nineties had been a decade marked by doubt and rethinking
on many fronts, all of which seemed to have come to a head for some of
us during that summer.
There was a sense of disquiet with increasing urban violence and
strife, dissatisfaction with restrictive modes of thinking and
practice within mainstream academia, the universities & the media and
a general unease at the stagnation that underlay the absence of a
critical public culture.
At the same time, Delhi witnessed a quiet rebirth of an independent
arts and media scene. This became evident in exhibitions and
screenings that began taking place modestly in alternative venues,
outside galleries and institutional spaces, and in archival
initiatives that began to be active. Spaces for dissent and debate
were being kept alive by clusters of teachers and students in the
universities. New ideas, modes of communication and forms of protest
were being tried out and tested on the streets. There was a vibrant
energy evident in street level improvisations with new technologies.
Public phone booths were transforming themselves into street corner
cyber cafés, independent filmmakers were beginning to organise
themselves in forums and a new open source and free software community
made its mark in the city's BBSs (Electronic Bulletin Boards). The
city itself, as a space and as an idea, was becoming a focus for
enquiry and reflection, and a provocation for a series of creative
experiments.
It was from within this ferment of ideas, rough & ready plans, and
fragments of proposals, that a series of conversations on film
history, new media theory, media practice and urban culture was able
to mature into the conceptual foundation of Sarai. Underlying these
conversations was a desire to create a space which, like the sarais
for which Delhi was once well known, would be a convivial place where
people from many backgrounds could gather, converse and work together.
The challenge before the founding group was to cohere a philosophy
that would marry this range of concerns to the vision of creating a
lively public space where research, media practice and activism could
flow into each other.
It took two years to translate this conception into a plan for a real
space and a design of a workable interdisciplinary programme of
activities. The Sarai Initiative embraces interests that include
cinema history, urban cultures and politics, new media theory,
computers, the Internet and software cultures, documentary filmmaking,
digital arts and critical cultural practice.
Sarai has been founded on the basis of a collaborative vision and it
will grow by continuing to include and engage with new people and
ideas.
Initiators :
Ravi Vasudevan & Ravi Sundaram (Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies)
Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata
Sengupta)
Aims & Objectives
Sarai, the New Media Initiative, a programme of the Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies is an alternative, non-profit space for
an imaginative reconstitution of urban public culture, new/old media
practice and research and critical cultural intervention.
The framework of Sarai includes scholarly reflection and creative work
on film & video, computers, telephony, print culture, radio,
multimedia and the Internet.
Aims & Objectives
To become an engaged and integral part of contemporary urban culture
within the city of Delhi.
+ To foster interdisciplinary research on urban culture & politics and
media history & practice.
+ To create contexts for collaboration between practitioners &
scholars
+ To collaborate with non-elite and neighbourhood media practitioners
with new skills through workshops and outreach programmes.
+ To demonstrate the validity of low-cost & low-tech methods and
strategies in media and communication practices, with a commitment to
public participation and access.
+ To promote non-propreitary (copyleft) and collaborative models of
cultural practice/knowledge.
Activities & Interests
Media Research & Theory + Media Practice + Media History + Free
Software Development + Web Based Practices + Multimedia & Digital Art
+ Workshops & Seminars + Training + Lectures/Talks/Presentation +
Advocacy & Education + Film/Video/Multimedia Screenings + Online
Journal & Website + Publications.
CSDS
The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), founded in
1964, is one of India's best-known independent research institutes.
Bringing together some of South Asia's best known thinkers and
writers, the CSDS has played an important part in shaping the
intellectual and creative map of this part of the world. The CSDS'
research has focused on democratic politics, cultures and the politics
of knowledge, critical discourses on science and technology, and
violence, ethnicity and diversity. Added to this has been an important
new programme of the Centre: Sarai, which reflects the Centre's very
contemporary concerns in intellectually and creatively addressing
issues of the new millennium.
(
geocities.com/sankarshan76)