Howtobean Artist by Night: Raqs Media Collective

7
HOW TO BE AN
ARTIST BY NIGHT
Raqs Media Collective

The professional sphere of contem-
porary art subsists within a larger
economy of the production of material
and immaterial cultural goods. This
includes the media and entertainment
industries, publishing, and software
and design, along with a network of
globally active galleries and auction
houses that trade in art (traditional,
modern, and contemporary) and
antiquities. It is not a matter of dispute
that a large number of people who
train in art academies finally end up
as wage workers (with regular or precarious employment) within the continu-
ally burgeoning culture industry. When art students graduate from their acad-
emies, they usually end up as “no-collar” workers in the industry by day and as
artists by night in their dreams.
Contemporary art can also be a refuge from the relentless pressures of the
culture industry. But it is the kind of refuge that makes no bones about the fact
that it is also a secret internal exile. The young artist, who often begins profes-
sional life as an intern in the corporate setting of the culture industry, usually
finds himself or herself in a simultaneous condition of internment within con-
temporary art.
All industrialization processes bring in their wake an enormous pressure
for the new. The so-called creative industry is no exception to this rule. The logic
of production itself is typically captured in the slogan, “Innovate or perish.” A
great deal that is valuable in cultural and artistic life becomes a casualty of this
entrepreneurial acceleration. Tenure within this industrial milieu comes at a price.
What is lost is the capacity to reflect, to take time, to be critical of the world and
one’s own practice. The no-collar worker by day is at war with the artist by night. The
lives of contemporary art practitioners the world over are scarred by this battle.
Sometimes this double life can be traumatic. The fear of irrelevance, obso-
lescence, and marginality haunts many younger practitioners, and the pressure
to exhibit as an artist is almost as lethal as the pressure to innovate as a cultural
worker or entrepreneur. Coupled with this is the fact that the dissolution of a
stable canon in the wake of the rapid global dispersal of contemporary art prac-
tice brings a certain disorientation to bear on the lives of most practitioners. No
one quite knows what to do next to stay afloat in a swiftly changing world.
The question of what then constitutes an education that can adequately pre-
pare a practitioner for a vocation in the contemporary arts is primarily a matter of
identifying the means to cultivate an attitude of negotiation with and around this
kind of pressure. Learning the ropes is learning to do what it takes to maintain
a semblance of the life praxis of artistic autonomy. To think about the content of
such an education requires us to return to some very basic questions.
A SOBER INTERLUDE AT SCHOOL
Education ordinarily presumes a retreat, or a period of waiting, so as not to bur-

den the student with the distractions and demands of a professionally productive
HOW TO BE AN ARTIST BY NIGHT 73

life. The position of apprenticeship that education generally assigns to the stu-
dent implies a withholding or a deferral of the fullness of practice, which is
held out as a promise that can be redeemed once the student proves mastery
over the rudiments of a calling. Being someone, and learning to be someone,
are seen as two distinct moments, with the first following the successful com-
pletion of the second. While this may be true generally, it is difficult to sustain
this understanding of art education as a phase that merely seeks its posthu-
mous completion in the career of an artist.
Artists undertake to transform themselves continuously through their
practices and throughout their working lives. For an artist, there can be no
rigid separation between being someone and learning to become someone.
The reason to continue to be an artist lies in an everyday rediscovery of what
remains to be said or done. Being an artist is no different from learning to
become an artist. This process of rediscovery of what it is that he or she needs
to do transforms the artist on an everyday basis. The horizons of the artist’s
self continuously expand to take in the incremental unraveling of what the
artist still desires to inscribe on his or her consciousness and the attention of
the world.
The day that an artist realizes that his or her stock of things left to think
about and to do has depleted to a point where it measures less than what has
been done already, that artist might as well stop practicing. This means that
in order to continue working, the artist learns to constantly prepare for the
unknown, for what remains to be done. An artist’s education is never finished.
School is never out.
WHAT IS A SCHOOL?
Is school a place, an institution, a set of facilities, a situation, a circumstance,

an attitude, or a constellation of relationships of the transfer of acquired, in-
vented, and accumulated knowledge, experience, and insight from one gen-
eration to another? Perhaps a school or the idea of a school as a condition of
learning, of being open to discourse and discovery, can also be seen as some-
thing that we might carry with us wherever we go, whatever we do.
74 RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

SKHOLĒ (Σχολή): AN ETYMOLOGICAL DIGRESSION
Whenever we think of a school, it is useful to remind ourselves that the mean-

ing of the word has undergone many transformations, and the root of the Eng-
lish word school can be found in the classical Greek term Skholē' (Σχολή), which
denotes, first, “a pursuit or time of leisure” (taken from a withholding of, or va-
cation from, other kinds of more instrumentalized time) and only consequent-
ly shades off to mean “a forum for discussion” and “a place for learning.”
It is necessary to dwell on this conflation of duration (time), gathering (a
forum), and site (a place for learning). Of these, time is the most important,
because a gathering that does not endure or a place that disallows the transfor-
mative, accumulative inscription of exchange and discourse cannot by itself, or
even in combination, generate a context for learning. So it is time, and a par-
ticular kind and quality of time—time out, leisurely time, the kind of time that
can be a vessel and receptacle for reflection—that is central to learning. The
current reality of schools, and of all other institutions that produce the com-
modities known as technique and information, have strayed a great distance
from the original sense of what schooling might have meant.
When it comes to the artist’s education (which is by definition a continu-
ing process of learning and preparation), this emphasis on a non-instrumental
attitude to time introduces a certain tension between the imperative of having
to be productive (in a professional sense, especially within the art industry) and
a desire to vacate the pressures of production, output, and delivery in order
to accumulate time to keep on entering situations conducive to learning. It
means that while an aspirant has to create the conditions of living that require
him or her to seek out and make room for non-instrumental time—time for re-
flection, for contemplation, for investigations that do not necessarily demand
results—there is simultaneously a surfeit of obstacles (through constant de-
mands to produce and perform) that hinder this search.
These demands may stem from the art world, from institutional contexts,
from the market, from the need to stay in circulation, and most significant,
from the artists’ ongoing assessments of their own generative capacities. The
paradox of an artist’s life is that in order to prepare for production, the artist
must engage with time in a non-instrumental way, while this engagement at
all times can represent a fundamental distraction from production.
There are two possible ways out of this conundrum. One is to loop prepa-
ration and production, leisure and work, in a pattern of successive and alter-
nating phases. The other, perhaps a more difficult and rewarding procedure,

is to insist on a mode of practice that is also reflective—that is, to insist on a
mode of practice in which reflection is inseparable from practice. Here, mak-
ing is thinking, and learning is what occurs at the instance of activity. Praxis
is theory.
This second mode of intertwined practice/reflection, or praxis, is often
difficult to sustain in the face of the current frugality and precariousness of
institutional hospitality toward the non-instrumental activities of artists. That
is why artists who choose this mode can often end up generating the contexts
that make their work possible. For them, the work of art is not just about mak-
ing art but also about making the conditions and initiating the networks of
solidarity and sociality that enable the making of art. These conditions are not
just the material and institutional circumstances that have to do with space,
resources, and attention to the practical issues that underwrite the realization
of artistic projects (though these are very important and require a great deal of
energy). Most crucial, they are also about the diligent and enduring cultivation
of the kind of intellectual ambience and the social matrix that allows the unfet-
tering of artistic praxis and inquiry.
RIYAAZ
In Hindustani (north Indian classical) music traditions, riyaaz, or the everyday

cultivation of one’s musicality, is a repertoire of exercises to keep the voice or
fingers or one’s ability to play an instrument in good shape. But it is more than
this. It is as much about the cultivation of a set of attitudes and sensibilities as
it is about the honing of a skill. Riyaaz is an attempt to explore the boundaries
of what one can do on a regular basis and of pushing these boundaries, again
on a regular basis, so that the foundations of one’s practice undergo a daily
renewal, so that one keeps becoming an adept. Riyaaz is a practitioner’s medi-
tation on his or her practice.
What would constitute the riyaaz of the kinds of artists who busy them-
selves with the continuous generation of contexts for praxis? By way of an at-
tempted response to this question, here are eight points for consideration that
sketch a rudimentary set of contours for a hypothetical instance of an artist’s
riyaaz—just as the eight notes (cdefgabc) of a scale provide scaffolding for the
riyaaz of a musician. Articulating these “notes” through practice means filling
them out, embodying them with the experiential specificity and particularity

contingent on different situations. The notes can be “sung” in any order and
combination, with some repeated, some not, depending on the emphases that
a particular situation may call for. No rules are mandated for their singing,
other than that each note is given its due in a manner that the singer sees fit.
No one instance of riyaaz can be identical to any other, and riyaaz constitutes
a form of meditation, not a formula for practice.
(1) EMBEDDED CRITICALITY: The awareness that the cultivation of a critical re-
lationship to one’s situation is a privilege that has to be earned by an intimacy
with it, not purchased by a distance from it. One has to know reality with the
intimacy appropriate to a lover in order to appreciate its flaws and be awake
to its beauty. This means that the practitioner’s stance toward a reality cannot
be compromised by an abdication of his or her entanglement with it. When
the desire to create a new context for one’s practice takes hold, the practitioner
reflects on how that context and the inauguration of that practice can respond
with curiosity and generosity toward what already exists in the practitioner’s
environment. This is also an acknowledgment of the corollary fact that the de-
sired context cannot be built from materials other than those provided by the
existing environment, given that the environment’s boundaries are seen to be
flexible and open to redefinition through the practice itself. While there may
be no escape from what exists, entire worlds can also open themselves out or
be prised open from the coordinates of a street corner or a cul-de-sac.
Like the first note on the scale, which anticipates the next octave even as it
founds one, embedded criticality acts as a tonic, providing the engaged practi-
tioner with impetus—the slope of a trajectory as well as a destination.
(2) UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: The willingness to be open to all the possi-

bilities, including some that are neither anticipated nor intended. The capacity
to experience the emergence of new desires of practice when confronted with
new contextual possibilities. The education of intention in order to keep the will
apace with changing circumstances, An abeyance of foreclosure. Recognition
of the occasional unpredictability of the familiar and the patience necessary for
surprises go hand in hand. With an openness to unintended consequences,
the practitioner remains alert, even to the unimagined.

(3) RADICAL INCOMPLETENESS follows logically from an openness to unin-
tended consequences. Learning to be comfortable with the idea that the cir-
cumference of a work is always larger than the boundedness of its nominated
authorship. The work of art is never done, and so there is always room for
another author. And then another. Contexts gather people.
(4) NON-(UN)EQUALITY OF PRACTICES: Generative contexts attract many dif-

ferent kinds of people and their different kinds of energy. Not everyone comes
with the same history. Class, gender, culture, race, traditions, belief systems,
even nutritional histories are always at the practitioner’s back and shape the
content of every interaction. The fact that some people have more knowledge
or information or appear to have more or are able to present themselves as hav-
ing more should not distract from the responsibility of having to live with and
address those who do not display the same bounty.
Everyone is communicative and knowledgeable, or not, depending on
the context they find themselves in. Loquaciousness and reticence go hand in
hand, just as knowledge and uncertainty do. Unequal purchases on the under-
standing of the world are apportioned in roughly equal measures. Some people
may know a lot, but everyone is equally ignorant. So no matter how much
knowledge an instance of practice embodies, it still does not know as much as
any other instance of practice. This means that different practices, even when
they are not equal to each other in terms of their communicative or cognitive
strengths, are at the same time not unequal either. Learning this modesty is
essential for practitioners who desire a sense of their own strengths.
(5) MINOR MEDIA: The differences between different kinds of practice are
chromatic. They are differences of character, not of quantum. There may be
major and minor media, but the differences are not analogous to the differ-
ences between greater and lesser or higher and lower practices. What matters
in the end is not scale or impact, but acuity, affect, dispersal, resonance, and
endurance. This allows different people to enter the field of practice in a man-
ner commensurate with their histories and capacities (which, as we have seen
above, are neither identical nor unequal).

Minor media are practices in a minor key. They introduce tonal altera-
tions that rearrange the regularities made familiar by the repetition of major
practices. They alter the mood or setting or emotional tenor of a practice by
insisting on attention to irregular variations. They are ways of remembering,
imagining, and accounting for things that do not get remembered, imagined,
or accounted for in the ordinary course. At the same time, they are things that
can be done every day. Although riyaaz is not the same as the making of a
work of art, minor media are the practices that can be stitched into the folds of
everyday riyaaz—observation, recording, alteration, restoration, arrangement,
rearrangement, ordering, disordering—one step at a time.
Minor media are not masterstrokes and do not seek to produce master-
pieces, and they are not necessarily worked on by great masters. What they do
allow is a dense layering (by one person or by many over lengths of time) of the
work of art with a multitude of surfaces that produce a context, rhythm, and
texture of accumulative annotations. It is this accumulation that occasionally
yields the sharp significance that is the unique property of a work done in a
minor key.
(6) INCREMENTAL RECORD: Building an archive of works incrementally (wheth-

er they were done in a minor key or a major one) creates a record of the gen-
erative life of a practice even as it is in process. A history of the movement of
a practice gets inscribed into the very terms of its expression, making visible
all of its ideas—threadbare, discarded, extended, or transformed. This not only
allows others to enter into the making of a work (if the work is, say, an extended
collaborative process) but offers them the opportunity to become familiar with
what has been said already. Of course, it also allows practitioners to revisit
ground that they may have already covered in order to mine fresh insights
or remind them of something that might have eluded their memory. The re-
cord and trace of a work’s incremental evolution is something that has to be
learned. It does not happen by itself.
(7) INTERLOCUTOR: The various kinds of accumulations that we have de-

scribed, produced by the actions made possible through riyaaz, can take the
form of complex assemblages. These assemblages demand mediation and

become arenas within which the artist acts as an interlocutor in order to fulfill
his or her mediatory role. If the work is a boat, the artist-interlocutor is a sailor.
An interlocutor is someone who speaks between different acts of speech by
translating, annotating, mediating, criticizing, interpreting, and extending the
contents of the different instances of articulation. The practitioner is not the
owner or possessor of a work of art. Instead, the artist takes custody of what
might have begun within his or her life, consciousness, and body, but the work
is already on its way out into the world. The artist takes responsibility for the
safety and integrity of the work during this voyage, making sure that it lands
on some more or less secure promontory of meaning before embarking on
other journeys.
(8) CONTINUOUS EXCHANGE: Neither the history of an idea nor the here and
now of the moment of its iteration occupies a space of privilege. The net effect
of the provenances, conversations, and the warp and woof of expressions and
meanings woven into a work can only give rise to a space of a continuous ex-
change between memory, reflection, articulation, and action in which everyone
concerned—practitioner, viewer, critic, curator, and enthusiast—contributes to
the production and circulation of ideas and knowledge, which are based on a
continuing encounter with the work of art. People learn from and with art, not
simply from the speech of teachers but from the ongoing history of exchanges
and conversations that embody the relationships and interactions that straddle
the work of art over time. School may be an initiatory process of significance
to some artists, though not to the development of others. Clearly, this process
of continuous exchange is the transposed articulation in another key or the
situation that we found ourselves embedded in critically at the beginning of
this “octave.”
CODA: THE WISHING TREE
It is said that on an unmapped island, sheltered in the curve of a hidden bay,

there stood a speaking tree. It was one of its kind. Some called it the waq-waq
tree, the tree of tongues; some called it the kalpataru, the tree of desires. If you
stood under the leaves of the speaking tree and named your desires, the wind

rustling in the leaves of the tree would echo each utterance and the wishes that
had names would come true.
The world is made as the things in it are named. Sometimes naming pre-
sumes knowledge; sometimes the name is a sign that we do not yet know what
we name. We trust the name to make do while we hold our knowledge in abey-
ance. The creation of the world, the sustained and sustaining desire for the
world, and the knowledge of the world—which is a tacit admission that we do
not know and can never know all of the world—all end in the same set of con-
sequences. The world and the things in it get reproduced by naming, knowing,
not knowing, and desiring. This is what keeps things alive, and the world gets
created anew with the expression of each desire. In this sense, an education for
art is a school (a time set aside) for the production of desires, a space for the
continuous generation of interpretive acts that also successfully constitute the
world or a world among many.
The artist by night, in dreams, recovers what the no-collar worker lost by day.

76 – 82 Wonderful Uncertainty 77
Wonderful Waiting For Rain
The first rain that ends a long, arid summer in a hot country quickens
Uncertainty the heartbeat, unleashes the sudden release of the scent of the waiting
earth, makes leaves, bark, tar and metal glow, cleans the light that falls
from the sky and transforms children and dogs into heroic shamans and
Raqs Media Collective rain-dancers. It is said that even un-romantic people find themselves
falling in love more often in the first week of the advancing monsoon.
What the first rain does to our senses, to our bodies, to our dry
and waiting minds is the sly undertaking of just a quiet shift, a barely
perceptible re-calibration of our appetite for life. The rain invokes some-
thing latent, something unformed, something hidden in us, and coaxes us
to give those musty, locked-in aspects of ourselves an airing. It awakens
sensations just under our skin, makes us remember snatches of forgotten
songs and stories, and allows us to see things in the shapes made by
clouds. We open windows, unlock doors and let the world in. Our dreams
turn vivid.
The best kind of art, like the rain, invokes a re-ordering of the
cognitive and sensory fields. It asks of its actual and potential publics
to open doors and windows and let other worlds in. This re-ordering —
subtle, slight, sure, sharp or soft as the case may be, whether it is a
desultory drizzle across a few frazzled or jaded synapses, or the neuro-
logical equivalent of an electrical thunderstorm and sudden downpour
— is why we bother with art in the first place. When it rains art, we do not
reach for umbrellas. It makes sense to let ourselves soak, as long as we
can, like children dancing in the season’s first rain.
However, unlike the process of paying attention to the environ-
ment within and around our bodies ( which we cannot avoid as long as
we are alive ), attending to art is not simply a matter of staying alive but a
highly contingent series of choices which remain acts of conscious will
even if they are rooted in our somatic instincts. Despite appearances
to the contrary, art neither kills us nor keeps us alive, but being in the
presence of art is sometimes a matter of fathoming exactly how alive we
are prepared to be.
76 – 82 Wonderful Uncertainty 77
Wonderful Waiting For Rain
The first rain that ends a long, arid summer in a hot country quickens
Uncertainty the heartbeat, unleashes the sudden release of the scent of the waiting
earth, makes leaves, bark, tar and metal glow, cleans the light that falls
from the sky and transforms children and dogs into heroic shamans and
Raqs Media Collective rain-dancers. It is said that even un-romantic people find themselves
falling in love more often in the first week of the advancing monsoon.
What the first rain does to our senses, to our bodies, to our dry
and waiting minds is the sly undertaking of just a quiet shift, a barely
perceptible re-calibration of our appetite for life. The rain invokes some-
thing latent, something unformed, something hidden in us, and coaxes us
to give those musty, locked-in aspects of ourselves an airing. It awakens
sensations just under our skin, makes us remember snatches of forgotten
songs and stories, and allows us to see things in the shapes made by
clouds. We open windows, unlock doors and let the world in. Our dreams
turn vivid.
The best kind of art, like the rain, invokes a re-ordering of the
cognitive and sensory fields. It asks of its actual and potential publics
to open doors and windows and let other worlds in. This re-ordering —
subtle, slight, sure, sharp or soft as the case may be, whether it is a
desultory drizzle across a few frazzled or jaded synapses, or the neuro-
logical equivalent of an electrical thunderstorm and sudden downpour
— is why we bother with art in the first place. When it rains art, we do not
reach for umbrellas. It makes sense to let ourselves soak, as long as we
can, like children dancing in the season’s first rain.
However, unlike the process of paying attention to the environ-
ment within and around our bodies ( which we cannot avoid as long as
we are alive ), attending to art is not simply a matter of staying alive but a
highly contingent series of choices which remain acts of conscious will
even if they are rooted in our somatic instincts. Despite appearances
to the contrary, art neither kills us nor keeps us alive, but being in the
presence of art is sometimes a matter of fathoming exactly how alive we
are prepared to be.
Raqs Media Collective 78 Wonderful Uncertainty 79
The Unknown Addressee know they have, in a language that they do not understand, without any
guarantee that the letter will either reach its intended addressee or be
This awareness of how alive we can become is a form of embodied, opened and read, if indeed it ever arrives.
sensate knowledge, which may or may not be expressible in words and Like Don Quixote asking Sancho Panza to deliver to an unknown
readily available concepts alone. It is what people ‘know’ they experience address a love letter written to a Dulcinea imagined only through desire, (1)
when they encounter an artwork, even if they are not always able to say or like the lonesome forest spirit trying to inveigle a passing rain cloud
what it is that they know. This knowing ‘non-knowledge’ may open a few into carrying messages to his distant lover in the opening canto of the
of the windows that have been closed by ordinary knowledge and so let classical Sanskrit verse-drama The Cloud Messenger, (2) artists often find
the rain come in. themselves having to rely on mediators to even begin to become visible
This process is not only about what people ‘take away’ from a to their publics, their distant Dulcineas.
work of art, but also about what they ‘bring forward’ in their experience
of it. Different publics bring their own dispositions, which may be as fresh,
original and unfamiliar as that which artists and curators purvey. Each The Illiterate Wanderers’ Revenge
may not know the gifts that the other brings to the encounter, and in each
case there may be discoveries waiting to be made in the surprises with How wonderful it could be if, like Sancho Panza, there were people
which the encounter itself is laden. who could return with replies from audiences, even through the opacity
The issue of not knowing enough about the ‘other’ cuts both ways. of a correspondence carried on to some extent deliberately at cross-
It is not just publics that do not know their artists or what lies hidden in purposes. Like a true and faithful lover, or the earth waiting for rain, the
a work of art ; artists are equally susceptible to not exhaustively knowing artist would then be susceptible to being transformed by the encounter
either their own work or sometimes, not even minimally knowing, their with his or her public, as much as the public itself might care to be altered
public. But the artist’s ‘non-knowledge’ ( echoing, but not necessarily by its encounter with his or her work. Then the work itself would become
identical to, the public’s own ‘knowing non-knowledge’ ) is not to be a portal, through which both artist and public passed in search of each
confused with ignorance. It is a generative, productive impulse that other and things other than those contained within the boundaries of their
propels a desire to communicate. It is what brings artists, curators and beings and practices.
their public to the same place. The point is not to render all things and ourselves transparent
The artist may or may not know everything that lies in their work and legible, but to insist on the interpretative worth of margins of error,
simply because they are as much an author as a medium for the channell- of accidents and serendipity, of uncanny resonances and speculative
ing of different currents and energies ( originating elsewhere in time and layering, of doubt and ambiguity as the foundations of an epistemology
space and coming to inhabit their practice ) of which he or she may as yet that does not have to ground itself in the dead habit of certainty.
be only dimly conscious.
The artist also may or may not know all the things that every
person will experience when they encounter his or her work ; people
bring their own histories, memories, scars and desires to bear on any
1. Our formulation of the unknown addressee owes a debt to Jacques Rancière’s
work that they encounter. An artist cannot possibly know what these may discussion of Cervantes’ handling of Don Quixote’s correspondence with his beloved
be ; in fact, when an artist works, he or she has little or no intimation of Dulcinea. See Jacques Rancière, ‘Althusser, Don Quixote and the State of the Text’.
The Flesh of Words : The Politics of Writing. Stanford University Press. 2004.
how members of the public will get to know themselves when they face pp. 136 – 138.
2. For the forest spirit’s ( yaksha ) request to a floating cloud to act as a
the work. The private language of the artist will never be the same as the messenger, see Meghadootam ( The Cloud Messenger ) a classical Sanskrit play
private language with which the work will be ‘read’ by its viewer. In this by Kalidasa ( c. 100 CE ). For a useful translation, see Kalidasa, Meghadootam :
A Rendering from the Sanskrit into Modern English. Rajendra Tandon ( trans. )
sense, the artist is like someone who writes a letter to a lover they do not Rupa & Co. 2007.
The Unknown Addressee know they have, in a language that they do not understand, without any
guarantee that the letter will either reach its intended addressee or be
This awareness of how alive we can become is a form of embodied, opened and read, if indeed it ever arrives.
sensate knowledge, which may or may not be expressible in words and Like Don Quixote asking Sancho Panza to deliver to an unknown
readily available concepts alone. It is what people ‘know’ they experience address a love letter written to a Dulcinea imagined only through desire, (1)
when they encounter an artwork, even if they are not always able to say or like the lonesome forest spirit trying to inveigle a passing rain cloud
what it is that they know. This knowing ‘non-knowledge’ may open a few into carrying messages to his distant lover in the opening canto of the
of the windows that have been closed by ordinary knowledge and so let classical Sanskrit verse-drama The Cloud Messenger, (2) artists often find
the rain come in. themselves having to rely on mediators to even begin to become visible
This process is not only about what people ‘take away’ from a to their publics, their distant Dulcineas.
work of art, but also about what they ‘bring forward’ in their experience
of it. Different publics bring their own dispositions, which may be as fresh,
original and unfamiliar as that which artists and curators purvey. Each The Illiterate Wanderers’ Revenge
may not know the gifts that the other brings to the encounter, and in each
case there may be discoveries waiting to be made in the surprises with How wonderful it could be if, like Sancho Panza, there were people
which the encounter itself is laden. who could return with replies from audiences, even through the opacity
The issue of not knowing enough about the ‘other’ cuts both ways. of a correspondence carried on to some extent deliberately at cross-
It is not just publics that do not know their artists or what lies hidden in purposes. Like a true and faithful lover, or the earth waiting for rain, the
a work of art ; artists are equally susceptible to not exhaustively knowing artist would then be susceptible to being transformed by the encounter
either their own work or sometimes, not even minimally knowing, their with his or her public, as much as the public itself might care to be altered
public. But the artist’s ‘non-knowledge’ ( echoing, but not necessarily by its encounter with his or her work. Then the work itself would become
identical to, the public’s own ‘knowing non-knowledge’ ) is not to be a portal, through which both artist and public passed in search of each
confused with ignorance. It is a generative, productive impulse that other and things other than those contained within the boundaries of their
propels a desire to communicate. It is what brings artists, curators and beings and practices.
their public to the same place. The point is not to render all things and ourselves transparent
The artist may or may not know everything that lies in their work and legible, but to insist on the interpretative worth of margins of error,
simply because they are as much an author as a medium for the channell- of accidents and serendipity, of uncanny resonances and speculative
ing of different currents and energies ( originating elsewhere in time and layering, of doubt and ambiguity as the foundations of an epistemology
space and coming to inhabit their practice ) of which he or she may as yet that does not have to ground itself in the dead habit of certainty.
be only dimly conscious.
The artist also may or may not know all the things that every
person will experience when they encounter his or her work ; people
bring their own histories, memories, scars and desires to bear on any
1. Our formulation of the unknown addressee owes a debt to Jacques Rancière’s
work that they encounter. An artist cannot possibly know what these may discussion of Cervantes’ handling of Don Quixote’s correspondence with his beloved
be ; in fact, when an artist works, he or she has little or no intimation of Dulcinea. See Jacques Rancière, ‘Althusser, Don Quixote and the State of the Text’.
The Flesh of Words : The Politics of Writing. Stanford University Press. 2004.
how members of the public will get to know themselves when they face pp. 136 – 138.
2. For the forest spirit’s ( yaksha ) request to a floating cloud to act as a
the work. The private language of the artist will never be the same as the messenger, see Meghadootam ( The Cloud Messenger ) a classical Sanskrit play
private language with which the work will be ‘read’ by its viewer. In this by Kalidasa ( c. 100 CE ). For a useful translation, see Kalidasa, Meghadootam :
A Rendering from the Sanskrit into Modern English. Rajendra Tandon ( trans. )
sense, the artist is like someone who writes a letter to a lover they do not Rupa & Co. 2007.
Nathaniel Katz, who worked as part of the education team on What is significant here is the desire to hold in abeyance the
the exhibition ‘The Rest of Now’ ( Manifesta 7, Bolzano, 2008 ), writes question — or the fact — of the intention of the artist, and hence to
in response to our query about his experience of ‘mediating’ an re-assert the authority of an exhibition. This frees the work of mediation
exhibition : (3) from being, at best, a supplement to the authorial or curatorial contribu-
tion. It makes it possible instead for the mediator to set in motion a series
I wanted to write again though also to maybe clarify, or of open-ended interpretative manoeuvres ( set up through an exchange
expand on an idea that came up during your visit. If you remember, while in which neither mediator, nor artist, nor curator, nor public have the final
you were giving your guided tour, I approached you to say that there word ), which seek to take a work of art or an exhibition ( and their public )
are some different attitudes toward mediation at an exhibition, and that into areas that may not necessarily have been anticipated by its creators
a ‘traditional’ guided tour is perhaps not necessary. The way I perceive or custodians.
the situation ( and this is by no means definitive or even correct ), there is This calls for the slow, deliberative prolongation of the interac-
one attitude toward mediation that views the role of the mediator as one tion between the artwork, its public and its critical milieu, which is not
who creates the necessary conditions for the visitor’s understanding and predicated on the instant processing of readily available information
engagement with the work. In this attitude, the intention of the artist takes alone. What it probably requires is the belated insertion of the category
supremacy [ over ] anything else, the purpose of mediation is to arrive at this of discursive and critical wonder ( which could be another tangential
intention ( albeit through perhaps non-frontal means ). understanding of the category of knowing non-knowledge that was
referred to earlier ), as a valid mode of orientating oneself towards a work
Another attitude toward mediation is that the artwork is a of art as opposed to the need simply to know. Wonder is not necessarily
catalyst for an engagement that takes place within the group and in conver- a retreat into ineffability. Rather, it can, in some ways, be a side step into
sation with the work. However, the intention of the artist is, in many ways, an eloquent and busy conversation founded on possibilities rather than
secondary, as the meaning that is generated from such an exchange is on certainties.
open-ended. My interest in this work lies in the potential that is created by A 1936 report, produced by a committee set up to examine the
an open-ended exchange within the context of art. This is the approach condition of museums in India, complained that the foremost museo-
that I have taken in my workshops at the exhibition. For me, the artwork, logical problem in India was the fact that vast hordes of illiterate people
curatorial concept and workshop structure are a context [ … ] in which to flocked to museums not to ‘know’ but to ‘wonder’ (4). In fact, the colloquial
have an entirely new generative experience. I view art mediation as creative Hindustani term for museum was ajaib-ghar or ‘house of wonders’. The
work, not as supplemental work. report concludes that the only way to improve museums and museum-
going and the appreciation of art and culture in India was to discourage
I guess that I felt it may be important to share this with you as the illiterate itinerant and make museums places in which to create the
I [ have ] often felt that the educational programmes at large exhibitions were appropriately ‘aware’ modern subjects — the projected future cognos-
treated as important but not given the same level of importance as, say, the centi. Since that day, museums in India have become sepulchral. The
artists. It created an unfortunate hierarchy, given that those engaged in living breath of disorderly, ill-informed, wondering and wandering visitors,
mediation are those with the largest amount of contact ( and most impact ) who walked in and out of galleries as freely as they walked in and out of
with the visitor to the exhibition and with their experience of the exhibition.
For me, this is a shame, a missed opportunity to really rethink the way in 4. For a discussion of museums and museum-going in colonial India, see
Museums of India ( the first report on Indian Museums ) prepared by S.F. Markham
which we interact with an art exhibition. ( Empire Secretary of the Museum Association ) and H. Hargreaves ( Director General,
Archaeological Survey of India ). The report was published in 1936. For an interesting
discussion and citation of Markham and Hargreaves’ report, see Vidya Shivdas,
‘National Gallery of Modern Art : Museums and the Making of National Art’, in Shivaji
3. Personal correspondence with Nathaniel Katz, art mediator, Manifesta 7 Panikkar, Parul Dave Mukherji and Deeptha Achar ( eds. ), Towards a New Art
Education Department, 2008. History : Studies in Indian Art. DK Print World. 2004.
Nathaniel Katz, who worked as part of the education team on What is significant here is the desire to hold in abeyance the
the exhibition ‘The Rest of Now’ ( Manifesta 7, Bolzano, 2008 ), writes question — or the fact — of the intention of the artist, and hence to
in response to our query about his experience of ‘mediating’ an re-assert the authority of an exhibition. This frees the work of mediation
exhibition : (3) from being, at best, a supplement to the authorial or curatorial contribu-
tion. It makes it possible instead for the mediator to set in motion a series
I wanted to write again though also to maybe clarify, or of open-ended interpretative manoeuvres ( set up through an exchange
expand on an idea that came up during your visit. If you remember, while in which neither mediator, nor artist, nor curator, nor public have the final
you were giving your guided tour, I approached you to say that there word ), which seek to take a work of art or an exhibition ( and their public )
are some different attitudes toward mediation at an exhibition, and that into areas that may not necessarily have been anticipated by its creators
a ‘traditional’ guided tour is perhaps not necessary. The way I perceive or custodians.
the situation ( and this is by no means definitive or even correct ), there is This calls for the slow, deliberative prolongation of the interac-
one attitude toward mediation that views the role of the mediator as one tion between the artwork, its public and its critical milieu, which is not
who creates the necessary conditions for the visitor’s understanding and predicated on the instant processing of readily available information
engagement with the work. In this attitude, the intention of the artist takes alone. What it probably requires is the belated insertion of the category
supremacy [ over ] anything else, the purpose of mediation is to arrive at this of discursive and critical wonder ( which could be another tangential
intention ( albeit through perhaps non-frontal means ). understanding of the category of knowing non-knowledge that was
referred to earlier ), as a valid mode of orientating oneself towards a work
Another attitude toward mediation is that the artwork is a of art as opposed to the need simply to know. Wonder is not necessarily
catalyst for an engagement that takes place within the group and in conver- a retreat into ineffability. Rather, it can, in some ways, be a side step into
sation with the work. However, the intention of the artist is, in many ways, an eloquent and busy conversation founded on possibilities rather than
secondary, as the meaning that is generated from such an exchange is on certainties.
open-ended. My interest in this work lies in the potential that is created by A 1936 report, produced by a committee set up to examine the
an open-ended exchange within the context of art. This is the approach condition of museums in India, complained that the foremost museo-
that I have taken in my workshops at the exhibition. For me, the artwork, logical problem in India was the fact that vast hordes of illiterate people
curatorial concept and workshop structure are a context [ … ] in which to flocked to museums not to ‘know’ but to ‘wonder’ (4). In fact, the colloquial
have an entirely new generative experience. I view art mediation as creative Hindustani term for museum was ajaib-ghar or ‘house of wonders’. The
work, not as supplemental work. report concludes that the only way to improve museums and museum-
going and the appreciation of art and culture in India was to discourage
I guess that I felt it may be important to share this with you as the illiterate itinerant and make museums places in which to create the
I [ have ] often felt that the educational programmes at large exhibitions were appropriately ‘aware’ modern subjects — the projected future cognos-
treated as important but not given the same level of importance as, say, the centi. Since that day, museums in India have become sepulchral. The
artists. It created an unfortunate hierarchy, given that those engaged in living breath of disorderly, ill-informed, wondering and wandering visitors,
mediation are those with the largest amount of contact ( and most impact ) who walked in and out of galleries as freely as they walked in and out of
with the visitor to the exhibition and with their experience of the exhibition.
For me, this is a shame, a missed opportunity to really rethink the way in 4. For a discussion of museums and museum-going in colonial India, see
Museums of India ( the first report on Indian Museums ) prepared by S.F. Markham
which we interact with an art exhibition. ( Empire Secretary of the Museum Association ) and H. Hargreaves ( Director General,
Archaeological Survey of India ). The report was published in 1936. For an interesting
discussion and citation of Markham and Hargreaves’ report, see Vidya Shivdas,
‘National Gallery of Modern Art : Museums and the Making of National Art’, in Shivaji
3. Personal correspondence with Nathaniel Katz, art mediator, Manifesta 7 Panikkar, Parul Dave Mukherji and Deeptha Achar ( eds. ), Towards a New Art
Education Department, 2008. History : Studies in Indian Art. DK Print World. 2004.
Raqs Media Collective 82 83 – 96
competing knowledge systems and epistemic frames, has given way to

the hush of empty halls and display spaces.
Education Aesthetics
When we pause to consider the educational turn in contemporary
art, we nurture the hope that the life-giving rain, which washes away Andrea Phillips
certainty, be given its due. Getting wet in the rain was never as welcome
as it is today.
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Jeebesh Bagchi:
Welcome everyone, to the last panel. We’ve named this panel, ‘Has the moment of the
contemporary come and gone?’ When Parul invited us to do a panel at this fair we thought we
could do a panel on something that we have been discussing with many of our friends from
many parts of the world over the last two years, looking at many of the exhibitions;; that the
idea of the contemporary in contemporary art is under some kind of pressure. And given the
last few years of turmoil and turbulences in the world, the idea of the contemporary is up for
reevaluation. We thought it would be a good idea to revisit the idea of the contemporary in
the construction of contemporary art and see where we go from there. I’m Jeebesh from
Raqs, with me is Shuddha, and Monica is here amongst the audience. We have two panelists,
Daniela Zyman, Chief Curator from Thyssen-Bornemisza collection in Vienna, and Ravi
Sundaram, our colleague at Sarai-CSDS. I’ll introduce them and the work they do soon. They
will speak for 15-20 min. I’ll give a short introduction about why and how we would locate the
problem and the way the three of us in Raqs have framed it, and they will respond from their
own vantage points. Shuddha will give a brief comment on them, after which we’ll open it up
for public discussion. It will be crisp do not worry. By five it will be over.
The idea of ‘contemporary’ in contemporary art, and we can mark it as the last 20 years,
becomes the sign under which a lot of art—and art institutional practices—happens. We can
mark certain trajectories within it. Lets borrow a soon to-be-published phrase from a friend
and film historian Kaushik Bhowmik, ‘insurrection of capital’. Looking over the last 20 years,
or just before that, we see some kind of insurrection of capital over life, and over art. There
is a body of reading of contemporary art from many sites, from Hal Foster to all kinds of
critical voices, where they see a certain complicity and suspicion around the contemporary as
being a big part of this insurrection of capital to dominate art, and dominate life. This
insurrection then marks the contemporary as a site of contamination in many such accounts.
Contamination takes us away from our criticality regarding art, our ability to produce art as a
site of conversation, discord, dissensus, and complicity, pushes us towards a discourse of
mere innovation, spectatorship, publicity, and a performance of a certain kind which is
supposed to scale up, be known, seen, and produced. This is, broadly, the prevalent
discussion around the contemporary. So there is a body of thinking that goes: let us rescue
art from the contemporary. The mission would be: let us rescue art from the insurrection of
capital. So this is its own thing, but within it there is something else that happens, there is a
series of other trajectories.
One trajectory is very clear and particularly grounded that Rem Koolhaas (OMA) has shown
through his analysis. It is that in the last 20 years, until 2007, there has been a 90% increase
in museum spaces in the world. So here you have, suddenly, an expansion that is
unprecedented, unknown, and that is only until 2007—the four museums that we have in Delhi
since then are not part of this calculation. Galleries are not part of this calculation. The
biennales are not part of this calculation, and thousands of millions of temporary spaces
where [art is] produced are not part of this calculation. So we have a sudden unprecedented
proliferation, a proliferation that is almost like the mobile telephonic proliferation after the
landline, over the last 10 years. We’re talking about this kind of proliferation, under the sign
in which the contemporary is produced. So we have this proliferation, we have this
insurrection of capital and then the third sign – here we’re borrowing from a just-published
essay by Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, a beautiful essay called The Laughing Performer—where he
argues on this question of the stage and the footlights. For a certain theatricality of life you
produce—you need—the stage and the footlight, and around the carnival the footlight
dissolves. But according to Sibaji’s argument, there is an overflow in life that actually
dissolves the footlight. I think that with the proliferation around the last 20 years, and the
multiple sites of claim to contemporary art, the idea of the contemporary produces an
important question around time, in terms of what kind of a disjointed time is produced;; the
linear time of progress of capital gets kind of broken – fairly broken – now. So what we have
is a fractured idea of time, which allows for a multiple entry points in this proliferating
entropy.
So we have the footlights demarcating the performance or art or theatre or any politics from
its spectator getting increasingly dissolved, and find that it gets more and more difficult to
engage with the overflow that is produced. What we have is a certain sign under the last 20
years that is being produced and we have counter signs, which produce a different optic and a
different kind of difficulty in reading this period. In the last 1 or 2 years we have had another
form of insurrection, and the confidence of the last 20 years of capital-regulated life is over,
in some form. So if we mark the last 20 years, the suspicion of the last 20 years, or the
spectatorial celebration of the last 20 years within signs that it was an insurrection of capital,
of life and of art, what we get is a very interesting situation to rethink that period. This decade
will be a very interesting time, where we will not be able to take for granted the suspicions
and anxieties and forms of the last two decades, and maybe even the way we produced art,
as also a certain criticality around art. A critique of spectacle may not be sufficient, given that
something else has emerged—another form of being in the world. And this is what we thought
this panel could perhaps reflect on.
Our first speaker is Daniela Zyman. She has, over the last 15-20 years, seen most of the
minor and major exhibitions in the world, and over the last 10 years she has tried to
institutionally construct the Thyssen-Bornermisza Art Foundation, where one can visit the
conceptions of what would constitute an art practice, how you give meaning to art and what
are the goals of institutions. After Danto on Warhol, we have ideas of institutions as becoming
very crucial to the production of meaning in art, but she has a different reading of the
problematic of the institution. We’ll first have her talking about the meaning of the institution,
and then we’ll have Ravi, who will talk about the formation of new publics and the production
that we have been talking about here—proliferating subterranean structures of new life. After
that Shuddha will make some commentary.
Daniela Zyman:
Thank you Jeebesh. That was a great introduction. We promised to have a lively panel, so I
will maybe not use up all of my 10-15 min, and make a shorter statement so that we might
have a bit of ping pong. I’d like to use 3-4 minutes, which might be sufficient to make my first
point, to talk about two moments that I find important in thinking about the contemporary.
One is to maybe think about what is the contemporary, and what is the contemporary within
the field of art? And to me, already, the field of art , the space of art, kind of gives a direction
where I would like to posit the contemporary. I think it is a field—a generative field—that
comprises works and practices, institutions, and their critiques and their embodiments, but is
mainly a generative field. A field that kind of produces, and therefore produces the new, and
in doing that obviously reviews the “all”, includes the “all”, critiques the “all”—but its
generative potential, its ability and hunger for the new is obviously what I consider as being
important in our discussion here. So in that sense I would say, obviously the contemporary is
not gone. There is a mechanism within the field, within the avant-gardistic model, which
we’re still reproducing. So within the field the generative model of the space of art and the
field of art is that which produces, and will continuously produce, the contemporary. So that is
my first remark.
My second one is maybe to come back to the critique of the spectacle. How do we appreciate
art, how do we think about art? I think one of the important optical devices and framing
devices, in understanding our relationship to art, is obviously the frame. The frame has had
an incredible history from being four planks of wood that you build together to differentiate
the world of the aesthetic from its surrounding. But it has created an incredible apparatus of
mechanisms and institutions of differentiation. What I mean by that is, if you think for a
moment of lining up in front of a museum, buying a ticket, the entrance hall, the museum
lighting, the colour of the walls, all these moments of framings have become the ways we
today experience art, the production of art, the display of art, the location of art and it is
obviously the same in the visual arts or the performing arts. These sorts of framing devices
are extremely, extremely powerful. Even to the degree that the one institution or the one
moment in which one would think the frame would lose its relevance—namely public art—has
its own institutions and frames.
So what does that produce? The frame actually produces the fact that our encounters with art
are always safe. They always have the framing apparatus that tells us whatever happens we’ll
not be hurt, we won’t be damaged by our experience. We will always be within the safe
moment of the contemporary, of the now. And so to me that is kind of the counter movement
to the generative flow of the art field—the powers of framing, the power of the institution over
the artistic control that defines our ways and our relationship to it. Obviously all these
moments of framing create perhaps for me the feeling that we see things as being gone, as
already known and domesticated, or stage-set. So all these expansionist moments that you
have within artistic practice, that is, the blurring between art and life, art and its forms of
manifestations, all are kind of put into its framing moments, and therefore our frustration with
experiencing them and with possibly creating something that might be beyond these forms
and tools of communication.
Shuddhabrata Sengupta:
I think Daniela you’ve introduced a very interesting provocation by saying that it’s a question
of how we frame the moment that actually determines our stances vis-a-vis the problematic
of the contemporary. In our thinking and work with the questions of time, which informs a lot
of our practice, one of the ways in which we’ve thought about the question of lets say a word
like samay, which is the Sanskrit and also other Indian language word for time, actually
stands for the ability to perceive that someone is standing with you. So in a sense the frame
that you are in is already filled with the presence of others and what they bring to life. So in
that sense I don’t think that you can have a framing of the contemporary that is based on a
monadic concept of some kind of solitary insertion into the contemporary, into culture, but
more constant recognition of the fact that the time of the now is always the time of some
other who shares your time and that is why they are contemporary with you. And that
question of the sharing, the shared inhabitation of time, leads one to think of different
registers of temporal existence because I think that part of the problem of why we all chafe at
the edges of contemporaneity is because we assume that contemporaneity has a certain
single direction and a certain single velocity. Whereas it may be possible for us to think of
these inhabitations of shared moments of time leading to movements in very different
directions and at different speeds. So much so that even within the body itself, within a single
individual, exist different registers and different kinds of velocities. The velocity of waking up
in the morning is different from the velocity of being exhausted after a day’s labour, and
those are two different registers of contemporaneity that even occur within a single individual.
Now if that occurs within an individual then I suppose that if one generalises that to the art
system, we are already faced with the fact that we are dealing with an ecology where various
different kinds of practices produce their own rhythmical patterns, produce their own
economies of attention. Such that some things demand a much longer, slower duration of
attention, some things can be fleeting and ephemeral and that these ultimately face the same
public which is asked to respond in various different ways to the shared moment of time. And
part of the institutional crisis of the contemporary may be arising out of a willful selection of
certain temporal patterns and a rejection of other temporal patterns. And perhaps a return to
the contemporaneity of contemporaneity would be to suggest that the insurrection of capital
that Jeebesh invoked, primarily erodes certain temporal registers.
I’ll close for now with one very brief remark of a news item that I read today, which is quite
remarkable: The honourable minister of the interior of the union of India, Mr. P
Chidambaram, made perhaps the most succinct comment on culture and cultural policy
recently at a forum called the northeastern business support forum, where he talked about
the fact that there is a product of building the modern state, which requires mines and mining
and all those who resist mines and mining, lets say in the northeast of India, are instances of
a counter culture. Then he goes on to say counter culture belongs in museums because
counter culture is dead. So in a sense, he was saying two very interesting things. One he was
saying that museums are repositories of dead culture, and second: that any movement to
resist the certain velocity of let’s say a mining corporation’s take-over of an entire form of life
is the instance of the modern state and therefore any voice that talks about it is counter
culture. Its interesting that he implicates the fact that the project of the mining corporation
backed modern state is actually culture. So now we know that the museums are in the state
that they are in because the government clearly believes that this is dead culture and it
doesn’t require anything. So this presumes a certain different valance of two different kinds of
living with time, and which share the same moment so they therefore are contemporary with
each other, one is culture, can belong to the mines and the other is counter culture and must
belong to the museum.
Jeebesh:
Ravi Sundaram we've known and worked with now for twelve years. Ravi is primarily a
theoretician of urbanism and media. His book Pirate Modernity is one of those rare instances
where a very quirky media scholarship meets a very acute urbanist. So in a sense, now in an
art context, Ravi may produce a little bit of provocative reading coming from a rereading of
the media and the contemporary, and that may help us relook the highly intensive space of
the art fair.
Ravi Sundaram:
What I’m going to do is open up the concept of the contemporary. Why are we discussing
this? I think it’s a kind of pressure to name the present. We need a name for the present. And
that is where most of these debates have historically emerged. In the 19th to early 20th
century, it was the whole concept of modernity right to the Second World War was the idea of
modernity. Since the 2nd World War and really post 1968, the whole debate on the
contemporary has taken a new register. What I’m going to do is quickly go over some of the
questions, because they are important questions. The debate of the contemporary has
paralleled the shift in art. It takes a very interesting parallel all the way through the 19th
century.
I want to start with something Adorno wrote in 1969, a year after the events of 1968. The
year Adorno died. It is a very famous quote: ‘It is self-evident that there is nothing
concerning art that is self-evident anymore. Not its inner life. Not its relationship to the world.
Not even its right to exist. In short, nothing.’ Now, as the critic Hal Foster points out, this is an
end that seems premature, because after this is really when you have the real take-off. After
the Documenta, and the series of events that came. And actually it fitted so many of Adorno’s
melancholic, really melancholic predictions of that time. However what I want to say is 30
years later Adorno’s intimation of a conceptual shift should be put in perspective. It’s been a
long time since he wrote this. Many people criticised him in the 70s. Let’s get back to this.
Foster, himself once associated with Art in America, suggested today that there is nothing
conceptual about contemporary art today, it has no privileged purchase on the present more
than any other phenomenon. So what Foster is saying is that we are kind of living in a kind of
perpetual aftermath. That is it’s a perpetual aftermath. And this aftermath includes the crisis
of modernism, the decline of the historical avant-garde, the conceptual attack on the historical
form of the museum. So the contemporary for him—and this captures a kind of melancholic
take on the new shift—is really a kind of living-on. Time is that of just living-on, a present
without history. And the main responses, because living on are trauma, spectrality. So Foster
writes this, just before the boom, the big boom that Jeebesh has spoken about, the so called
insurrection of capital in world capitalism. And for some years this is actually forgotten. Now,
with the decisive global downturn and the crisis of Western capitalism, I think the modern of
contemporaneity as living-on, may stage a comeback. But one other question for us, and it is
an important question, is—Is living-on a conceptual reference for the new upstarts in world
capitalism? What about us in Asia? Here we have a civic culture that was throttled and
bureaucratised by the Indian and Chinese regimes. In place of melancholia and economic
crisis we have the delirium of the Asian boom. The nervous excitement of the latecomer,
these are kind of two force fields if you like.
So what of the contemporary? What is the report card of the idea of the contemporary after
the western millennium? Which is clearly playing out, whose end is clearly playing out before
it arrives. 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, the long phase is coming to an end. What
does it mean to be contemporary after the great archive of modernity and the ideas of
contemporary are slowly playing out? Now I want to quickly set up the 3 models of
contemporaneity that come up in the 20th century, all of which I want to say make little sense
today. The dominant model is a model that many artists are aware of in their art practice,
which is the model of the untimely. This comes up first in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. So
what Nietzsche says is, he postulates a kind of untimeliness, a kind of being out of joint with
time, against what he calls the historical fever of modernity. So this fever is in
accommodation with the present, and to be contemporary is to be out of joint with the
present. And it is precisely this disconnection, anachronism, being out of time—you have to be
out of time—and it is by being out of time and by being out of joint that you can actually
perceive things that others cannot. So in short, those who are tied to the epoch, particularly
to its historical fever, are not contemporaries. Precisely because they cannot manage this
notion of being joined and yet not joined.
The second model of the contemporary has been proposed recently by the philosopher
Giorgio Agamben. Agamben sets up this notion of the contemporary where really it’s not the
present but it is an attitude towards the present. He says interestingly, those who can call
themselves contemporary are those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights
of the century but who manage to get glimpse of the shadows of the century. So it’s a
perception of darkness. It’s an attitude. It’s really not about the new. It’s not necessarily
about being out of time, it’s a perception of darkness. So what Agamben does is take a very
well known poem called Vek written by the poet Osip Mandelstam in the 1920s. So it is in
Mandelstam’s absolutely brilliant dramatic poem where he says this century, this brutal
century, is like a beast. He’s writing this around the Russian revolution, 1922 I think. It’s a
long poem. Mandelstam says: This century is like a beast. It’s conjoined with the body of the
artist and the poet and it immediately demands a response from the thinker and the artist.
And the century has a broken backbone. This is the shattered backbone which is the
contemporary. Agamben takes this poem, and from here he proposes a model for the
contemporary which is a notion of broken time. Broken time demands a specific response,
which is our time, which is the present, is actually very distant. It cannot reach us, its
backbone is broken, and we are – that is the thinker, the artist, the practitioner – at this point
of the fracture of time. It’s really not about newness. To be contemporary is not to intimate
the new, but a perception of this crisis. So it’s not a chronological time. You are urging. You
are pressing. Untimeliness, and here he goes back to Nietzsche, is a perception of darkness.
So what he is really doing is uniting three historical debates on the contemporary – after
Agamben the debate on contemporary has been on hold. So he’s taking three elements, that
of the untimely by Nietzsche, that of the Archaic which has been there through 20th century
art, and his model of the inversion of darkness and light. It’s not a perception of light, its not
an intimation of the new, it’s not about alterity as we always thought about. It’s an
understanding of darkness. It is a model for the world where the archive, you can say the
western millennium, the backbone has been shattered. It is a model of contemporary at the
boundary of the end.
So what we need to do probably is to shift away from this. I think the idea of the
contemporary needs a different debate from the melodrama of the western decline and the
Asian arrival. If you take Asia, the great brutal legacy has been that of nationalism, where
you have an independent cultural public which has been still-born for many decades after
independence. So the state, this model, our model, sought to monopolise almost all
institutions of cultural production, set up an elaborate patronage system, many of which
continue to wreck our lives in many ways, even today. The worst legacy of this rhetoric of
nationalism, expressed at all times by right and by left, has been a deep suspicion of the
other and a brutal intolerance of all difference. And this continues even during the insurrection
of capital—you have many times, you have insurrection of capital, you have events like this.
This was our past, this is our present, and this will continue.
Here is the puzzle—and this is a real puzzle when you talk about the contemporary: The
traditional Western references of cultural production do not exist in Asia;; they have not
existed and do not exist. And that is very useful and interesting. What you have are parallel
potentialities in a vibrant cultural landscape. We don’t have the old theological references that
Agamben talks about. We do not have the 19th century debates on modernity. What you have
is a series of radical potentialities. Within this potentiality is the transformation of the old
realm—and this is what I want to talk about in a little bit of detail—that used to be called the
population, the so called mass of the people, who are enumerated, who are governed by the
state. This realm has been radically transformed in the last decade by the transformation of
what I call the media public. This population is a post-media population, which is no longer a
mass to be governed, to be enumerated. So what you have is a radical expansion of the
media infrastructure, along with the technological infrastructure which is the most substantial
of our time, the majority of our population—this extremely unequal and poor population—has
mobile phones;; they have some access to technology. More people today in India access,
circulate technological media than ever before. So in this post media present, the old zone of
the people has mutated into archivists, archeologists, media producers, event instigators,
producing event scenes, artists, destroyers of the old secrets of power. So if you have the old
model of the media, you have the censorship regime, you have the import export system,
controlling cultural production. You have representational formats, film studios, state radio,
newspaper houses. So in this model the population simply receives media. There were
institutions that managed culture and then there was a model of governance. I think this
model has collapsed. So what you have is a large domain of the population that is a source of
all kinds of new potentialities of technological culture. This is a productive, not a passive body,
an archive of surprises, and deeply frustrating to power.
What you have is that the historical archive fever of modernity, which would be collectors,
museums, has shifted to this large body that is the population itself. Here we are constant
archivists and curators in our own lives. In 2000, Lev Manovich had suggested that digital
culture was primarily cinematographic in appearance, and digitally and materially driven by
software. Despite this, in South Asia if you see the cell phone, which is really an archival
device, is in the number of hundreds of millions. If you look at the phone screen, it draws
from running text display, photography, game design, video. The object itself carries links
with the analog transmitter. But it is much more;; it has become a transmitter and a media
production device. Millions of people have become amateur photographers, videographers,
and artists for the first time. So what you have is a vast archive of images, text, sounds etc
produced by subordinate populations who had never had an entry into this world. What this
means at a more theoretical level is that the political itself has been fundamentally
transformed in the last decade, the so called insurrection of capital. If you take Tahrir Square,
the Syrian protest, the radical movement intimated by the Occupy movement worldwide, I
think the terms of the contemporary can no longer be in the old terms that started from the
19th century, the post 1968 debate on the contemporary, which is really the playing out of the
Western century. We are moving well beyond the time after. The old artist-archivist,
ethnographer, archeologist is now beyond reference to any particular body of work, or
moment, or medium or movement. Rosalind Krauss in A Post Medium Condition infers
precisely to the criticism of new installation art. We are well beyond those debates. For us this
is also a way of stepping away from the dividing line between modernism and contemporary
art to posit a standpoint that is indifferent to a before and after. There is no before and after.
The untimely is not simply a posture or a being out of joint with history, or a created
disjunction. We have to put to work a relationship between different times. It’s a work of
creative intervention. So what for Foster was the time after modernity has become the now
time, not a melancholic paralyzing present without the guarantees of histories, but I think a
productive and fearful one, but ours to engage with.
Jeebesh:
Thank you Ravi, for a very interesting provocation about the untimely. We have been working
for some time on this word atithi. We did some philological tracing of atithi with Sibaji, who I
also mentioned earlier. One of the hunches we made is that it is ‘untimely’, atithi the word
gestures to ‘off’, in the sense of off-date. So someone who comes uninvited is also untimely.
The untimely, then, may be very close to you in daily life;; it may not be a category that one
has to discover by reading Nietzsche and Agamben, but simply by being attentive to words
that surround us. The fear of atithi is the fear of the stranger is the fear of the urban life itself.
So untimely may be something that is continuously there and continuously feared. And if you
have to do away with the breakdown of the after and before, then maybe some interesting
possibility opens up.
Ravi's reading of Agamben’s Darkness reminded me of Third Man by Carol Reed. There is this
brilliant dialogue when he is under the rains in Vienna and he is asked—he is an evil person,
he is a man of darkness—and he is asked what is his motivation, and he laughs and says,
‘Look at Italy: they had bloodshed, violence, turbulence and what did they produce?
Michelangelo. And look at Switzerland: they had peace for 500 years, and what did they
produce? The cuckoo clock.’ So maybe in our re-reading of Darkness and doing away with
after and before time, we may come to a very interesting re-reading of the contemporary
itself. I’ll just take one small response from Daniela on the act and difficulty of framing in the
present volume and expansion of artistic production, and then take all your questions.
Daniela:
I want to comment on the untimely, which has inspired a lot of people. Especially in the
context of art. Isn’t the difficulty of defining the contemporary, the moment of the present,
the untimeliness of art itself? Its effect, which is way beyond its own moment and time of
creation? We can go around the Art Fair looking at a number of works that deal with
modernity, trying to understand or grasp, or put in frame or establish a relationship of
timeliness between what in some ways can be considered a closed episode. You see that all
the time. When does Nietzsche’s timeliness arrive? Or has it already arrived? And so on. I
really like this essay by Jalal Toufic. Jalal speaks of untimely collaborations because so many
artists are so much ahead of their time that other artists had to pick them up, piggy-back
them to make them be heard in the present.
Another cursory remark is about the isolationary moment of the contemporary. In German
the word for the contemporary is Zeitgenössische. But the Zeit in Zeitgenossenschaft is the
community of the contemporary. That kind of community, camaraderie, of being in a time
along with other cultural and non-cultural producers is something we should try to explore
much further. Possibly the time has come where that will be much more possible as we see it
today, as certain mental borders and frames are breaking down, finally. Geographies are
opening up, the map of the world is changing and these communities can rearrange
themselves along different time zones and geographic constellations. That is something we
should look forward to.
Shuddhabrata:
To get back to this question of the discomfort with the contemporary, because the framing of
the question ‘has the time of the contemporary come and gone?’ seems to indicate a certain
anxiety about the presence of the contemporary in the world of artistic production. We know
that in the past few spectacular exhibitions, we have witnessed this discomfort in a restoration
of certainties. The last Venice Biennale and several other exhibitions have actually tried to
attempt to restore the certainties that contemporality distracted us from. Perhaps that has to
do with the fact that the production of value, and the production of an aura around legitimising
subjects of artistic production, can be very nicely segued into a privileging of timelessness,
that which is beyond an outside time. So timeless aesthetic values on the one hand, or an
enslavement to timeliness, to topicality and relevance, on the other. Whereas the untimely
seems to be some third order which continues to surprise us by its refusal, on the one hand,
to be only topical, and on the other, to take for itself the position of being beyond time and
space. In that sense the untimely is the stranger, the atithi or the sudden guest in our times
and is the one that produces that disturbance and that sense of the untimely. So I think that
the discomfort that the world that the artistic system sometimes feels with contemporary art
is something like the discomfort that hosts sometimes feel with untimely guests. But untimely
guests never go away, they keep returning. In that sense I don’t think that the discomfort will
allow itself to woo over the untimely guest.
Jeebesh:
We have 15 minutes for questions.
Floor:
By placing and producing, as spectacle or work that is a product of the time that he is
witnessing, is this untimely guest that power which can catalyze change? What I am asking is,
that by producing a work, does he have the ability to disturb the present in a way that can
wake the public up? In a day with all the media and ways of communicating, people are out of
touch with society, and there needs to be a certain element of grotesque in contemporary art
to wake people up to realise the conditions that they have been put in.
Jeebesh:
Often the subjectivity that is associated with public—alineation, sleepiness, exhaustion—
actually takes away from the idea of the public. Through a certain inversion, Ravi, you
produce a different idea of a very wakeful public, maybe more wakeful the artistic practice
would sometimes acknowledge. I would be curious about your response.
Ravi:
The way that I would look at the untimely is... firstly what I’m arguing is, you have a debate
on the untimely that begins in the 19th century, that goes through the 20th century, and
resurfaces periodically. It is reflected in this whole debate on modernity and newness of the
19th century right up to newly independent nations etc. What I think today what's most
interesting is we have a situation… where we need to reflect. What does it mean to be
untimely? Conceptually you have to think more about the untimely: untimely to what? If not
to history—that is not very interesting anymore. I think there we are actually on the border of
something else. This is a time that has no name. And that is the most exciting thing about it.
It is terrifying and exciting at the same time. Which means: we may well be entering an era
that the entire archive, not just of modernity, modernism, the avant-garde… We don’t know
where we’re going to go 10 years later. If you see the Agamben essay, it is like the last
essay, we can’t say anything more anymore. And that I think is the most interesting basis for
thinking about the present. It’s not about newness anymore. I think there the intervention
becomes very, very interesting. The notion of politics becomes very, very interesting.
Because in the past politics needed to have a name. It needed to be referenced in terms of
an archive of names. [gap] I think all these interventions will spring forth in a range of
potentialities. We can call it the untimely, I’m okay with that. I think the terms of the untimely
have to be opened up, and this opening up will carry on into the next decade and it’s a very
good time to open it up.
I think capital will frame this historically, will always try to frame the contemporary as it does
with politics. But I think today capital is weaker than it ever was before. What does criticality
mean today? Can we open up the terms? These are all open questions. These are terms for
art, these are terms of politics too. What does it mean to do politics today?
Shuddhabrata:
I think what is very interesting is the language of the act. That is a suggestion of the untimely.
Protests and petitions are always timely. They beseech that which already exists to be
something else. Whereas the act is not interested in protest or petition, it acts. There was an
interesting situation at the recent Jaipur Literary festival: There was no protest and no
petition;; there was an act. And the untimeliness of the act is was what disturbed the scene.
Floor | Alistair Hicks:
Ravi, I’m fascinated by your language about your new concept of time because to me it
sounds very theological.
Floor | Geeta Kapur:
I got the exact opposite from the proposal just made by the questioner. Ravi, I followed the
trajectory of your argument with a kind of necessarily produced anxiety. And that is one of
the intentions, that you go through your argument producing a certain anxiety about all
categories that we’ve worked with—certainly history and most certainly progress, certainly
nationalism and most certainly the state. So it produces a state of the untimely, obviously
creating a state of uncertainty. I’m surprised at the end of it—I made a note, a kind of
conclusive note on what you’d said—it seemed to be, unfortunately to the argument, simply a
polemical point. That you actually pose or position Agamben’s notion of broken time brought
forth so beautifully by Mandelstam’s poem... that melancholy is in some ways the melancholy
of history itself, and what you do in relationship to it is a strict polemical refusal or refuting.
What you do is speak of subaltern agency, you speak of a wakeful public, you speak of
crowds and mobility, and you could just as well have spoken of the multitudes. And then
therefore created a state of anarchy and that is not as interesting...
Ravi:
Thank you Geeta. I think what Agamben is trying to do, what is interesting about the essay, is
that he is trying to assemble three elements. So the intervention is not chronological. There is
no relationship with history. It is within the context of his argument that he says explicitly that
this is not a chronological intervention and the whole idea of taking Mandelstam was to link
the two centuries not chronologically but in terms of a kind of traumatic suture between the
artist, the thinker, and this epoch, if you like. So it is not chronological. It is an urgency
through which you are able to perceive not just darkness but elements of light that may
emerge. It is linked, I think, to Benjamin’s last thesis. He doesn’t say it but Agamben reads
Benjamin a lot, so that’s my sense.
Now it wasn’t polemical at all. My own sense of it is that the debate on the contemporary in
the West has run its course. Where else do you go from here? What else do you flag?
Nietzsche was critical of history. This whole debate on newness. Agamben goes all the way to
the end. Beyond this I don’t see the debate getting any more interesting. What is interesting
for me is today for the first time in the last 10-15 years, with the deep capitalist crisis
worldwide, the so called rise of Asia you actually have the time for a new debate on what we
are, what is politics. It is happening all over the world. I think the now-time is not really a
time afterwards. What happens after modernism? I think we really need to think through the
concepts and open up new concepts. And it is far more interesting than ever before because
after Agamben I don’t see the debate going anywhere.
And [in response to Alistair] I absolutely didn't intend to be theological. Absolutely not. I think
it is a series of radical potentialities that I see in the present. And these potentialities could be
dark. I think the way Hardt-Negri put it, I wouldn’t go that way. But there are really dark
radical potentialities in the present;; we can’t get away from that. They are terrifying and
exhilarating at the same time. And we need to find categories that can help us intervene
conceptually, artistically, philosophically, and I think we are in that time. Gramsci once talked
about that intermediate time that the past is not getting over the new, etc. I won’t use that
phrase. That is theological: Eternal transition, after-time. I think we need to be on another
plane today.
Floor | Parul Dave Mukherji:
I have a question about your naming of the session in terms of 'Has the moment of the
contemporary come and gone'. In your own practice you try to dismantle the notion of that
kind of temporality. But the way in which this phrase has been put together, it seems to still
retain a certain notion of temporality. So I was wondering if it was meant to be a provocative
phrasing, or is it something with you want to set us thinking?
Jeebesh:
When you had invited us to do this panel, we thought it may be worthwhile to bring into focus
the question of the contemprary, as it is something that is completely unreflected and pushed
aside. So we thought that maybe the contemporary has gone! So in a sense this phrase was
just to examine the life of a concept, or to make an umbrella for a larger discussion, that is
all.
Floor | Maya Kovskaya:
I’d like us to try to take these very abstract thoughts and try to ground them in a specific
artwork, or a few specific lines from a specific artwork. And I’d like to read 2-3 lines from the
Capital of Accumulation and ask a question about untimely guests in that context. So in this
piece, there is a line that says, ‘We have looked too long to find the face of capital. We
thought we could turn the mirror to Medusa’s head, but the mirror became a mask’. Further
down in the piece, the question is, 'How do you stop being imprisoned by the mirror? So how
do we stop analysis from turning into fatalism and then fatally wounding us?' And I think your
elliptical and brilliant answer is, ‘You can allow yourself to be surprised at what the world
might become.’ So I’d like to ask, is this surprise at what the world might become one of
these untimely visitors, and is there a way in which art can help prepare us to welcome that
surprise and untimely visitor?
Floor | Sabih Ahmad:
Now is talked about as a very interesting moment in time, with a lot of initiatives being taken
that are not top down. People are coming together to do all kinds of things. And there is a
sense of urgency about it, and a sense of urgency about addressing it as we speak right now.
That sense of urgency has some kind of a relationship to time which might also be thought of
as punctual, which I’ve heard of other people speak about, including Geeta on other
occasions. A relationship with history in which something has to be done punctually, and
something that has to be done with a sense of urgency because it has to be done now;; if not,
then when. I wonder how you would like to think about that.
Jeebesh:
How does someone who is an orphan do history? The question on the stabilisation of subjects
through nationalism, through civilisational discourse, never took the orphan seriously, and
maybe at this point of time if the orphan were to be taken seriously, one may arrive at a very
different question about historical excavation. History becomes a very joyful act rather than
an act that will determine me. This is just a polemical answer to your question, and we can
talk about it later.
Floor | Rajesh Thind:
Slavoj Zizek says he has a picture of Stalin as soon as you enter his house. He gave a speech
recently at the Occupy protests in New York. He started by saying that in China in the spring
this year, where they’ve been looking at the Arab Spring and they’ve been cracking down a
lot, they banned science fiction. The point he made was that at least in China they still have to
do that. They still have to ban.
In the West we’re at the end of after but we can’t even begin to think about after the end of
after. And I kind of wonder from that perspective whether you guys think there might be
some schism opening up in the experience of the rise of Asia, or whatever you want to call it,
and the experience of the decline of the West. I was wondering if there is some schism that
you see emerging in a much more radical way, at the cultural and artistic level over the next
coming decades.
Jeebesh:
In the last panel with Roselee Goldberg, Maya said to her, your book is read in China. It’s
translated. Its very important and Roselee said I’ve never seen it. Its pirated. So in a sense,
there is a life of books and science fiction in China in a way that exceeds the ways in which
we produce the idea of censorship and ban. In that sense, the idea of the public and the state
in confrontation, where the confrontation is visible and legible, is a kind of old Hegelism and
liberalism of Europe. It doesn’t work. We don’t actually live through that stuff.
I was just talking to Johnson and he said that MOCA in Shanghai has been made a limited
company so that nobody else can use the word. At least the state can’t use it. So there are
many forms in which these things are produced which are not understood in those terms
which Slavoj Zizek would like the world to be legible in. There is an afterlife of things, which is
not legible. Shuddha, would you like to respond to Maya?
Shuddhabrata:
I’m responding both to Maya and Sabih because I think they’re questions are linked. How
does one prepare for the untimely visitor and what does it mean to be punctual? I think it is
important to be punctual but the question is punctual to what? We are fortunate that we live in
a language universe where, as pointed out by the author who’s book is banned under section
11 [Salman Rushdie] of the Customs Act in India, that in Hindustani, Urdu, Bengali, the word
for yesterday and tomorrow are the same, ‘kal’. So your orientation towards time is not
necessarily a fixed point in some kind of utilitarian plane. You have more than one surface to
consider when you have to think of which is the appointment that you’re keeping and with
whom. And secondly—and I have no worries with invoking theological references, I enjoy
them greatly—one of the greatest preparations of the untimely visitor comes from the
Talmudic literature where there is always the idea that the messiah is always around here
anyway. It’s just that no one is prepared to receive him. So he is the quintessential untimely
guest, the one who will come and who will produce salvation by his presence, it’s just that no
one is as yet prepared to receive him. For many people within that tradition, the work of
making the world right is to create the conditions for preparation of the untimely guest. So the
work of art then is actually just the preparation for receiving the untimely guest.
Ravi Sundaram is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
in Delhi and is co-founder of the Sarai program at the Centre. Sundaram’s work rests
at the intersection of the postcolonial city and contemporary media experiences. As
media technology and urban life have intermingled in the postcolonial world, new
challenges have emerged for contemporary cultural theory. Sundaram’s work has
looked at the phenomenon that he calls ‘pirate modernity’, an illicit form of urbanism
that draws from media and technological infrastructures of the postcolonial city.
Daniela Zyman is Chief Curator of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna
where she joined in 2003. Between 1995 and 2001, she acted as chief curator at the
MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art in Vienna and was a
founding member of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House in
Los Angeles. Between 2000 and 2003, she was artistic director of Künstlerhaus, Wien
and A9-forum transeuropa.
Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta)
have been described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers and editors.
This discussion took place at Speakers' Forum at India Art Fair 2012 in Delhi.
Keywords:
Archive, Capitalism, Institutional Critique, Language, Media, Nationalism, Spectatorship,
Translation
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humanitiesunderground
taking on mediocrity & mechanization
AUGUST 6, 2011 by HUMANITIESUNDERGROUND
Off Modern: A Conversation with Raqs
(http://humanitiesunderground.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/premonition1.jpg)
1. Moinak Biswas: Your recent show in Calcutta, ‘Premontions’, seems to speak of the fractures within
the flow of time that we all inhabit. An internally anomalous time has engaged you as artists for some time
now (‘The Imposter in the Waiting Room’, the clock project, the factory project at Bolzano). What makes it
important for you to address this question now? What does an apprehension of ‘our time’ have to do with
this inquiry? In ‘Premonitions’ I felt there was an attempt to inflict an arrhythmic pulse of sorts on the
viewer. Is it possible to talk about the politics of this?
Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi): Lets try
responding to your question with a query of our own, a speculation.
What if we could fold time in the same way as we can fold a piece of paper? Supposing we
could fold it into a boat or an airplane, what kind of voyage would we find ourselves
embarking on? Would we realize that our sense of our time, the time(s) we live in today, are
also amenable to being folded in a way that can make us sense other times in a way that is
suddenly up close and personal even as they retain their chronological distances?
Premonitions is one manifestation of our ongoing engagement with time and temporality. We
are interested in how the present instant comes to us striated with other times (real and
imagined pasts, possible alternatives to the present, anticipated futures, and loops that
connect the three times) and other ways of thinking about time.
What this does is to keep a window in our collective consciousness perpetually open. This
helps us avoid the claustrophobia of thinking that just because things are the way they appear
now all discussion and questions about how else things might be – how things might have
been – and how things might yet become – are void.
As you can see, this is not so much the question of introducing the viewer to an ‘arrhythmic’
pulse, of creating gaps (that is what happens when you have an arrhythmic heartbeat or
arrhythmia in respiration) as it is of creating contrapuntal rhythms, of inserting a different pace
and temporal signature alongside what you might call the countdown of the present. So that
just before things are down to zero, somewhere else, some other count is beginning to pulse
out a different sense of time. This can free us from the heaviness of inevitability, destiny, and
the arrow of time that gets exhausted by travelling forever in one direction alone.
(http://humanitiesunderground.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/deja-vu1.jpg)MB: We see
affinities with modernism here. Is it possible to say modernism lives within the imagination of
contemporary art? This modernism incorporates a critique of historicism, the inevitability you mention.
Your sense of the ‘contrapuntal’ echoes the principles of Soviet montage. I was thinking of how Lev
Manovich looked at the New Media through Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera. Spatialization
dominates the vision of much contemporary critical theory and aesthetic practice. But criticality often
seems to return through what we can largely call montage, a typical modernist method, where the vertical
and the synchronic continue to play a role. Would you like to talk about this?
Raqs: Let’s think momentarily of modernism as a four lane highway, let’s say – a ‘national
highway’ that claims to take you from A to B, and then let us imagine a few tracks off the high
road – that meander alongside, and cross the highway, some-times in a disorderly, zigzag
fashion. These tracks are always within hailing distance from the highway, but may not always
be visible; sometimes they rise above and run below it. We see our journeys taking place
sometimes on the high road, and often, when we need to get to destinations that the highway
ignores, on the off-tracks. The off tracks, like most paths that come into existence because
people have persistently walked them into being, have been built over peripatetic centuries.
And they carry on their surface – the depth, the layers, of centuries of footprints. You could
call this a layered, continuing archive of walking, extending itself into the future.
Unlike the highway, where there is never any turning back, except at sanctioned u-turns, the
off-tracks are meant for Janus-faced journeymen and journeywomen, (which is what we aspire
to be) who know well the ruses of the archive and the contingencies of the present but have
also equipped themselves with an open-endedness towards the dilemmas of the future. This
means that we don’t necessarily have ‘role models’ to follow, even though we are aware of the
velocity and the trajectory of passengers on the high-road.
Our encounter with the dust of other times – modern, non-modern, off-modern – is laden with
our sense of their out-of-joint presences. Faced with the complexity of these presences, the
modernist celebration of unidirectional speed, fueled by the necessity of arousing everyone
and herding them towards the future seems archaic and naïve at times.
We are still coming to terms with the turn that compels us to undertake close readings of the
peripatetic archive of the off-tracks. This seems to us to be a tendency that we see spreading
across the last two decades in many practices, both artistic and otherwise, as a renewal of what
it means to ‘sense’ the world, and to render it ‘sensate’ and ‘sensible’. These moves are not
direct and unidirectional. They have ambivalences, they are equivocal, as befits the task of
moving on a surface as jagged as that of the contemporary world. They resemble the crooked
move of the knight in chess. Interestingly, the post-Soviet aesthetician and writer, Svetlana
Boym, often speaks of “lateral move of the knight in a game of chess. A detour into some
unexplored potentialities of the modern project” to explain what she means by her call to fully
inhabit the “off-modern” condition.
This search is not to obliterate the near past. On the contrary it is a detour to revisit it as a site
of abandoned routes, of experiments, of imaginations, of thwarted attempts. This pre-
occupation of searching through the archive of the abandoned has also had it moment,
particularly in the heyday of early modernism, where it has been played out as a grand idea of
the march of time expressed through the trope of the rise and fall of civilizations. The march of
time idea easily lent authority and intellectual and moral legitimacy to the subjugation of
peoples and communities all over the world. Our sense of the diachronic is different, what we
can see taking place around us (at all times, actually) are – polyphonic searches in the minor
scales undertaken by a multitude of actors. These processes add up to something totally
contrary to the march of time and the rise and fall of civilizations. Instead of a smooth fabric,
they produce a perforated image of time; they spin a web or lattice of time. In fact, they
constitute an image of patient time that can hold within itself the plural unfolding of
complementary as well as contestant claims on the experience of duration itself.
So, to come back from this detour into the terms of your question – our sense of what you call
the contrapuntal does not necessarily ‘echo’ the principles of montage in early Soviet cinema.
Instead, perhaps the relationship may be better understood in the terms of what the
vocabulary of your suggestion contains implicitly. It is ‘contrapuntal’. An echo is a delayed,
and weakened transmission of the same signal, arising due to acoustic resonance. We are
neither a delayed, nor a weakened transmission of the signals of montage, or of the early
twentieth century avant-gardes. Our moves may constitute at times a counter-signal, a
horizontal, diagonal and diachronic interference into the dialectical-epistemological certitude
of what you rightly characterize as the vertical and synchronic principles of montage.
(http://humanitiesunderground.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/more-salt-in-your-tears1.jpg)
MB: We need to re-affirm this in the face of an academic discourse where ‘art’ has become anathema,
where it has been decided that everything is culture. Commitment to art is equated with elitism. South
Asian critics believe in this more than others. Is the critical/discursive aspect of your work a conscious
reaction to the populism this tendency harbours, a demonstration that critical reflection needs to connect
up with creative adventures rather than feed into culture industries? If that is so, how would you deal
with the perception that, unlike film or theatre, visual arts still occupy a physical space that finds it
difficult becoming public?
Raqs: A mathematician friend always argues that the value of the work of mathematics in
society does not have to demonstrate through its ‘popularity’. Mathematical creativity is
valuable regardless of how many (or how few) people understand it because it is generative of
new ways of thinking. Can we apply the same criterion to discussion of art? Let us keep this
question unanswered, for now. Instead, we could ask, why do we not see art as a
condition/possibility for everyone in life?
We live in the time of the twinning of “the industrialization of creativity” and “a meltdown of
culture”. Clearly, for the elite there is a loss of confidence in culture as the site of its
unquestioned dominance. The parameters of hegemony are now blurred. It is becoming less
clear as to how they can undertake cultural “adventures” as they used to be taken. Moreover,
the drives to accumulation and expansion are increasingly running counter to the slower
rhythm of the cultivation of practitioners. This anxiety runs too in the minds of plantation
managers. They get impatient, and thus the Amazon gets cut down everyday.
The word “public” these days has become a placeholder for impatience, profit and consensus,
with little interest in the actual formation of public/s. The patronizing – yet hopeful – idea of
the public that was first deployed perhaps in the 1920s by early social democracy stands
betrayed today. Nowadays the ‘public’ can neither be easily conjured up nor can it be simply
constituted. It has escaped its patrons. We see this as an opportunity to rethink the contours of
contemporary contestations in public space.
We would prefer to call ourselves, ‘amidst’ and ‘in-relation’ to crowds. The crowd
incorporates the possibilities of things bursting open, unpredictably, in unknown directions. It
can be an egalitarian space, it can allow for movement. It is also an idea that can be imagined
and played with. It can change over time. To be part of a great crowd is an achievement.
Also, we often find ourselves working with and towards the idea of a ‘missing crowd’, a
gathering that is yet to collect itself, a crowd that will get constituted.
MB: It is interesting how you visit your own intellectual development through the real metaphor of
technology. The source of the metaphor in this case is a machine that strives to erase the borderline between
materials and consciousness. How far do you see your work being made possible by a technological
revolution?
Raqs: It would be a mistake to assume that any machine can erase the borderline between
materials and consciousness. We are comfortable with inhabiting a technological milieu, but
we are far from being techno-positivists, or techno-determinists of the kind that believe that
computers, or digital technology per se – determine the content and shape of culture by their
very presence. If that were so, every regional engineering college in this country would be a
hub of creativity and cultural innovation. That is far from being the case. The use of computers
can instill conformity just as easily as it can inspire creativity. It all depends on what use we
make of them.
In the early ‘90s we set up our studio (inside our then living quarters). We had just bought a
computer, and they were not as common as they are today. It was a machine that was used by
many of our friends and comrades. It was a modest production site for research notes, for
writing proposals, projecting scenarios, for producing booklets on work and political
economy, essays, criticism, correspondence, catalogues, etc. Among other things, it contained
our growing address book and the early eclectic notes for Sarai. This poor, overworked
machine went through various disruptions – crashes, version changes, incompatibility issues,
upgrades and new software. Through it we made our first forays into list cultures and the
internet. It saw us through what must arguably have been the most exciting and foundational
decade of our realizing the immensity of the zone of work and ideas that we would go on to
inhabit.
During the course of one of the crashes we found that the data in the machine became
progressively ‘chewed’ with each successive attempt to re-start the computer. The machine got
slower. The complexity of possible commands and actions and even the capacity to effect an
upgrade began to falter. What became available to us with each re-start were twisted, broken
data threads and snatches of unrealized proposals. Later most of even this got lost and we had
to take the hard disk out of the computer. The machine, got gifted to someone else, who kitted
it out with a new hard disk. The ‘original’ hard disk itself remained packed away, becoming
unusable over time due to the incompatibility of languages. Eventually, it must have found its
way to some toxic dump. Almost a decade of work lost in a day.
All we have today from that world are inchoate memories, the beginnings of a few processes, a
few completed works and scattered printouts of the twisted thread of productive acts. We are
still coming to terms with the fact that the readings, arguments and practices of a decade are
now only a bit of illegible digital residue. So, as you can see, we have experienced the fact that
time does not move in a smooth linear transition from the past to the future at first hand. The
loss of the hard disk meant having to go back in time, into a fragile memory, to reconstruct a
damaged thread that connected our past to our (then) present, and through it to the future.
We know that this can happen again, at any moment, and of course, now we try to make back
ups. But it has made us sensitive to the concrete fragility of memory (both corporeal and
machinic) and to the care that one has to take in the maintenance of the history of one’s own
practice. Were it to happen again, we would certainly experience a certain déjà vu, a feeling of
‘we have been in this place before’. But at the same time, we would also feel its opposite,
jamais vu, the sense that though this is not an unfamiliar experience, it can still feel as strongly
as it would if it were to happen for the very first time.
Navigating between the uncannily familiar and the uncannily unfamiliar, which can be two
faces of the same experience, means that one has to actually learn how to deal with a temporal
breakdown: where all your senses of what was available to you as ‘past’ and what you have at
hand as the ‘present’ can be up for radical reconfiguration. This can happen during a data
crash, or during a time of social upheaval, or during and in the wake of a sudden disaster like
an earthquake or a tsunami. In our time, getting grips on this will be a survival skill.
Wherever we have found ourselves in, we have had to figure out a way to re-learn and
reconstruct the amplitude of the passage of time. Sometimes, one has to recover in a flash what
passes through (or has passed through) the poles of a decade, even a century.
Our intuition is that we are not alone in feeling this way. The people who become our co-
narrators, interlocutors and translators are also alert to this incremental and conflicted
movement. It is within this flux, around its tilts, crests and troughs that we try to create work,
live and have our conversations.
(http://humanitiesunderground.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/rules-to-be-invented1.jpg)
MB: Your work occupies a space between media, not unlike other events of contemporary art. But there is
a desire to make discursive lines occupy the intermediary spaces. One can see from the texts the allusions
to contemporary scholarship in social sciences and critical theory. It also permeates the images involved.
This is critical reflection. Does art afford you a freedom from the cut and dried frames of criticism, from its
habits?
Raqs: Well, the way in which we have learnt to occupy the space of contemporary art allows
us to go beyond either the habits of social science, the familiar tropes of political stance-taking
and the affectation of purely formal concerns – hopefully, this is possible to do without having
to jettison either the discursive depth of intellectual inquiry, the ethical ground of political
commitment or the unpredictability and imaginative plenitude made possible by aesthetic
engagements.
Of course, this is not a position we reached automatically. Nor do we claim that we have
‘arrived’ definitively at the place where we want to be forever. Like everything else, it has a
history; it also has a future. Things have changed. Things will change.
Sometime In the late eighties there was a screening of Hartmut Bitomski’s film ‘The Autobahn of
the Third Reich’ at the Max Mueller Bhavan in Delhi. All three of us saw it on the same day, but
we did not really know each other then. What we do remember is the feeling of being
unmoored by the film’s rhetorical stances from the compulsion of being within – or outside –
the discourse of any particular discipline.
What was Bitomski doing that we were so taken with? We can remember having several
conversations about the space he had create in his mind with this film. It was not the space of
facticity, nor was it pure speculation. It was not a slave to evidence or to fancy. He was
reading archival images gathered from state and cinema archives, making new connections,
using simple juxtaposition to cut through sedimented forms of viewing and yet he was not a
slave of the archive.
He was arguing for a critical engagement with the construction plans and forms mobilization
of energy and resources for the building of motorways during the 1930s and ‘40s in Germany
and yet he did not have to spell out what he was saying. He was laying the foundations of our
being able to ‘read’ the film, rather than telling us what to think. It was a film that could
demonstrate what the concentration of power in the Nazi state meant without having to even
refer to the familiar tropes of fascism. It also made them appear chillingly commonplace. So
that Nazism could be seen not as an exceptional phenomenon, but as the concentrated instance
of a general process.
What impressed us was the confidence with which the film could inhabit multiple modes of
knowledge production – the archival and the speculative, use different kinds of rhetoric, move
between evidence and its shadow. This was not a work that held out its ‘knowledge’ on
display, on its sleeve as it were. It did not suffer from what we know in social science to be
‘citationitis’ – the pathology of an anxiety of citation.
Rather, it played a series of subtle moves that displaced the knowledge that its viewer took
for granted. This meant that the viewer had to think for him or herself to get to the place where
the film pointed towards.
(http://humanitiesunderground.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/strikes-at-time2.jpg)
At present, contemporary art allows for such an agility. It is today a space rife with
conversation, in ferment, enriched by currents that emanate in diverse disciplines and
practices.
The question of freedom is a difficult one. It does allow us to explore differing stances and
moves. How free are our moves can only be evaluated in conjunction with other such moves
being made by other practitioners in the arts and other fields.
We think that the space of making art today is a generative site. A site that can produce
different forms of knowing about the world, in the world. But this form of knowing must not
be confused with a mere “evidentiary” mode that sets out to build platforms for the launch
and defense of arguments. To know in art is not to know in order to win or lose an argument.
It is to access a plenitude that does not care about having to defend the necessary fragility of
the contingency of our intellectual positions at any given moment.
MB: I find myself in agreement that we need to return to a mode where a) we do not produce finished
messages, and b) we arrive at forms that work on the meeting lines of argument and art, scholarship and
creative work. The first takes on some urgency in the face of the emergence of consensual politics and
culture – the typical effect of post-ideological projects. In Indian cinema, for instance, you cannot have
irresponsible films anymore. Everyone preaches, every theme is an ‘issue’, and crass reformism rules.
Criticism of the work is forestalled by consensus on the issue. But when you say art keeps alive a space
where one does not have to make statements you remind me of the world-wide resurgence of another kind
of cinema where the audience is allowed to make their own images and connections from the order of
things on the screen. From Kiarostami to Haneke to Apichatpong, this has emerged as alternative form of
speech and politics across a range of styles. Do you think it becomes difficult to imagine this in the Indian
context because of a continuing expectation from art of a certain kind of social communication, e.g.,
‘development communication’?
Raqs: We live in the age of a fractured and confused consensus. We might as well call it
‘dissensus’. Given that “dissensus” is all around us, the agencies that are supposed to
maintain consensus seem overburdened and at their wit’s end. To generate consensus of any
kind, no matter how short-lived and contingent it may be, these agencies have to work very
hard.
You can get a sense of how hard they have to work when you see the angry commentaries
around a few recent Supreme Court judgments that have deviated (even if slightly) from the
‘consensual’ script. (See for instance the pious editorial grandstanding and op-ed sabre
rattling in a few national dailies on the ‘ideological’ tenor of the Supreme Court judgement in
Nandini Sundar and others v. the State of Chattisgarh . As if judgements that favour the status quo
were free of ‘ideology’.
This disequilibrium is also in the arts. Not everything that is happening in the arts in our
milieu is as per the consensual cycle of celebration and mourning of the ‘boom and bust and
boom’ scenario. There are gaps opening up. Gaps, that can also be seen as creative
opportunities, are opening out in all disciplines and sites, especially as practitioners distance
themselves from their prescribed functions as the shapers of “pedagogic” formation or as
generators of consensus. There are options and opinions other than the ones in the
newspapers, and they are beginning to be seen and heard.
What is it that lends these sites and disciplines the charge and electricity of ruptures and new
openings? At certain historical junctures, where the experience of life is harder to smoothen
out, things become sharper. In the space of contemporary art, we can see this charge. But it is a
fragile thing. It needs custodianship and argumentation. It needs real, and imagined, crowds
to mingle in.
Developmentalism is deeply anchored within the terms of a master-pupil relationship, in the
transaction mandated between the know-all and the ignoramus. We think it is time to retire
this relationship, but we know that it will not go out quietly. It will stay with us, at least for
the foreseeable future. It is indeed at the heart of the distribution of time and space (we only
need to look around us in our cities). It is the ground on which the superiority of the ‘expert’ is
asserted. But its unwillingness to shake from its grounds makes it all the more necessary to
propel the charge that will dislodge it; from art into new kinds of cinematic experience, from
fragile spaces into wicked ones, from melancholic margins to distributed networks.
(http://humanitiesunderground.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/the-capital-of-
accumulation1.jpg)
MB: Your example of Bitomski’s use of the archives triggers some thoughts. With digital media we are all
veering close to your basic techniques, of mining and juxtaposing not only disparate elements but also
media. Could you take on the question of politics that I raised once more, keeping this condition in view?
Isn’t it now necessary to rethink the art- and- politics question as scholarly (research and archiving, for
instance) and creative work (digital databases themselves throw up questions for form and aesthetics) veer
close to each other, almost by default?
Raqs: Absolutely, it is a very good time to rethink the relationship between art, politics, ethics
and knowledge. The ‘archival turn’ that a lot of art making is currently in the process of
undertaking emphasizes the crucial role that a deeper philosophical engagement with
questions of memory, amnesia, recall and re-inscription will play from now on. This is a time
when the distinctions between art and research, between scholarly play and playful
scholarship will gradually cease to matter. We look forward to this happening.
—————————————————————————————–
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Television & New Media
http://tvn.sagepub.com
Sarai: One Year in the Public Domain

Monica Narula
Television New Media 2002; 3; 387
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http://tvn.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/3/4/387
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Narula / One Year in the Public
Television
Domain
& New Media / November 2002
Sarai
One Year in the Public Domain
Monica Narula
Sarai, Center for the Study of the Developing Societies
Sarai (www.sarai.net) is an interdisciplinary program of research and creative experimen-

tation with old and new media in urban spaces. It was launched in February 2001 at the
Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. This essay sketches the history of the
Sarai initiative, outlines its primary concerns with urban cultures and city spaces, new and
old forms of media practice, and research into the politics of information and communica-
tion. The text is also an account of the different kinds of energies—ranging from theory,
research, media practices, public cultural intervention, publication, and online as well as
offline discursive spaces—that animate the space of Sarai.
Although Sarai opened its doors to the public of Delhi only a year ago, the
ideas that crystallized into the actual making of the space have a history
that goes back to 1998 in Delhi. The 1990s 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 the summer of 1998. There was a sense of dis-
quiet with increasing urban violence and strife, dissatisfaction with restric-
tive modes of thinking and practice within mainstream academia, the uni-
versities and 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 kept alive by clusters of teachers and
Author’s Note: This article is based on a talk given by the author at Sarai, on the oc-
casion of Sarai’s second anniversary in February 2002.
TELEVISION & NEW MEDIA

Vol. 3 No. 4, November 2002 387–395
DOI: 10.1177/152747602237281
© 2002 Sage Publications
387

388 Television & New Media / November 2002
students in the universities. New ideas, modes of communication, and

forms of dissent were being tried out and tested on the streets.
It was from within this ferment of ideas, rough and ready plans, and
fragments of proposals that a series of conversations on film history, new
media theory, media practice, and urban culture between Ravi Vasudevan
and Ravi Sundaram (fellows, Center for the Study of Developing Societies)
and Jeebesh Bagchi, myself, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (the Raqs Media
Collective, Delhi) was able to mature into the conceptual foundation of
Sarai.
Sarai (the space and the program) takes its name from the caravan-serais
for which medieval Delhi was well-known. These were places where trav-
elers could find shelter, sustenance, and companionship; they were tav-
erns, public houses, meeting places; destinations and points of departure;
places to rest in the middle of a journey. Even today, the map of Delhi carries
on it twelve place names that include the word Sarai. The Sarai Initiative
interprets this sense of the word sarai to mean a very public space where dif-
ferent intellectual, creative, and activist energies can intersect in an open
and dynamic manner to give rise to an imaginative reconstitution of urban
public culture, new/old media practice, research, and critical cultural
intervention. The challenge before the founding group was to cohere a phi-
losophy marrying this range of concerns to the vision of creating a lively
public space where research and media practice could flow into each other.
We were interested in the way in which we could see the urban space we
were located in begin to reveal itself to us as a dense communicative
network.
We saw this network as a matrix within which new and old technologies
and practices of communication—ranging from print to photography to
film and the internet—were able to constantly renew a dynamic media
ecology. It was evident that the network was kept alive by a technologically
astute street-level creativity in the making and transmission of signs,
through informal appropriations of new media forms. At the same time, it
was besieged by powerful state and corporate media interests that sought
to regulate access and act as gatekeepers.
Sarai was the focus of our desires to understand and intervene in this
space of contested meanings and transmissions. It took two years (1998-
2000) to translate this conception into a plan and then into a real space and
to design a workable multidisciplinary program of activities.
Today, there are eighteen people working at Sarai on a range of projects.
There are media practitioners, academics, designers, legal researchers, pro-
grammers, and cultural workers from a variety of backgrounds. We have
an active fellowship program, and Sarai has visitors and interns working
with us who come from different parts of India and the world. There are
screenings, talks, exhibitions, and a calendar of seminars, besides the

Narula / One Year in the Public Domain 389
media lab and the outreach program. All these activities only make us real-
ize how much more there is still for us to do at Sarai.
What follows is an attempt at communicating some of the excitement of
being in Sarai, and I hope that by bringing the reasons for that excitement
into what we (ever since the first Sarai Reader) have grown accustomed to
calling the “Public Domain,” this text can suggest something of the many
energies that animate Sarai as a space and as a cluster of activities and
interests.
We have often been asked, What do you do at Sarai? Where in all the
spectrum of activities and projects is the focus that animates Sarai?
I will try and answer this with a series of instances of the kinds of work
and the processes that have been at play here. But before I do that, I would
like to dwell on two terms—collaboration and commons—that have trans-
lated into key concepts for us.
So what do these two words—collaboration and commons—mean when
we deploy them to describe or qualify what we do, and also who we are?
For us, collaboration denotes those encounters and processes that entail a
synergy between discrete forms, practices, and cultures. These can be
between media practice and media theory, between designers and
researchers, between programmers and artists, between people in a basti (a
squatter settlement) and people in a digital lab, between practitioners
across borders and cultures in an electronic public domain, and between
languages.
Typically, the city as a cultural form is the arena in which such encoun-
ters are played out to their fullest potential. A program such as ours that
foregrounds the urban as a category for reflection in this sense mirrors the
sensibility of the city.
Sarai renders these reflections public through a constellation of media
practices ranging from print, video, and sound to the internet and digital
art. All this contributes to, and takes place within, a notion of the com-
mons—a metaphor taken from the ways in which resources and space have
been held together through history and which is now deployed to suggest
an accretion of cultural energies and materials that are openly available and
that are built over time, through shared endeavors, in the public domain.
The commons is the frame within which collaborations take place. This, we
would suggest, is how the city, media, and the public domain hang together
in our frame of things.
How then does this translate into actual practice? I would like to offer a
few instances from the past year at Sarai. A residency that Sarai shared with
Khoj, an artists network, to host Syeda Farhana, a photographer from
Dhaka, Bangladesh, led to her creating a hypertextual photographic instal-
lation on Bangladeshi migrants in Delhi in collaboration with Joy

Chatterjee in the Sarai media lab (see www.sarai.net/compositions/

images/farhana/Html/index.htm).
The work done by her constituted not only a stand-alone digital work
but also the nucleus of a set of materials in the Sarai archive of the city. There
are several levels of interaction here: between Sarai and another institution,
Khoj; between Farhana and us at the media lab; between photography and
digital media; and between art practice and an archival imperative. This is
an example of the ways in which the word collaboration comes to mean
what it does at Sarai.
One of our print media fellows—Frederick Noronha—is working on a
documentary history of the free software movement in India. His research
methodology involves an active posting mechanism. He posts his queries
onto a series of electronic lists, and the queries and the responses, as well as
what he writes in the form of notes, observations, and essays, are made
available online. In this way, an archive of materials is formed out of the
growing correspondence between him and his subjects, for all of whom the
project that he has embarked on is essentially a collaborative venture to
write their history together with him (see http://opennews.indianissues.
org and http://linuxinindia.pitas.com).
There are nineteen other such grants; with academics, activists, inde-
pendent researchers, and media practitioners working on a variety of pro-
jects ranging from histories of urban localities to soundscapes to graphic
novels and reportage.
These various research and practice projects that are in a sense located
outside Sarai are offset by a central research and theoretical agenda that ani-
mates a lot of the intellectual work that goes on at Sarai. This is the cluster of
activities governed by a research emphasis called the “Publics and Prac-
tices in the History of the Present.” Work in this area is underway as a
unique set of activities that involve practitioners, theorists, and researchers
in a repertoire of explorations. Although on one hand it might involve pho-
tographic documentation of the lobbies of old cinema halls, or the electron-
ics bazaar at Lala Lajpat Rai Market, and detailed ethnographies of media
spaces, it also involves practitioners, researchers, and theorists at Sarai
working together to arrive at conceptual categories with which to think
through the very idea of what Ravi Sundaram likes to call the “messiness”
of the contemporary!
Collaboration also informs the making of the Sarai Reader 02—The Cities
of Everyday Life (see www.sarai.net/journal.reader2.html). It has been from
the very beginning a collective endeavor, with five of us at Sarai interacting
closely with Geert Lovink from the Waag, now in Sydney, and then with us
at the media lab working in tandem with Pradip Saha, the designer of the
book. I think that in this case, the results of collaboration are very visible.

The richness of textual forms, and of approaches, and yet the clear presence
of a focus on the city as an object of knowledge, interpretation, and reflec-
tion of this order is seldom possible to achieve without the coming together,
the concert, of many energies, curiosities, and passions.
What is even more interesting is that it is clear to us that the book in its
print form is very much something that emerges from those aspects of new
media practice that interest us at Sarai. This can be substantiated by the fact
that this is a copyleft work and is produced through a collaborative edito-
rial arrangement. But I think that this new medianess is true even of the
form and argument of the structure of the book. The texts that constitute the
book may be arranged sequentially, but they follow a hypertextual logic
(and can be read through each other in a way that a linear arrangement of
texts may not be) that is also a result of our increasing online engagements.
Take, for instance, the online dialogues culled from the Reader List. The list
itself emerged from the publication of Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain
(see www.sarai.met/journal/reader1.html) as a loose discussion group
that wanted to look at the contents and themes of the first reader. Over the
year, it has grown into an active discursive community, and many postings
made on the list have now entered this year’s book in print form. A book
gives rise to an online community, and the online community gives rise to
content for a book (e-mail: reader-list@sarai.net).
Public engagements that have found their way into the book are not only
online ones alone. An important section in the book emerged out of the
workshop on cinema held at Sarai, and Ranjani Mazumdar, Ira Bhaskar,
and Moinak Biswas, each of them independent film scholars (Ranjani in
Delhi and New York, Ira in Delhi University, and Moinak in the Depart-
ment of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Calcutta), have had their
insights relayed into the book via the workshop. Another example of this
process at work is the way in which a set of film screenings can animate a
discussion that feeds into a text for the Sarai Reader. Nitin Govil (film stud-
ies, New York University) curated a set of science fiction films at Sarai last
fall, and the work that he put into contextualizing the films to a Delhi audi-
ence also translated itself into an essay on the city in science fiction for the
second reader.
This model of creating works and processes that embody an encounter
between different communicative practices is something that we have been
able to arrive at over the past year, and we have been able to do so because
the work we do at Sarai is multidisciplinary. It is an assemblage of practices
and discursive acts, of an interweaving of different rhetorics, of different
modes of address, of diverse technologies of communication.
Another instance of this process at work is the experiences we have
had in actualizing one of our core Outreach activities—the Cybermohalla
Project (see www.sarai.net/community/saraincomm.htm). The Cyber-

mohalla Project is an experimental initiative for the creation of nodes of

popular digital culture in Delhi in collaboration with Ankur: Society for
Alternatives in Education, a Delhi-based nongovernmental organization
(NGO). The word Cybermohalla suggests a hybrid location that has the
open-endedness of cyberspace, qualified by the local specificities and inti-
macy of a mohalla, or a dense urban neighborhood.
The project works with young people living in slum settlements and
working-class neighborhoods who are disadvantaged by lack of access to
cultural and social resources. The project brings together the energies of
community-based social intervention; creativity with texts, sound, and
images; and innovative uses of computers and digital technology while
remaining alert to the imperatives of social and cultural specificity and
autonomy.
The Cybermohalla Project was one year old in May 2002. In this one year,
we have witnessed the confident articulation of the visions of a group of fif-
teen young people, primarily young women, from the mainly Muslim set-
tlement of the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash (LNJP) Basti, Ajmeri Gate, Delhi.
They have acquired considerable technical skills in handling computers,
digital cameras, audio recorders, and scanners and have created wall mag-
azines and basic hypertext markup language (HTML) projects using com-
puters and free software applications. Excerpts from texts written by the
young people have been published in the Sarai Reader. We have also pro-
duced a separate bilingual book By Lanes, which is from the texts, images,
and drawings created by them. The book was published in July 2002.
Making our work public, whether on the web site or through print, is an
important part of our activity. With two Sarai Readers already published,
and a Sarai Hindi Reader as well as a book dedicated to the Cybermohalla
project, it is possible to say that Sarai is as much about print as it is about
other media technologies. If one takes the second reader as an example, it
becomes evident that the coming together of forms and practices has
pushed open possibilities of what the pleasures of making a book can be.
This is why the term new media for us is not so much about the novelty of
computers, multimedia, and the internet as it is about new forms and strat-
egies of practice, about innovative recombinations between old and new
media, between and across print, film, video, television, radio, computers,
and the internet.
We are keen to effect crossovers and transgressions that displace both
old and new hierarchies, which privilege neither tradition nor novelty for
their own sake, and give rise to a more layered and agile form of media
practice that is more reflective of the contemporary in our spaces. This
means being as invested in the making of print objects, visual works, and
soundscapes as in the creation of web content and looking for ways in
which practices and objects can straddle offline and online trajectories.

We are also working on a number of new media projects that examine

questions related to claims and contests around issues of space and access
in the urban environment and explore the idea of a so-called digital com-
mons. We hope to realize at least three to four major new media projects
around these themes this year on a variety of platforms—on the internet as
installations, and in the form of publications. Significant among these is the
“Co-Ordinates Delhi” (authored by Raqs Media Collective at the Sarai
media lab), which will be shown at Documenta 11, Kassel, and the parallel
online environment—the OPUS project, which is an intermedia platform
for locating media and art practice within a digital commons. OPUS will be
a space in which old and new media can meet online and create hybrid
works through dispersed authorship. It is inspired by the basic principles
of openness and collaboration that animate the free software milieu and
bring them into the field of general cultural practice. This presumes the cul-
tivation of a sensibility of creative and intellectual sharing, collaboration,
and free exchange. The OPUS project has benefited enormously from the
contributions of Silvan Zurbruegg and Bauke Freiburg, both students of
digital media (from Zurich and Amsterdam, who have been in residence
with us) and have worked alongside the rest of us at the Sarai media lab.
A central thread running through our work is the politics of information
and communication; the question of, Who can access which tools to say
what to whom, who can know what, what is openly knowable, who is the
object of knowledge for whom . . . and so forth. Hence, our engagement
with technology as cultural form and as the crucible of a new contest of
power is the point of departure of a series of ways of thinking through
issues related to the building of a new creative commons and an informa-
tion commons.
It is this emphasis on realizing a concrete practice located within a space
of the sharing of knowledge and creative resources that explains the key
importance of free software at Sarai. We are interested in free software not
only because it makes economic sense in an Indian context to not spend a lot
of money on expensive proprietary software but also because we believe
there are crucial issues of cultural freedom and creativity that are at stake
here. And the insistence that access and control over the technologies of
communication and information must be opened out is central to demo-
cratic practice of culture. We want to contribute to autonomous, collabora-
tive energies in the field of software, culture, and communication technol-
ogy, which are conducive to diversity. That some of these energies
challenge, or at least are skeptical about, the commodification of digital cul-
ture across the globe is something that we would like to see foregrounded
in a lot of the work that we do.
The emphasis on creating a more democratic notion of knowledge prac-
tices has also involved thinking about enhancing public access to cultural

materials and intellectual resources. Sarai encounters these issues by work-

ing toward a public-access digital archive of contemporary urban culture
by participating in a network of emerging archival initiatives by creating a
free space for exhibition and dialogue at the Sarai Interface Zone, and also
by initiating an Academic Resources Project that hopes to enable greater
access to key texts and documents for the humanities and social sciences to
the university community in Delhi and to independent scholars and
researchers by inviting writers, researchers, and publishers to locate their
work within the public domain.
The thrust on the politics of information in Sarai Reader 02 and a success-
ful workshop on law, surveillance, and the possibilities of thinking through
the ideas that might animate a notion of an infocommons have resulted in
the need for a sustained engagement with the legal regimes that surround
the domain of information, communication technologies, and culture. The
workshop itself (held immediately after the launch of the Sarai Reader 02)
featured discussions and presentations by activists, media practitioners,
and researchers on surveillance, censorship, free speech, free software,
cyber laws, and the right-to-information campaign in India. This workshop
helped lay open the ground for a public debate on the politics of informa-
tion, as well as the domination of the media and communication technolo-
gies by entrenched interests.
A direct result of the workshop has been a new Sarai research engage-
ment with the legal universe that surrounds the assault on the idea of a cul-
tural commons by the regimen of intellectual property rights. A legal
research project to look at the law, commons, and intellectual property has
recently been inaugurated at Sarai. This project will be coordinated by
Lawrence Liang and Sudhir Krishnaswamy from the Alternative Legal
Forum, Bangalore. It will involve analysis of constitutional provisions,
case laws, comparative legal histories, legal philosophy, and documenta-
tion and comment on current matters. An online discussion list—
commons-law@sarai.net—has also been initiated to facilitate greater dia-
logue and discussion on these questions and to build a community around
this research.
Sarai is interested especially in those media cultures that lie in the
shadow of technological and social elites. We are interested in speaking to
critical voices that produce and live the new media, which may exist in the
street, the software factory, the worlds of the local videowalla, the neighbor-
hood Public Call Office/cyber cafe, the gray markets in music, computers,
and other mediaware. This is the electronic everyday, which resides in the
shadows of the spectacular media space conjured by the media empires in
South Asia and will be very much an area in which Sarai’s work is slated to
grow in the near future.

I hope that all this gives a sense of who we are and what we have been up
to in the past year. It is evident, but I will say it regardless: We are busy, we
are public, we are open, and we intend to stay that way.
Monica Narula (e-mail: monica@sarai.net) is a media practitioner, photographer, and

cinematographer. She is a member of the Raqs Media Collective and a coinitiator of
Sarai, at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

To ask a human being to account for time is not
very different from asking a floating fragment of
plankton to account for the ocean. How does the
plankton bank the ocean?
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWhat is time?
What is the time?
01/12
The time is of your choosing.
The time is not of your choosing.
The time is out of joint.
The time has come.
The time needs changing.
The time has gone.
The time has come and gone.
The time has flown.
The time is not convenient.
Raqs Media Collective The time is at hand.
The time has been spent well.
Planktons in The time has been wasted.
The time is awkward.
The time is ripe.
the Sea: A Few The time has passed so swiftly.
The time is now.
Questions What is the time?
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWe say Òmy time,Ó Òyour time,Ó but how do
we tie these models of personhood, of being (me,
Regarding the you, us) to the medium within which all these
meÕs and youÕs and usÕs all swim in? Heidegger
Qualities of says, ÒBeing and time determine each other
reciprocally, but in such a manner that neither
Time can the former Ð Being Ð be addressed as
Planktons in the Sea: A Few Questions Regarding the Qualities of Time
something temporal nor can the latter Ð time Ð

be addressed as a being.Ó1
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn Confessions, St. Augustine begins his
e-flux journal #27 Ñ september 2011 Ê Raqs Media Collective
discourse on time by confessing, ÒWhat then is

time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I
want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.Ó2
In our effort to account for time, we will confess
to our confusions.
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊRecent research in the neuroscience of how
our brain processes time seems to indicate that
there are several clocks, in fact several kinds of
clocks running in our brain. A recent article by
Burkhard Bilger in the New Yorker on
neuroscientist David M. Eagleman explains,
Eagleman borrows a conceit from Italo

CalvinoÕs ÒInvisible Cities.Ó [sic] The brain,
he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great
Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century.
It sits enthroned in its skull, Òencased in
darkness and silence,Ó at a lofty remove
from brute reality. Messengers stream in
from every corner of the sensory kingdom,
bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and
smells. Their reports arrive at different
rates, often long out of date, yet the details
are all stitched together into a seamless
chronology. The difference is that Kublai
Khan was piecing together the past. The
brain is describing the present Ð
09.02.11 / 06:48:08 EDT

02/12
Mask excavated in Mycene, 12th cent BC.
09.02.11 / 06:48:08 EDT

processing reams of disjointed data on the thinking of time-based and spatially-located
fly, editing everything down to an forms of exchange today. Whenever capitalism
instantaneous now. How does it manage licks its wounds, looses confidence Ð as it is
it?3 doing today Ð dormant economic imaginaries
come into view.5 Economists start talking to
Bilger continues by detailing the context from poets, artists, and lay people Ð those they are
03/12
which EaglemanÕs work emerges: otherwise often keen to dismiss as madmen or
ignoramuses.
Just how many clocks we contain still isnÕt ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe need-based systems that emerge in the
clear. É The circadian clock, which tracks aftermath of periodic crashes or in the wake of
the cycle of day and night, lurks in the war and catastrophes are small conceptual
suprachiasmatic nucleus, in the windows on the realization of some of our
hypothalamus. The cerebellum, which desires of what a collective life based on
governs muscle movements, may control mutuality, generosity, reciprocity, and trust might
timing on the order of a few seconds or be. As capitalism eats away at the planetÕs
minutes. The basal ganglia and various resources, and spends more on destroying
parts of the cortex have all been nominated human life than it does on sustaining it, the lines
as timekeepers, though thereÕs some between having no choice and desiring
disagreement on the details. The standard something different may begin to blur.
model, proposed by the late Columbia
psychologist John Gibbon in the nineteen-
seventies, holds that the brain has
ÒpacemakerÓ neurons that release steady
pulses of neurotransmitters. More recently,
at Duke, the neuroscientist Warren Meck
has suggested that timing is governed by
groups of neurons that oscillate at different
frequencies. At U.C.L.A., Dean Buonomano
believes that areas throughout the brain
function as clocks, their tissue ticking with
neural networks that change in predictable
patterns. ÒImagine a skyscraper at night,Ó
he told me. ÒSome people on the top floor
work till midnight, while some on the lower
floors may go to bed early. If you studied
the patterns long enough, you could tell the
time just by looking at which lights are on.Ó
Time isnÕt like the other senses, Eagleman

says. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing
are relatively easy to isolate in the brain.
They have discrete functions that rarely
overlap: itÕs hard to describe the taste of a
sound, the color of a smell, or the scent of a
feeling. É But a sense of time is threaded
through everything we perceive. ItÕs there in After-work Time
the length of a song, the persistence of a As work-time becomes a less hallowed objective
scent, the flash of a light bulb. ÒThereÕs and criterion of living, as it becomes more
always an impulse toward phrenology in insecure and unpredictable, incomprehensible
neuroscience Ð toward saying, ÔHere is the and exhausting with inchoate repetition, the
spot where itÕs happening,ÕÒ Eagleman told value of after-work and non-work time can
me. ÓBut the interesting thing about the reassert itself as the site of inventiveness of
perception of time is that there is no spot. forms of life and mutuality. A wide spectrum of
ItÕs a distributed property. ItÕs metasensory; nineteenth-century thinkers imagined this
it rides on top of all the others.Ó4 experience of duration as the site of what life
could aspire to become. Their vision was
eclipsed by their twentieth-century epigones
In the Wake of Storms who ran amok over our imagination of duration
It is not at all surprising that we are all thinking with their frenzied worship of work-time and
quite seriously about the actual possibility of their paranoiac policing of time. How can we
09.02.11 / 06:48:08 EDT

speak in the language of exchange without using The irony is, we buy time with the time we take to
the vocabulary of measure? How can the span of do the things that fetch us the value against
time that covers the length of a service could be which we purchase time. We make time to buy
evaluated and divided into exchangeable units? time to sell time to buy time to make time. And
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe offerings and requests that are part of key to all of this is the imperishability of gold.
such project could be read both as a Even now, the fascination that ancient gold has
04/12
melancholic-ironic take on not being able to hold over us has something to do with the fact that a
on to precious moments of life or as an incipient gold ornament that is five thousand years old
coming-into-view of an enormous spectrum of seems, somehow, as good as new. Its promise to
specific inventions that human beings can make pay its bearer the sum of its worth in weight is
for one another when the imperatives of work, not diminished over time.
security, achievement, and hierarchy are held in
abeyance. It will be a challenge to enact and AlchemistÕs Gold
think through what this can mean for us today. At Now, the old alchemists dream of making gold
present, this enormous spectrum, like our Kublai and discovering the elixir of life make sense Ð
Khan-brains, lives enclosed in silence and both are quests for immortality, to make oneÕs
darkness. One could say that in a world where claim on time last longer than ever before.6
the division and hierarchy of labor functions as ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn todayÕs world not even gold can guarantee
the dominant measure of life, we inevitably end the stability of value over time. At the end of
up arranging various capacities and gifts as World War Two, the Bretton Woods Agreements
unequal but equivalent. But when we are not saw the worldÕs major currencies abandoning
brought into a relationship of equivalence vis-ˆ- their reliance on gold reserves as an expression
vis one another and mediated by abstract labor of their value. Instead, they pegged their value to
power, but instead invoke and discover each the rate at which they exchanged against the US
other through acts, desires, gestures, requests, dollar, with the understanding that at least the
and offers that activate propensities towards US dollar would exchange against gold.7
new possibilities of intercourse that lie outside However, in 1971, the United States under
work-time, we are faced with an interesting Richard Nixon abandoned the gold standard.8
enigma. Since then, global financial and monetary
systems have been in a kind of free fall. The
Perishables and Imperishables gravity of the gold standard has given way to the
The time of human life is a finite, perishable free-floating levitation of the value of different
thing. Which is why two quantities, X and Y of currencies. The US dollar tries to do the job that
perishable human time, can be brought into a gold did for thousands of years: by printing
relationship of fungibility only by means of a endless copies of itself which are then sent out
third thing, Z, that we agree upon as being into the world as a way of shoring up a system
imperishable, at least in comparison to human ultimately based on the faith that the worldÕs
life. For thousands of years, this Z was governments have in the idea that the US
condensed into units of precious metals, government will outlast them, just as gold
especially gold, which were treated as valuable outlasts other materials.
precisely because their durability and their ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊNever in human history has so much rested
apparent imperishability made them appear as on the fortunes of something as fragile as the
things that lived outside of time. destiny of an individual state in the world system
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn India, a currency note declares, ÒI of states. This is what lies behind the value of
promise to pay the bearer the sum of X rupees.Ó your time, my time, and our time Ð ultimately, the
These rupees reflect the value of a certain sum of value of our life is pegged to the fetish of the
gold, which because of its imperishability is free-falling, free-floating dollar bill. No wonder it
something that will be of the same quality, say says ÒIn God We TrustÓ; when all else fails, the
ten years from now, as it is today, so that a divine is the only thing left to turn to.
ÒpromiseÓ made to pay the bearer may be
redeemable in the future. Time, Workers, and the Republic
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIt is important to hold on to this notion of The relationship between the time and effort that
uniqueness and finitude, because lurking behind one puts into work, the nature of recompense
this calculation is the fact that if we view time that one receives, and the quality of oneÕs
from the point of view of the individual then the participation in social life is a triangulated
truths that each of us lives only once (hence each problem that seems to have been with us for
moment is unique) and that death is inevitable thousands of years. Since Plato, if not earlier, we
(hence, one day, our time will end) make time have been accustomed to the idea that those
itself the most scarce commodity we have. That whose hands are busy all day long cannot have
is why we buy time, save time, and hoard time. the ÒtimeÓ and the detachment necessary for an
09.02.11 / 06:48:08 EDT

05/12
Sir Daniel Mackinnon Hamilton's rupee note.
09.02.11 / 06:48:08 EDT

engagement with social questions. Hence, they deducting personal expenses is what your
must never be given the authority or the power to family consumes.
decide things, not even for themselves. This is
somewhat circular Ð it automatically ensures Second, see how many years of earning you
that those who have power allocate themselves have left (your retirement age minus your
the freedom to not labor, with the excuse that present age). Project family expenses up to
06/12
those who labor cannot find the time to think on retirement, allowing for reasonable
matters larger than themselves. In other words, increments. Subtract any pension benefits
the quality of the time of the thinker and the doer they would receive if you die. Add non-
are seen to be two different things have hitherto recurring expenses, like your childrenÕs
been arranged hierarchically in all societies. higher education, or their marriage. The
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWhat happens when we begin to pay shortfall is what you should insure for. And
attention to the seconds and the hours? We third, calculate the present value of the
remember them, tell stories about them, make shortfall, allowing for a reasonable rate of
poems out of tea breaks and songs out of time inflation.9
stolen from laboring. It is the gossip and idle
chatter of seconds and hours that makes for Here is an example: suppose you earn 300,000
society. We know what we know about each other euros per year, and have twenty-five years until
because we tell each other the public secrets of retirement. Your total earnings until you retire
capital. Stretched end to end, this chatter turns would be 20.9 million, after factoring in an
into history. annual increment of 10 percent. Say 60 percent
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWhen we are done with accounting for our of your income goes towards taxes and personal
exhaustions, we are still left with the question of expenses. The rest would be family expenses. At
how, for instance, we value a personÕs life Ð the the end of twenty-five years, then, your total
sum total of the value of their time on earth. The family expenses would be 10.1 million. It is
thing is, you can gauge the value of a thing only difficult to predict inflation over long periods, but
when you know what you miss when you lose it. following the current rate of 6.5 percent, the
The problem is, you would not be in a position to present value of your family expenses over
judge the worth of your life were you to lose it. twenty-five years would work out to 4.2 million.
And so, to one school of thinking, the worth of a That is your financial worth in relation to your
life can only be gauged from what its absence family.

means to those who inherit the loss. ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊSo, if you were to die tomorrow, your family
would have to earn 4.2 million units of currency
Human Life Value: An Insurance over the next twenty-five years in order to
Calculation compensate monetarily for your absence. This
gives you an indication of how much you should
How is the insurance industry, with a little insure yourself for. If you divide 4.2 million down
help from mortality figures and actuarial to the last minute of all twenty-five years, you
tables, able to tell you what you are worth, get 2.5 units per minute and 150 units per hour.
not to yourself, but to your inheritors?A That is the value of your time per minute and per
clear way to assess oneÕs financial worth is hour over the next twenty-five years, according
to calculate Òhuman life value.Ó This to the insurance industry. This is how the value of
concept was developed in 1924 by Solomon every minute is calculated backwards from the
S. Huebner of the Wharton School of event of death.
Business. Huebner is considered a
founding father of the life insurance Ian WalkerÕs Formula for the Value of Your
industry and a dominant force in its Time
professionalization. Another way of computing the value of life-time
is made available by Ian Walker, a professor at
Here is how human life value is calculated. the Lancaster School of Business at Birmingham
First, deduct all personal expenses Ð food, University. Walker has calculated what it means
clothes, travel, entertainment, and so on Ð to value every minute of our time.10 He even has a
from your annual income. Income includes formula for it: V=(W((100-t)/100))/C, with ÒVÓ
salary, bonus, employee benefits like being the value of time, ÒWÓ the hourly wage rate,
company contributions to pension funds, ÒtÓ the tax rate, and ÒCÓ the cost of living.
and income from investments. (It is ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn 2002, when this study was done, it
important to make as complete and showed that time had become increasingly
realistic an assessment of your income as valuable over the last twenty-five years. This is a
possible, so you donÕt end up over-insuring.) slightly different measure from that of insurance,
What remains of your income after mortality figures, and actuarial tables. If there
09.02.11 / 06:48:08 EDT

we had sense of how much the absence of our Eternity!
time would cost others, here we get a sense of But I am straying from the subject: waiting
how much our time is worth to us as we live. The rooms.
two figures can be different, as the second
equation does not include several factors that All over the world, in the great terminals
the first one (being more socially embedded) And the tiny rooms of disbarred
07/12
includes. Does this mean that the same unit of abortionists,
time can be valued differently depending on For transport, diagnosis, or divorce É
whether we look at it from the point of view of Alas! Maybe this mighty and terrible theme
the inevitability of death or, on the other hand, Is too much for me. But wait! I have an idea.
the contingency of life?
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWalker claimed that his research showed YouÕve heard it said, of course, that
that if people had an endless supply of money, anything
more than 80 percent would use that money to May instantly turn into everything
buy time. In other words, he argued, most of us In this world secreting figures of itself
use money to by time. But given that time is Forever and everywhere? How wonderful
money, we are back to where we were a little That is, how horrible. Wherever you wait,
while ago, using time to buy time. Between anticipation and regret,
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊRegardless of whether we arrive at our value Between the first desire and the second
of time from death or from life, we are faced with Is but the razor of a moment, is
the fact that key determinants of the calculation, Not even time; and neither is motion more,
wages, and the cost of living are in many At sixty miles an hour or six hundred,
instances completely out of our control. In a Than an illusion sent by devils to afford
desperate, war-torn country, wages may be low, Themselves illusory laughs at our expense
but the cost of living may be incredibly high. Even (we suffer, but they become happier).
poorer people may have to ÒbuyÓ themselves
protection. We know this to be true from the fact Think how even in heaven where they wait
that in many cases it is expensive to be poor, and The Resurrection, even in the graves
that the rich are, in many instances, subsidized. Of heaven with the harps, this law applies:
These days they call it stimulus. One waiting room will get you to the next.
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThis leads to even more skewed results Even your room, even your very own,
when it comes to the quality of time. The With the old magazines on the end tables,
qualitative experience of time spent waiting in a The goldfish in the bowl below the window
long queue for food in a soup kitchen is very Where the sunbeam falls between Venetian
different from the experience of time earned by a blinds É
rich patron in a restaurant that takes pride in And in the downstairs fall there is your
delivering quick and efficient service. In both mailbox,
instances, a hungry person waited for food. In One among many gathering paper and dust,
one case, they felt they exhausted their time in A waiting room figure, summing up
the wait, and in the other, they felt that they had Much in a little, the legendary box
earned the time of a good meal. If we are the Where hope only remains. You wait and
meal, and our inheritors are the ones waiting to see.11
eat us up, then the value of our time can be
sensed from how they recount their experience What really happens while we wait? Does our
of waiting for us to die. body, our consciousness register the passage of
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWhile on the subject of waiting, and the time in a coherent, unified, responsibly sovereign
price of waiting, we could drift momentarily way?
towards Howard NemerovÕs poem, ÒWaiting
RoomsÓ: Timecode Drift
DonÕt we all experience momentary blackouts,
What great genius invented the waiting anomalies, premonitions, and short sharp bursts
room? of dŽjˆ vu? And could it be that these snags and
Every sublime idea no doubt is simple, but glitches and cracks and disturbances occur
Simplicity alone is never enough. because our mental clocks are a little off-key?
A cube sequestered in space and filled with ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIt is interesting to consider what happens
time, when two bits of digital sound or video are joined
Pure time, refined, distilled, denatured time together. Essentially, this operation has to rely on
Without qualities, without even dust É the two bits of data first identified on the basis
Dust in sunbeam between Venetian blinds of their timecode stamps. A timecode stamp
Where a boy and his mother wait É appears on images produced when you make a
09.02.11 / 06:48:08 EDT

photograph with even a basic consumer end A multiplicity of timecode issues Ð drift,
digital camera Ð it provides information including break, sync, control track Ð appeared on
when the photograph was made and the frame the master tapes and I was confronted with
number. the horror of the loss of automated
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn a recent article, Gautam Pemmaraju tries synchronization amongst other devilry. This
to fathom the strangely anomalous phenomena perfidy cannot be overstated Ð the
08/12
that sometimes occur in the video editing room prospect of trying to achieve/repair sync,
when joining two different bits of footage leads the flaws of which are in turn mischievously
to unexpected outcomes: asynchronous, begins with the acceptance
of many, many edit hours of painful
Timecode is essentially a labeling system remedial work. Someone or something
for video, film and audio material wherein fucked up and I had to pay for it.13
each frame has a unique identification
address in Hour:Minute:Second:Frame As he watched his material go progressively out
format. As binary coded media metadata, of sync, Pemmaraju realized that he was
timecode [sic] formats (standardized confronted with a case of what he calls
SMPTE, EBU) are practical ways to identify, Òtimecode drift.Ó He explains it as a mysterious
locate, access and then manipulate de-syncing that happens in live (or Òas liveÓ) TV
recorded audio/visual data.12 production, where the inputs of multiple
cameras are received simultaneously (and
PemmarajuÕs story of footage and data going out synchronously by Genlock) and are edited in real
of sync is familiar to anyone who has spent time time to one recording source (called the Òon-line
in an editing suite. He recounts how he went into masterÓ). Pemmaraju notes that,
an editing suite for postproduction work with live
footage from a music festival, and he soon Drift is loss of sync. The clocks drifted
realized, Òto his utter dismay,Ó the anguish that apart, or more precisely, the Òmaster clockÓ
was in store for him: was not able to consistently enslave its
subordinates. And the drift itself was a
Raqs Media Collective, Unusually Adrift From the Shoreline, Site-specific installation at the RŒdhusteateret, Sandnes, Norway, 2008.
09.02.11 / 06:48:08 EDT

variable, not a constant. Its value changed that our different histories make for different
over time, bringing up the rather curious apprehensions of time.
idea of a drifting apart of time over time. ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊDōgen, the thirteenth-century initiator of
Multiple clocks, meant to be synchronously Japanese Sōtō Zen, wrote extensively on the
tethered to one another instead achieve a question of being and time. Here are a few
sort of frisson, a momentary excitement or fragments gathered from his text, Shōbōgenzō.
09/12
perturbation, unannounced and governed
perhaps by an incalculable whimsy as they We can never measure how long and
break away from their moorings, leading distant or how short and pressing 24 hours
then to schismatic clocks and parallel, is; but, just the same, we call it Ò24 hours.Ó
fractured times. The leaving and coming of the directions
and traces (of time) are clear, so people do
Pondering on the phantasmagoric nature of not doubt it. They do not doubt it but that
these interlinked drifts, of time, and perception, does not mean that they know it.
leads him on Òto consider paths crossing, or
crossed paths, missed opportunities, and We can say, for the present, however, that
ultimately, an eschatological stoppage Ð a doubt is nothing other than time.
grinding halt of time.Ó14
Thus there are moments that are made up
The Qualia of Time in the same moment of time and there are
PemmarajuÕs story urges us to consider the moments of time (plural) in which the same
occasional senses of temporal dislocation that mind is made up. Practice and realization of
we all experience from time to time Ð instances the truth are also like this. Putting the self
of timecode drift within our consciousness, in order we see what it is. The truth that
small insurgencies of slave clocks against a self is time is like this. We should learn in
tyrannical master clock. Little outbursts of the practice that because of this truth the
time of the id against the timetable of the super- whole earth includes myriad phenomena
ego? When thinking about the qualities or, to use and hundreds of things, and each
a more precise term, the qualia of time Ð the phenomenon and each thing exists in the
ineffable, intrinsic, private, directly whole Earth.
apprehensible sense of what happens when we

are confronted with duration Ð be it in waiting for Such toing and froing is the first step of
a bus, the arms of a lover, the walls of a prison, practice. When we arrive on the solid
or by the shores of a sea Ð we realize that every ground of the ineffable, there is just one
instance of the apprehension of timeÕs qualia is thing and just one phenomenon here and
layered on the memory of other experiences, that now, irrespective of whether we understand
in some incomprehensible way, the time spent in or do not understand things or phenomena.
the arms of a lover is understood not just in Because there is only this exact moment,
reference to itself, but also in contrast to the all moments of existence-time are the
time spent waiting our turn at a ticket counter. whole of existence-time, and all existent
And often, at the ticket counter or on the things and phenomena are time. The whole
assembly line, waiting while the clock weighs of existence, the whole universe, exists in
down on us, we are recalling the intensity and individual moments of time. Pause a
the comfort of the time spent in the arms of a moment and reflect whether or not any part
lover. When we trade time, which time are we of the whole of existence or of the whole
trading, which layer of qualia, and how can these universe has leaked away from the present
add up and be accounted for when our own moment of time.15
clocks drift away from each other, from time to
time? If each second contains the universe, how do we
trade it? How do we loan it, buy it, save it? How
Dōgen on Time: The Universe in a Moment do we accumulate interest on it? What can we do
All that we have discussed until now points to with it?
the difficulty in finding equivalences between ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊHow, then, can my time trade for yours?
different experiences of time. We have seen that ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIf my time and your time is the time of the
the value of time looks different from the points universe, then how can we trade time for itself?
of view of life and death, from the points of view Only if we reorder our orientation vis-ˆ-vis time
of the different temporal rhythms we embody, from one unduly governed by our sense of the
and from the point of view of how the social finitude of our lifespans to the infinitude of death
world conditions the triangulation of waiting, itself. This statement may seem surprising to
anticipation, and entitlement. Finally, we know some, and so might need a little unpacking.
09.02.11 / 06:48:09 EDT

who remains alive. So, in fact, all debts have
been cleared through this triangular relationship
of gift giving. As we make this model
progressively more complex, we realize that we
all stand in a relationship of complex obligations
and reciprocity where no one stands indebted to
anyone else because of the way in which debts
cancel each other out. And yet, everyone is
simultaneously indebted to everyone else.17
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn the second chapter of DerridaÕs Given
Time, entitled ÒThe Madness of Economic
Reason,Ó is a remarkable passage on the
relationship between gifting and time. His
analysis comes from a meditation on the
problem of the relationship between the excess
of gifting and the balance of reciprocity as
established by Marcel Mauss in The Gift.
The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to

the extent it gives time. The difference
between a gift and every other operation of
pure and simple exchange is that the gift
gives time. There where there is gift, there is
time. What it gives, the gift, is time. But the
gift of time is also a demand of time. The
thing must not be restituted immediately
The Circuit of Debt and Redemption: Life and right away. There must be time, it must
and Death Reconsidered last, there must be waiting Ð without
If wealth is controlled time, then, the sediment forgetting (lÕattente Ð sans oubli). It
that is formed when duration is put under duress demands time, the thing, but it demands a
is its currency. The time spent in labor is hereby delimited time, neither an instant nor an
regained as its coinage, which I guarantee to infinite time, but a time determined by a
exchange with the detritus of your time, for term, in other words, a rhythm, a cadence.
eternity. My time for yours, for now, for later, for The thing is not in time; it is or it has time,
the time of our choosing.16 or rather it demands to have, to give, or to
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe one thing that is equally available to all, take time Ð and time as rhythm, a rhythm
and that does not perish and can never perish as that does not befall a homogenous time but
long as there is life, is death itself. Our mortality that structures it originally.18
should be the gold standard of our lifeÕs
transactions with other lives. It is the metal to This presupposes that we understand our time
which we can peg all our currencies, all our on earth as part of a commons, and our
instances of giving and taking to each other. reciprocal actions as the motions of a grand
Once we die, we can neither give nor receive, and orchestra in which the music continues to be
all attempts to evade this fact, whether through played even though players come and go. This
inheritances or estates, are basically arbitrary time actually devolves back to the commons
attempts to pretend that death had in fact not when we die. It creates more time for other
occurred. people. To paraphrase Marx, dead time makes
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊConsider the example of two people in two fertile the ground of living time.19
retirement communities in different parts of the ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊAristotle reminds us that, Ò[things] are
world, who each decide to give each other a contained by time in the same way that things
present Ð a gift of time. The first gives his gift of which are in number are contained by number
time to the second, who then dies and has no and things which are in place are contained by
chance to reciprocate, and remains indebted to place. É [T]hat to be in time is to be measured by
the person who is still alive. But it gets more time.Ó20 It is not the other way around, it is
complicated than this: this first person receives precisely not to measure our time by the worth of
a gift of time from a third person, who then also our being. It is time that has us, not we that have
dies, leaving the this person who is still living time.
with no way of repaying him either. But before ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWe cannot have time, because in time we
they died, each person gave and received gifts of become ourselves and then cease to be
time Ð through the intermediary of the person ourselves. In earlier times, time was seen as the
09.02.11 / 06:48:09 EDT

property of God, and that is why there were Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh
prohibitions on usury. You could not charge Bagchi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta) have been variously
described as artists, curators, editors, and catalysts of
interest on a loan because what you were giving cultural processes. Their work, which has been
to another person was not necessarily money exhibited widely in major international spaces and
alone, but also time. As long as the borrower events, locates them along the intersections of
gave back the principal to you, that was all that contemporary art, historical inquiry, philosophical
11/12
mattered. A demand for a repayment of interest speculation, research and theory Ð often taking the
form of installations, online and offline media objects,
only made sense if you thought that the time he
performances and encounters. They live and work in
had kept the money with himself actually Delhi, partly based at Sarai, Centre for the Study of
belonged to someone, and that that someone Developing Societies, an initiative they co-founded in
happened to be you. To assume this was to lay 2000. They are members of the editorial collective of
claim to time as oneÕs fief, to make oneself a the Sarai Reader series, and have curated "The Rest of
Now" and co-curated "Scenarios" for Manifesta 7.
competitor of God.
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible has
passages on time that continue to be of value to
consider:
A time to cast away stones, and a time to

gather stones together; a time to embrace,
and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to
keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to
keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of
war, and a time of peace.21
Even those of us who are not blessed with belief

in the divine can make sense of the fact that
there is something perverse and arrogant to
laying claim to time as property. The wage

system miraculously offers entitlement to a
fraction of time, but takes away entitlement to
most of it, and yet, at the same time, insists that

one should jealously guard the time one has left
from theft by others. No wonder that thieves
make excellent policemen and the biggest bank
robbers are those who own and manage banks.
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊOur time began when we were born, and will
end when we die. We have done nothing to earn
it, so we cannot pretend that it is ours. How do
we share and exchange that which is not ours?
What does it mean to use words like sharing,
exchange, and reciprocity in relation to
something that cannot be owned?
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ×
This essay originated as a presentation given on May 16, 2011
at Staedelschule in Frankfurt on the occasion of the opening
of Time/Bank, a project by Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle.
09.02.11 / 06:48:09 EDT

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ1 University of Chicago Press,
Martin Heidegger, On Being and 1977), 459Ð60.
Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh
(Chicago: University of Chicago ÊÊÊÊÊÊ12
Press, 2002), 3. Gautam Pemmaraju,
ÒMisbehaving Clocks: A Primary
ÊÊÊÊÊÊ2 Pathology of Timecode
Saint Augustine, Confessions, Troubles.Ó See
trans. Henry Chadwick (New http://www.3quarksdaily.com/
12/12
York: Oxford University Press, 3quarksdaily/2011/05/misbeha
1991), 230. ving-clocks-a-primary-pathol
ogy-of-timecode-troubles.htm l.
ÊÊÊÊÊÊ3
Burkhard Bilger, ÒThe ÊÊÊÊÊÊ13
Possibilian: What a Brush with Ibid.
Death Taught David Eagleman
about the Mysteries of Time and ÊÊÊÊÊÊ14
the Brain,Ó New Yorker, April 25, Ibid.
2011, 57.
ÊÊÊÊÊÊ15
ÊÊÊÊÊÊ4 Master DōgenÕs Shōbōgenzō:
Ibid., 57Ð58. Book 1, trans. Gudo Nishijima
and Chodo Cross (BookSurge
ÊÊÊÊÊÊ5 Publishing, 2006), 91Ð93.
For a history of the idea of
alternatives to currency, see ÊÊÊÊÊÊ16
Thomas H. Greco, Jr., The End of From a note that accompanied
Money and the Future of our contribution to Anton
Civilization (White River Vidokle and Julieta ArandaÕs
Junction, VT: Chelsea Green inauguration of Time/Bank.
Publishing, 2009).
ÊÊÊÊÊÊ17
ÊÊÊÊÊÊ6 For a wealth of ideas on gifts,
For more on alchemy, gold, debt, and reciprocity, see
money, and immortality, see Bronisław Malinowski, The
Hans Christoph Binswanger, Argonauts of the Western Pacific
Money and Magic: A Critique of (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press,
the Modern Economy in the Light 1984); Marcel Mauss, The Gift:
of GoetheÕs Faust (Chicago: Forms and Functions of
University of Chicago Press, Exchange in Archaic Societies,
1994). trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W.
W. Norton, 2000); Georges
ÊÊÊÊÊÊ7 Bataille, The Accursed Share:
For an interesting history of the Consumption (Volume 1)
fortunes of the US dollar as a (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 1991);
unit of international exchange Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt
see Barry Eichengreen, and the Shadow Side of Wealth

Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise (Toronto: House of Anansi Press,
and Fall of the Dollar and the 2008).
Future of the International
Monetary System (New York: ÊÊÊÊÊÊ18

Oxford University Press, 2011). Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1.
Counterfeit Money (Chicago:
ÊÊÊÊÊÊ8 University of Chicago Press,
For a useful overview of the 1994), 41.
abandonment of the gold
standard during Richard NixonÕs ÊÊÊÊÊÊ19
presidency see Allan J. The reference here is to MarxÕs
Masutow, NixonÕs Economy: discussion of dead labor and
Booms, Busts, Dollars and Votes living labor in Marx, Capital,
(Lawrence: University Press of Volume 1 (New York: Penguin
Kansas, 1998), 149Ð82. Classics, 1992), 283Ð93.
ÊÊÊÊÊÊ9 ÊÊÊÊÊÊ20
From Aristotle, The Physics (New York:
http://119.82.71.56/printart Oxford University Press, 1999),
icle.aspx?85951. See also S.S. 110.
Heubner, The Economics of Life
Insurance: Human Life Values Ð ÊÊÊÊÊÊ21
Their Financial Organization, Ecclesiastes 3:5Ð8.
Management and Liquidation
(Leap Systems Inc./Appleton,
Century, Crofts, 1996).
ÊÊÊÊÊÊ10
ÒTime is Money, Professor
Proves,Ó CNN, May 29, 2002,
http://articles.cnn.com/2002 -
05-29/tech/time.money_1_pen
ce-formula-average-cost?_s=P
M:TECH. See also, Nick Drainey,
ÒA Formula for Efficient Living,Ó
The Scotsman, May 29, 2002,
http://news.scotsman.com/new
s/A-formula-for-efficient-li
ving.2330929.jp.
ÊÊÊÊÊÊ11
Howard Nemerov, ÒWaiting
Rooms,Ó in The Collected Poems
of Howard Nemerov (Chicago:
09.02.11 / 06:48:09 EDT

This book has its origins in the editors’ hypothesis that the Asia Pacific region
offers a useful vantage point on the question of place, where, for example, issues of
sovereignty are often tied to material struggles to reclaim traditional territories,
and many distinctive cultural values stem from human relationships with the
land. The region, though, is arbitrarily constructed, and it is from this starting
point that the Raqs Media Collective weave together some myths — factual and
symbolic — of the Pacific into a series of images with which to frame and to
think urgent ethical questions about the fate of cultural values in new media
practice. For example, remembering the knowledge system that preceded the
currently dominant Western conception of navigation, they explain how older
Pacific sailors calculated their progress in an inversion of Dead Reckoning, “on
the basis of a metaphorical assumption of the still navigator interfacing with
a world that courses towards or away from him or her”, concluding that Dead
Reckoning won out as a way of thinking because the ships that used it were
equipped with more deadly munitions. In relation to a detail like this, the essay
traces cultural values deep into human practices, and in making them visible,
asks how we might avoid the violence that homogenises culture in the way
information is handled and different ethoi are brought into communication:
How can we think of culture without thinking in terms of property, for example?
How can we avoid the hegemony embedded in “end-user agreements”? In posing
these challenges to their own practice, Raqs demonstrate the learning that may
occur in openly and curiously engaging with different histories.
Pacific Parables
The Pacific Rim as a Fiction of Place

The Pacific Rim is a fiction about place, a filter through which you can
look at the world if you choose to and confer more or less arbitrary
meanings on to a set of latitudes and longitudes. There have been
previous fictions about place straddling this water, one was called the
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and unleashed havoc in the
name of the solidarity of oppressed peoples of Asia, another thought
of the Pacific as a Californian frontier, a kind of Wild Blue West. A third
spoke French, drew naked women in Tahiti, and detonated hydrogen
10 Chapter Two
bombs in the water. A fourth, the South Pacific Bubble, was one of the
first episodes of global financial speculation that shaped the turbulence
of the economy of our modern era.
Meanwhile, Sikh peasants from the Punjab, Chinese railroad workers
from Canton, agricultural workers and sugarcane cultivators from the
hinterland of North India traversed the ocean, Mexicans swam or walked
along the coastline, Australian sailors, New Zealanders on whaling ships,
Japanese factory workers, Filipina nurses and itinerant Pacific Islander
communities traversed the Pacific, and the wider world, buffeted by the
rough winds of recent history. They grew fruit trees in Napa valley, felled
timber in British Columbia, mined tin in Peru, pressed grapes in Chile
and made what some choose to call the Pacific Rim what it is today. In
time, agricultural labourers were joined by software programmers. And
roads from Napa Valley began to lead in and out of Silicon Valley.
Ringed by fire, held together by fragile surfaces that slide on to each
other, girded through with pipelines, beset by storms. You could say that
the Pacific Ocean, apparently endless and bottomless, sounds almost
like the Internet. Which is not altogether inappropriate considering that
the Pacific Rim, between California, East Asia and Australasia, probably
contains within it the highest density of Internet traffic.
The first question we want to ask is: how can this fiction of location,
this imaginary map, the one that we are all currently engaged in drawing,
not reproduce the boundaries that beset all mapmaking exercises? How
can we as mapmakers avoid the predicament of an expression of mastery
over the landscape we intend to survey?
Dead and Living Reckoning

We forget that cartography is as variable a practice as any. There are maps
and then there are maps, and there are different kinds of mapmaking.
Modern maritime navigational charts, based on latitude and longitude,
determine a principle of navigation known as “Dead Reckoning”. Dead
Reckoning, in our limited understanding, is the method by which the
position of a moving body is deduced in advance by taking fixes from
previously known positions and then reading them against calculations
with variables such as speed, direction, wind speed, tide patterns and
currents. Prior to GPS, most navigators had to rely on dead reckoning,
with a little help from a compass, an astrolabe, star charts, chronometers
Raqs Media Collective: Pacific Parables 11
and longitude tables. Dead Reckoning models itself on the dynamics

of the relationship between a moving object and a notionally inert
surface.
We say most, but should qualify it immediately, because for most of
human history, the largest water body in the world was navigated using
a different system of reckoning. The Pacific Island cultures, which were
probably the most prolific seafarers that the history of humanity has
known, actually used the opposite navigational principle. Reckoning was
taken on the basis of a metaphorical assumption of the still navigator
interfacing with a world which courses towards or away from him or
her. Thus, it is not the sailor that approaches an island, but the island
that advances towards, and then past the sailor. Meanwhile, the stars
remain constant, thus marking general orientation. The course is set
by the stars, and the world—a living, dynamic entity—flows past under
the navigator’s gaze. For terminological convenience alone, one could
call this method “Live Reckoning”. The relationship between dead and
live reckoning is a study in the encounter of two knowledge systems,
two practices and ethoi of information. The difference between them
ultimately lay in how much gunpowder they had backing them. One
had lots, the other, none. The ships that used “dead reckoning” carried
cannons and muskets; the canoes of the live reckoners were armed with
arrows and spears. The knowledge system with guns won the day. Pacific
Island navigation systems remain as relics, occasionally resuscitated by
an anthropologist or a sailing enthusiast.
Today, we who are practitioners of information, artisans of knowledge,
often forget that our practices are also guaranteed by sophisticated
weapons, and not only of the lethal kind. Modernity’s edge is ultimately
a matter of ammunition. What safeguards should we institute to ensure
that our encounters with the few remaining knowledge, information
and communication systems different from our own do not result in
their extinction? How can the business of reckoning continue to remain
alive?
Cargo Cults
We head now in the direction of the island of the long wait. We refer
here to a quintessentially modern practice of faith, the Cargo Cults
that arose in the Pacific Islands, as a poignant marker of the power that
12 Chapter Two
technology (even if it does not work) can wield over the human spirit.
In a typical Cargo Cult, contact with the accoutrements of modern
Industrial civilization at war time (in the form of airdrops of food and
other essential items from large transport or cargo planes for soldiers
stationed in the islands) allegedly convinced the islanders that all that
they needed for utopia to arrive was the ability to attract the right kind
of airplane to land and disgorge its cornucopia of wealth (tinned food,
white goods, durables, clothes etc.) on the island. It had been observed
that airplanes tended to land on airstrips that were complete with
runways, observation towers, a few standing airplanes and radar. So
replicant infrastructure and replica airplanes were built with locally
available materials in the hope that such engineering efforts would
attract the bountiful flying machines from the sky. Needless to say, the
planes would never land. The islanders waited, and perhaps still wait.
Cargo Cults are a useful metaphor for thinking about many diverse
phenomena in contemporary culture, ranging from shopping malls
spreading across space to imitative work routines. When the success
of shopping malls in a region spawns mall clones in adjoining areas
that wait for customers that do not arrive, we can see a cargo cult like
phenomenon at work. Gigantic hulks of retail, arrayed for miles, stand
girded by empty parking lots in many parts of Europe, North America
and Asia.
Why do we wait for things to come to us? What guarantee is there
that if we create replicas of the structures that house cultural expressions
in other spaces, we will automatically create the conditions of a new
culture? Why be in such a hurry to acquire the latest technology, and
why wait so long for the perfect machine, the perfect piece of code, the
killer application? What is it about our situation that makes us so afraid
of being left behind? Why do we fear obsolescence?
Easter Island
What more remarkable reminders of obsolescence can there be than the
stone giants of Easter Island. They too stand, as if waiting, scanning the
horizon of the Pacific for a perpetually deferred future. We know almost
nothing about the people and the culture that created them, and we do
not know what they were trying to communicate to the big ocean by
placing these standing figures. What we do have a sense of is the fact
that this activity of intensive stone quarrying devastated the ecology

and social structures of the island, and that ultimately, the culture could
not bear the burden of its own communicative practices. Perhaps a
useful object lesson. Sometimes it becomes useful to audit the social and
ecological footprints of our communicative practices.
The making of computer hardware and software also involves
toxic materials, depressed wages and prison labour, and a great deal of
this occurs on either side of the Pacific seaboard, in East Asia and in
California. How can we reconcile the utopian promises that are made
on behalf of information and communication technologies with the
dystopic realities of their production in our societies?
The Imaginary Island on the Dateline

The utopian impulse is castigated elsewhere, but remains uncritically
celebrated when it comes to communication technologies. Sober, even
conservative, men in suits turn instantly into radicals when it comes to
a new gadget. As if what were questionable in politics were automatically
acceptable when translated into culture. Every product, every device,
every new piece of code or procedure announces itself as a revolution. As
artists working with these devices we are often the most effective bearers
of this revolutionary zeal. This takes us to our fifth Pacific destination, to
an imaginary island that straddles the dateline, encompassing within its
circumference the diurnal revolution such that sunrise and sunset are
locked into some kind of recursive embrace. And so you have sunrise
media that almost immediately becomes sunset media. Where the
pressure of getting a headstart into your tomorrow or the fear of being
left behind in your yesterday leaves no room for today. What remains
of the day is an insomniac anxiety about being adrift, lost in the ocean.
How best can we jettison the burden of being the new, so that we can stop
worrying about becoming dated?
El Niño
Sailing in the Pacific is a hazardous job. Depending on the direction
in which you are going you could run across strong contrary winds.
A combination of atmospheric phenomena and pressure conditions
creates weather systems that may be specific to, or originate in the
Pacific, but have global consequences. One of them is the El Niño, which
14 Chapter Two
together with its companion La Niña, arises in the waters off the coast of
Peru, and creates weather conditions that lead to depletion in fish stocks
in some waters, overabundance in others, hurricanes in some places,
and droughts in others. It was noticed sometime in the late nineteenth
century that drought and famine struck India and Australia with
remarkable concordance, and it was deduced that this had something
to do with the way in which the phenomenon known as the El Niño
Southern Oscillation affects the weather system of the Indian Ocean
and its littoral region.
This is well known; what is less well known is the matter of a
speculative economy, particularly in the fixing of global food and primary
commodity prices that capitalises on the eccentric but not irregular
periodicity of the El Niño and La Niña systems. Here you have real time
based weather report, statistical observation of meteorological systems
going back at least a century, commodity price fluctuation indices and
a globally integrated market working together to reap enormous profits
from the tamed uncertainties of the weather. The futures market in
primary commodities, in food and other natural products, works on this
basis, creating enormous wealth, based on speculation, for some and
misery for billions of others. Here, data and disaster often go together.
How can those of us who work with information in a creative manner
begin to get a handle on the enormously significant ethical questions
that arise from the handling of information in today’s world, especially
in the region that we describe as the Pacific Rim?
Nauru: Birdshit and Gold

The consequences of the generation of disproportionate assets through
operations on information, knowledge and culture, require special and
extended treatment, and this is probably not the best occasion to do
that. But there is a Pacific Parable that can be drawn from the dots in the
ocean that are composed of skeletons and shit. We refer to islands like
Nauru in the Pacific, where one of us actually visited over a few years
as a teenager, whose entire economy consisted of phosphate mining
operations that processed fossil birdshit into gold. Nauru is a parable for
the toxicity that accompanies a gold rush. The wealth that was produced
within the span of few generations—the first ship with guano left in
1907—was consumed within a generation, leading to a population that
is unwell, intoxicated, and poor. Growing up in Nauru was not the most
exhilarating experience, and the teenage utopia of a Pacific Paradise
never matched up to the reality of dependence and decay. Today, Nauru
is reduced to being a place where the Australian state out-sources the
detention of people it considers to be potential illegal immigrants.
When the accumulated deposits of millennia are mined within a
generation, people are left with little or no resources for the future. If
the ruthless commodification of nature always produces a toxic culture,
what would the relentless mining of a commons of culture produce? An
unquestioning faith in the mechanisms of intellectual property takes
for granted that the accumulated creative, imaginative and mental
labour of our ancestors, which informs all our thought and creativity
today, is a resource available for plunder. This engenders an acquisitive,
proprietary attitude towards cultural production that inhibits growth,
learning and future creativity.
The epics, stories, songs and sagas that represent in some ways
the collective heritage of humanity have survived only because their
custodians took care not to lock them into a system of “end usage”, and
embellished them, adding to their health and vitality, before passing
them on to others.
The parallels that we are drawing between guano and intellectual
property rest on a variety of resonances. It could be argued that some
of the unilateral features of TRIPS agreements that definitively shaped
the destiny of Intellectual Property (IP) legislation across the world had
a historical precedent, or at least shares a resonance with the piece of
US Federal Law known as the Guano Islands Act (currently embodied in
federal statutes as U.S. Code, Title 48, Chapter 8, Sections 1411-1419). The
Guano Islands Act, which became law in August 1856 (exactly 150 years
ago), enabled any and all U.S. citizens to take possession (for the United
States of America) of any island, rock or key, containing Guano deposits,
anywhere in the world, provided they were not occupied or within the
jurisdiction of any other government.
The intellectual property regime legislated by the TRIPS agreement
allows citizens of several states to patent, trademark, copyright or
otherwise assert their intellectual property claims on several forms
of life, aspects of knowledge systems, cultural material and practices
(wherever previous private intellectual property claims are absent).
16 Chapter Two
This renders much of human culture akin to islands of Guano, primed

for possession and mining. They create enclosures where none existed
before.
When codes or languages closed in on themselves, allowing no
“interpolations” or trespasses after a point, they rapidly haemorrhaged.
How can we in our generation, immersed as we are in the language
of property, ensure that there is space left for the cultivation of the
commons? We ask this also because even initiatives like free and open
source software, and the Creative Commons initiative, ultimately take
recourse to the language of ownership and property, albeit an annotated
notion of ownership, to make their case. Is there a language for culture,
especially for the reproduction of culture that can elide the question of
property?
The Kula Ring

Unlike commodities, gifts can accrue value to themselves as they
pass from one person to another in a network of gift exchange. The
ethnography of the gift exchange in the Trobriand Islands, made famous
by the Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski as the Kula Ring in his
remarkable book, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, is an instance of this
phenomenon; as is, in a less exotic sense the ways in which heirlooms
add value to themselves as they pass down generations. In a digital
environment it is not necessarily the patina of age or prestige that will
lend value to a digital object as it passes between persons; rather, it is the
possibility that it will be improved, refined, and have things added to it
through usage (without doing any damage to an always available earlier
iteration of the object itself, which can be recovered through the layers
that gather to a work in a palimpsest).
It is this fact that gives to electronic piracy, and to any act that frees
information from the prison of artificial or illusory “originality”, its
true cutting edge. It does so not out of any radical intent to subvert the
laws of property and the commodity, but because it makes eminent
common sense for people to share information in any community
through networks of informal sociality, especially if the act of sharing
brings with it no depreciation in the value of that which is shared.
Rather, the person who shares more gathers prestige to herself, and
by now we are all accustomed to extraordinary feats of electronic
generosity (which sometimes carry with them an aura of “bravado”) as

means of earning reputations within tightly knit online communities.
The new pirates are just as desirous of chronicles of their adventurous
heroism as their ancestors! The Pacific has distinguished histories of gift
giving, complex circulation and custodianship principles for cultural
material, pirate economies and mutinous sailors. How can this history
of an adventurously redistributive generosity inform our practices with
information and culture today? What can Pacific traditions of abundant
reproduction and replication teach the contemporary global moment?
How may we rediscover a robust ethic of transaction that does not
lock culture into the dungeon of “end user agreements” that inhibit
circulation?
Depth, Shipwrecks and Dark Fibre

It is well known that the Pacific holds within itself the world’s deepest
spots. Many fathoms below the surface of the sea, the Mariana trench
is the world’s deepest place. Deep spots such as these are places where
residues and remains accumulate. The depths of cyberspace, and what
is beginning to be called “information society”, like the depths of the
ocean, are places where all sorts of residual pieces of information
accumulate. Here, amongst forgotten and shipwrecked media, one
encounters strange, mutant electrical life forms. Beings made of what
Geert Lovink (2003) has called “dark fibre”.
So much of the discourse about information technology and
communication is about light, about transparency and knowledge, that we
forget that information is crucial for the manufacture of disinformation.
We are thinking right now of the enormous energy that is being put
into the media, electronic, online and print, all over the world, but also
especially in the United States, in justifying the naked aggression that
the State of Israel is inflicting on the people of Lebanon. How can we
begin to talk about the dark matter of information, or disinformation,
and the political management of information, with at least as much
attention and energy as we do about information enlightenment? How
can we render the deep and the dark in our work with light?
18 Chapter Two
Lemuria: Lost Continent

We come now to our final destination. This time, we are sailing in a
submarine. After all, we were plumbing the depths of the Mariana
Trench a moment ago, so it makes sense to keep going under water,
crawling along the sea floor in search of a lost, submerged continent. At
the fag end of the age of geographical discovery in the late nineteenth
century, the public imagination in many parts of the world, in its thirst
for new worlds, hit upon the idea of lost and submerged continents.
Mariners tales, philosophical speculations and utopian strains of
thought were dredged from all across history to yield lost continents
like Atlantis, and its variant in our neighbourhood, Lemuria. Lemuria
first came into view as an attempt at explaining a zoological puzzle, the
pattern of distribution of the lemur family of primates, which hugged
the shorelines of islands and continental landmasses of the Asia Pacific
region, from Indonesia to Africa. Lemuria was invoked in explanations
of everything from the missing link in the chain of human evolution, to
the origin of diverse language families, the origin of the human species
and the routes taken for the first human migrations.
What interests us here is not the project of recovering a fascinating
imaginary history so much as a speculation about the distribution of a
life form yielding an image of a space and a continent. This can lead to a
prospective, and not retrospective insight. Like lemurs, many of us who
occupy spaces within the media arts, hug the shorelines of landmasses
of cultures, especially in the Asia Pacific region. We recognize that
something, a family likeness perhaps, an eccentric sense of the kinship
of our practices, the broad features of common questions and concerns,
hint at some kind of extended lineage that we can draw from. These
would include the histories of communication that we have inherited
and the questions that our social, cultural and political milieus confront
us with. If we are to create cultural futures for ourselves, we will have to
place and ground our practices on the terrain of a recovered continent.
How can we begin mapping this continent that awaits our recovery of
its submerged landscape. What do we need to do now to explore the
shorelines of all our practices?
This chapter is adapted from a keynote address given at the Pacific Rim New
Media Summit, ISEA2006/zero one, August 2006, San Jose, USA.
References
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of the Third World. London: Verso.
Diamond, J. 2004. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New
York: Viking.
Economist. 2001. “Nauru: Paradise well and truly lost.” The Economist, 20
December 2001. http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_
id=884045
Fitzgerald, J. “Contemporary Cargo Cults.” http://www.actualanalysis.
com/cargo.htm
Harris, M. 1974. Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture. New
York: Random House.
Howe, K.R. 2003. The Quest for Origins. Auckland: Penguin Books.
Lovink, G. 2003. Dark Fiber. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Malinowski, B. 1984 [1922]. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Reprint ed.
Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press.
Raqs Media Collective. 2003. “Value and its Other in Electronic Culture—
Slave Ships and Private Galleons” in DIVE, edited by Armin Medosch.
Liverpool: FACT. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/texts6.html
Ramaswamy, S. 2005. Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories: The Lost
Land of Lemuria. New Delhi: Permanent Black.
Teaiwa, T. K. 2006. “On Analogies: Rethinking the Pacific in a Global
Context.” The Contemporary Pacific 18, no. 1. 71–87.
Turnbull, D. 2000. Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative
Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge. London:
Routledge.
Wikipedia contributors, “Guano Islands Act,” Wikipedia, The Free
Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act
Alt + Option / 357
A Concise Lexicon
Of / For the Digital Commons
RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE
i t e r a t i o n
k y a r n w e b
g i f t e
o r b i t a c c e s s
n o
t v e u d l
z o n e s a l e b e i
o c i i m
l t t m q i
s o e e n u n
r m o i a
e d a t a l
e y
v e c t o r s
ACCESS
The facility to log on and log in to a space or a network where people and meanings
gather. To be present, to have the ability, the key, to decode a signal, to open doors, to be
able to download/upload on to any system of signs and signals – be it the Internet, a book,
an art work, or a dinner party. There can be no excess of access.
358 / Sarai Reader 2003: Shaping Technologies
BANDWIDTH
Describes the dimensions that are necessary for messages, signals and communications
to get through. The greater the bandwidth of a system, the higher the number of messages
and the higher the quantum of information that it can accommodate at any given time. It fol-
lows from this that access is a function of bandwidth. More people can make themselves
heard when there is room for them to speak and be spoken to. Bandwidth translates into
content-rich information, streams of video, audio and text flowing into each other. It also
translates at the moment into cash. The hard cash and control that comes from selling pic-
tures and sounds and numbers to more and more people.
CODE
That which carries embedded within it a sign. A code is always a way of saying something
to mean something other than that which is merely said. A code can be ‘opened’, in the sense
that it can be accessed and entered, as opposed to ‘broken’. An open-access culture of com-
munication ‘reveals the source’ of its codes. A closed culture of communication blocks
access to its codes. ‘Free code’ is code which welcomes entry, and is open to change. ‘Free
code’ needs to be shared for it to grow. Code connotes community, a community of
‘encoders, decoders and code sharers’. Like eggs, code is sometimes best had scrambled.
DATA
Information: Can mean anything from numbers to images, from white noise to noise to
sound. A weather report, a portrait, a shadow in surveillance footage, a salary statement,
birth and death statistics, a headcount in a gathering of friends, private e-mail, ultra high
frequency signals, sale and purchase transactions and the patterns made by pedestrians
as they walk in a city – all of this can be and is data. Data, like coal, uranium and other
minerals vital to the running of the world economy is mined, processed, refined and sold at
a high price. Battlefields, early twenty-first-century inter-personal relationships and stock
exchanges have been known to be hypersensitive to data traffic. Data mining is a major
emerging industry in Delhi. The miners lead very quiet days, and spend long nights coding
in low temperature zones called “Data Outsourcing Centres”.
Contrarily, the word Data (dãtã) in Hindi/Sanskrit is taken to mean ‘giver’, which sug-
gests that one must always be generous with information, and make gifts of our code,
images and ideas. To be stingy with data is to violate an instance of the secret and sacred
compacts of homophonic words from different cultural/spatial orbits (dãtã in Hindi and
‘data’ in English) as they meet in the liminal zone between languages, in the thicket of the
sound of quotidian slips of the tongue. Errors in transmission and understanding too carry
gifts and data.
ENSEMBLE
The conceit or delight in togetherness in an increasingly anomic, fragmented world. Playing
or working together to create finished or unfinished works. Chamber musicians, criminals,
code-hackers and documentarists form ensembles. Artists try to. Effective ensembles are
high bandwidth assemblies that build into their own architecture portals for random access
Alt + Option / 359
into themselves. They are, when they are at their best, open systems that place a premium
on shared information within them. They can at times maintain high levels of secrecy while
appearing to be transparent. Here, confidentiality is an index of practices in gestation.
Mined data is, sometimes, restored to natural states of information entropy in data dis-
sembling ensembles, which have been found to work best at night in media labs. The Raqs
Media Collective is an ensemble and everything it does is an ensemble of existing or antici-
pated practices.
FRACTAL
The self-organising design of repeating, replicating structures, often found in snowflakes,
tree branch growth patterns, molecular structures and free code. Every part of a fractal
pattern carries within it the signature or the emboss of the whole. A single fractal iteration
carries within it the kernels of all others of its kind. Every fractal is a rescension of
every other fractal that has grown from within it. In the same way a fragment of free
code, or free cultural code, carries within it a myriad possibilities of its own reproduction
and dispersal within a shared symbolic or information space. Fractals best describe the
geometry of the matrices that are formed when data is shared instead of being just mined
and shipped by a community of coders. Fractals are the fruit trees of the unconscious
designing mind.
GIFT
Something freely given, and taken, as in free code. Gift givers and gift takers are bound in
networks of random or pre-meditated acts of symbolic exchange. The code begets the gift
as the form of its own survival over time. In this way a gift is a quiet meme. Reciprocity
begets reciprocity. The principle of the gift demands that the things being given be price-
less, in other words so valuable as to be impossible to quantify in terms of the possibilities
of abstract generalised exchange. The gift must at the same time, be easy to bear and
keep, easy to use and there must be no guilt involved in its destruction or dispersal when
its use value either changes or demands redistribution in order to be effective. Gifts open
doors to our own possibilities of generosity. In this way they facilitate access to the things
we did not even know we had. And, there is such a thing as a free lunch, although it requires
the pursuit of a special recipe.
HETEROGENOUS
That which begins in many places, like the story of a person’s life. Diverse, dispersed, dis-
tributed, as in the authorship of culture, and in the trajectories of people who come to a
site. Interpretations and ideas embrace greater freedom only when they encompass hetero-
geneity. In this, they are like most intimacies and some kinds of fruitcake. The richer they
are, the more layers they have.
ITERATION
An articulation, when seen as an event, is an iteration. Utterances, whispers, manifestoes,
graffiti, stories, rumours and fragments of poetry found in the streets – each of these are
iterations. The organised rendition of a stretch of code is also an iteration. Iteration implies
a willingness to say something, and access to the means of saying it, and a time in which
it can be said. Every iteration resonates through orbiting memes that are set off on their
vectors by the fact of an utterance. An iteration is the kernel of a rescension. It needs to
be said, and then said again.
JOURNAL
A record of the everyday. Annals of matters varied and quotidian. Data from day to day
to day. On reams or scraps of any material that can carry the emboss of time. The
material may vary from newsprint to video to sound to binary code, or a combination of
the same, and the journal may transmogrify from being a witness, to a participant in
that which is being recorded. The extent and scale of ‘participation’ depends on the
frequency of entries into the journal, and the number of correspondents it can muster.
The higher the frequency of entries or number of correspondents, the greater is the
intensity of the inscription of a time on a journal. A densely, thickly inscribed journal is
one that is usually open access in terms of writing, reading and publishing. Why else
would strangers want to write in? An open journal expects to be published anywhere
at all. An open journal actively practices xenophilly. When a journal becomes more
than a gazetteer of a moment it turns into a history. It then begins to make sense of
itself as much as it does about a time that it spans. Conversely, every history begins life as
a journal.
KERNEL
The core of a work or an idea. The central rescension, of a narrative, a code, a set of signs
or any other structure that invites modification, extrapolation and interpretation, by its very
presence. Here, the term core must not be confused with ‘origin’ or with any other attribu-
tions of originality, which mean little within an open access system. It is almost impossible
to determine the origins of a code, because the deeper we go into the constitutive elements
of a code, the more it branches out to a series of nodes within and outside a given system
of signs. It is more meaningful to talk of the ‘custody’, rather than the ‘origin’ of any system
of signs.
A kernel is often the custodian of a line of ideas that represents within itself a
momentarily unique configuration. Kernels embody materials in states of intense concen-
tration. This is because they have to encapsulate a lot of information, or nourishment,
or structure building materials, within very limited dimensions. The density of information
within a kernel is a key to its own extensibility. The more the thread that is rolled into a tight
ball, the more it can be unwound. Kernels, by their limitedness and compactness,
are portable, not cumbersome. As in the kernels of certain fruits, they may be hard to
crack, but once they have been opened, they yield delicious and nourishing stuff. Kernels
lend themselves to easy reproduction, but are fragile and often in need of protection.
This protection may also come in the form of an outer layer of interpretation, which states
the purposes and nature of the kernel, so that it is not prised open to answer every basic
query about itself.
Alt + Option / 361
LIMINAL
Interstitial, vestibular and peripheral. Far from the centre, close to the border. A zone both
between and without larger structures. Liminal spaces and moments are those into which
large stable structures leak animated data about themselves and the world. Things happen
in liminal zones. A city carries within it the contradiction of liminal zones located in its cen-
tre, because inner cities are the city’s farthest borderlands. Liminal fringes are often the most
conducive environments for the culture of memes. This is because exiled images, ideas and
meanings from several stable structures mingle in the corridors between them. Here, bereft
of identities and other certainties, they are free to be promiscuous and reproduce. They
infect each other with recombinant strands of thought and image. At the same time, the per-
spective of liminality brings intimacy to bear on an exclusion. Being liminal is to be close to,
and yet stand outside the site of the border of any stable system of signs, where meaning
is frayed from being nibbled at on the edges. Nothing can know the centre better than the
sideways glance of peripheral vision. Liminality may be acquired from prolonged exposure to
the still air of airport departure lounges, thick and over-boiled tea at the Inter State Bus
Terminus on the ring road in Delhi, or the subliminal flicker of a cursor in an e-mail message.
MEME
The life form of ideas. A bad idea is a dead meme. The transience as well as the spread of
ideas can be attributed to the fact that they replicate, reproduce and proliferate at high
speed. Ideas, in their infectious state, are memes. Memes may be likened to those images,
thoughts and ways of doing or understanding things that attach themselves, like viruses, to
events, memories and experiences, often without their host or vehicle being fully aware of
the fact that they are providing a location and transport to a meme. The ideas that can sur-
vive and be fertile on the harshest terrain tend to do so, because they are ready to allow
for replicas of themselves, or permit frequent and far-reaching borrowals of their elements
in combination with material taken from other memes. If sufficient new memes enter a sys-
tem of signs, they can radically alter what is being signified. Cities are both breeding
grounds and terminal wards for memes. To be a meme is a condition that every work with
images and sounds could aspire towards, if it wanted to be infectious, and travel. Dispersal
and infection are the key to the survival of any idea. A work with images, sounds and texts
needs to be portable and vulnerable, not static and immune, in order to be alive. It must be
easy to take apart and assemble, it must be easy to translate, but difficult to paraphrase,
and easy to gift. A dead meme is a bad idea.
NODES
Any structure that is composed of concentrated masses of materials which act as junction
points for the branching out of extensible parts of the overall system may be described as
nodal. The concentrations or junctions being the nodes. A nodal structure is a rhizomic
structure, it sets down roots (that branch out laterally) as it travels. Here, nodes may also
be likened to the intersection points of fractal systems, the precise locations where new
fractal iterations arise out of an existing pattern. A work that is internally composed of
memes is inherently nodal. Each meme is a junction point or a node for the lateral branch-
ing out of the vector of an idea. In a work that is made up of interconnected nodes, the final
structure that emerges is that of a web in which every vector eventually passes through
each node at least once on its orbit through the structure of the work. In such a structure,
it becomes impossible to suppress or kill an idea once it is set in motion, because its vec-
tors will make it travel quickly through the nodes to other locations within the system, set-
ting off chains of echoes and resonances at each node that trace a path back to the ker-
nel of the idea
These echoes and resonances are rescensions, and each node is ultimately a direct
rescension of at least one other node in the system and an indirect rescension of each junc-
tion within a whole cluster of other nodes. Nodes, when written, perhaps erroneously, as
‘no-des’ gives rise to an intriguing hybrid English/Eastern-Hindi neologism, a companion to
the old words – des and par-des. Des (in some eastern dialects of Hindi, spoken by many
migrants to Delhi) is simply homeland or native place; par-des suggests exile and an alien
land. ‘No-des’ is that site or way of being, in des or in par-des, where territory and anxieties
about belonging, don’t go hand in hand. Nodes in a digital domain are ‘No-des’.
ORBIT
A path that describes the continuous movement of anything within a structure. Because the
movement within it is continuous, it (an Orbit) is also impossible to define in terms of origin
or destination. What is possible to determine at any given moment is the vector of an orbit.
A meme, when orbiting within a structure of signs, is neither travelling away from its origin,
nor is it travelling towards a destination.
This is why, in an open access system, which is composed of memes, it is meaning-
less to talk in terms of authors and audiences, rather one can only speak of the node where
one got on to an idea, and the junction where one got off, perhaps to enter the vector of
another orbiting meme. Sometimes a work of interpretation, like certain comets and other
stellar objects, can have an eccentric orbit. This means that there is always a likelihood of
a cluster of signs and images from afar, brushing past objects on its path, entering the
orbits of other constellations, when it is least expected to. The sky of meaning is full of
shooting stars.
PORTABILITY
The feature of a system or work that best describes its ability to move quickly through
different spaces and mediums. A sign or a meme that can travel well between image,
sound and text media is portable. A work, which while it speaks of one site, is under-
stood in another location, is portable. A work that describes many locations in the
course of its interpretative orbit is also portable. A portable work is rich in memes, which
act as engines for its movements, and is endowed with compact kernels that can travel
well without danger of being cracked open. Briefcases, languages, postcards, Swiss
knives, computers, jests, stories and shoes are portable. Gifts, because they change
hands, must always be portable. Monuments can never be. The life histories of some
(itinerant) individuals and (nomadic) communities make them approximate the condition
of portability.
Alt + Option / 363
QUOTIDIAN
Common but not commonplace. The memorable nature of the everyday. Memory walking
down a street and turning a corner. Memory buzzing in a hard disk. Ubiquitous, the dirt in
a site, the fog in a liminal zone, that which is thickened through repetition.
Milk, computers, onions, computers, pyjamas, computers, carpal tunnel syndrome,
computers, accidents, computers, sex, computers, bread, computers, night, computers,
class, computers, skin, computers, love, computers, money, computers, headaches, com-
puters, police, computers, buses, computers, bicycle, computers, radio, computers, horo-
scopes, computers, matrimonials, computers, funerals, computers, biscuits, computers,
conversations, computers, silences, computers.
The quotidian is that which makes a journal turn, over time, into a history, because it
induces the search for patterns and meanings in an otherwise tangled mass of time, in
memes iterated beyond reasonable limits. Routine, yet random, the quotidian nature of any-
thing demands fleeting moments of lucid engagement with the real world, which now in-
cludes within it the world that is forged every time any fingers do a qwerty dance on a key-
board. The quotidian is a measure of all things, rare and commonplace.
RESCENSION
A re-telling, a word taken to signify the simultaneous existence of different versions of a
narrative within oral, and from now onwards, digital cultures. Thus one can speak of a
‘southern’ or a ‘northern’ rescension of a myth, or of a ‘female’ or ‘male’ rescension of a
story, or the possibility (to begin with) of Delhi/Berlin/Tehran rescensions of a digital
work. The concept of rescension is contraindicative of the notion of hierarchy. A rescen-
sion cannot be an improvement, nor can it connote a diminishing of value. A rescension is
that version which does not act as a replacement for any other configuration of its con-
stitutive materials.
The existence of multiple rescensions is a guarantor of an idea or a work’s ubiquity.
This ensures that the constellation of narrative, signs and images that a work embodies
is present, and waiting for iteration at more than one site at any given time. Rescensions
are portable and are carried within orbiting kernels within a space. Rescensions taken
together constitute ensembles that may form an interconnected web of ideas, images
and signs.
SITE
Location, both as in the fact of being somewhere, and also as in the answer to the ques-
tion of ‘where’, that ‘somewhere’ is. Hence, situation. In a system of signs, site – understood
in the sense of the kernel of a situation – is not necessarily a place, although a place is
always a site. A site can be a situation between and through places. A web site is an
address on the Internet that always implies a relation of desire between hosts and visitors.
In other words, it doesn’t really mean anything for a place to exist (virtually) if it is left un-
visited. In this way, a site can be both located as well as liminal. Real as well as potential.
A system of signs (a work) that carries the markings of a location on a map may be situat-
ed in the relation that a map has to the world. It may be situated between the map and the
world. This situation may be a special characteristic of the work’s portability, in that,
although mobile the work always refers to the relation between sites that fall on its orbit. In
this way, marking a site as an address calls for the drawing up of relations between a loca-
tion and the world.
A site is a place where the address is. A site is a place where the work belongs. A sit-
uation between these two locations (where the work is and where it belongs) is a site where
the work orbits. A site is also a place where people need to wear hard hats to protect them-
selves from random falling bodies, travelling in eccentric orbits.
TOOLS
Things that help make things. Ideas, instruments, concepts, ways of doing things, and ways
of being or acting together that are conducive to creative work. In the context of an online
environment, a community or an ensemble of people is as much an instrument as a soft-
ware application. Conversely, a tool emerges when a group of people discover a method
that helps them act together to create something. Again, a work that acts as a navigation
aid, a browser or interface in a web of memes, is also a tool with which to open and search
for other tools.
UBIQUITY
Everywhere-ness. The capacity to be in more than one site. The simple fact of heteroge-
neous situation, a feature of the way in which clusters of memes, packets of data, orbit
and remain extant in several nodal points within a system. The propensity of a meme
towards ubiquity increases with every iteration, for once spoken, it always already exists
again and elsewhere.
It begins to exist and be active (even if dormantly) in the person spoken to as well as
in the speaker. Stories and the kernels of ideas travel in this way. A rescension, when in
orbit, crosses the paths of its variants. The zone where two orbits intersect is usually the
site of an active transaction and transfer of meanings. Each rescension carries into its own
trajectory memes from its companion. In this way, through the encounters between rescen-
sions, ideas spread, travel and tend towards ubiquity. That which is everywhere is difficult
to censor, that which is everywhere has no lack of allies. To be ubiquitous is to be present
and dispersed in ‘no-des’. Sometimes, ubiquity is the only effective answer to censorship
and isolation.
VECTOR
The direction in which an object moves, factored by the velocity of its movement. An idea
spins and speeds at the same time. The intensity of its movement is an attribute of the
propensity it has to connect and touch other ideas. This gives rise to its vector functions.
The vector of a meme is always towards other memes, in other words the tendency of vec-
tors of data is to be as ubiquitous as possible. This means that an image, code or idea must
attract others to enter into relationships that ensure its portability and rapid transfer through
different sites and zones. The vectors of different memes, when taken together, form a
spinning web of code.
Alt + Option / 365
WEB
An open fabric woven of strands and knotted at usually regular, but equally possibly irreg-
ular, intervals. Intricately structured, accessible and yet endowed with complex networks of
coded messages. The world wide web is a zone in which a digital constellation of memes
can find an orbit. A web of code is used to harvest meanings, just as a web of threads is
used to harvest fish.
XENOPHILLY
Friendliness and hospitality towards others, a human quality that best describes the moral
economy of an ideal digital domain. The search for connectedness, and the desire to trav-
el along the vectors from elsewhere. The meaning of the hyphen that transforms ‘no-des’
into a positive value.
YARN
Fabrics, and stories, are made from yarn. A yarn is a snatch of reality that travels by word
of mouth. Or it is shipped along with lots of html cargo. It is said that each fragment of code
contains rumours and gossip, or yarns about the makers of the code. Yarns collect in base-
ment cyber cafés, in stairwells of cinemas, in call centres and behind the opaque surface
of the walls of an apartment whose address is Error 404, which can be anywhere and every-
where at once. In these places, yarn collectors stitch different stretches of code-fabric to
make long bolts of data, which are then taken apart by hackers, and distributed into many
orbits. Yarns can adjust the amount of information they bear in relation to the width of band-
width. That is why yarns are good kernels.
ZONE
A site, within a location, or a work, that demands an attenuated awareness because of the
porosity of the lines that demarcate its existence. A zone is differentiated from a grid that
frames a site because its borders are fluid and accessible, or because they witness a lot
of traffic. It is difficult to distinguish the centre from the liminal periphery of a zone. Alert-
ness about where one stands is a prerequisite for entering any zone. A zone may also be
described as the overlap between orbits in a work, where memes transfer material from
one orbit to another, where logic likes to fuzz. The zone of a work extends to the outer cir-
cumference of the orbit of its ideas.
Zones are places where serendipity might be commonplace, and the commonplace
serendipitous. They are best entered and exited at twilight on shunting cars along abandon-
ed railroads that connect different data stations. The timing of twilight may vary, depending
on one’s longitude, but twilight lingers longer in the zone of the web.
Television & New Media
http://tvn.sagepub.com
Sarai: One Year in the Public Domain

Monica Narula
Television New Media 2002; 3; 387
The online version of this article can be found at:

http://tvn.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/3/4/387
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Narula / One Year in the Public
Television
Domain
& New Media / November 2002
Sarai
One Year in the Public Domain
Monica Narula
Sarai, Center for the Study of the Developing Societies
Sarai (www.sarai.net) is an interdisciplinary program of research and creative experimen-

tation with old and new media in urban spaces. It was launched in February 2001 at the
Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. This essay sketches the history of the
Sarai initiative, outlines its primary concerns with urban cultures and city spaces, new and
old forms of media practice, and research into the politics of information and communica-
tion. The text is also an account of the different kinds of energies—ranging from theory,
research, media practices, public cultural intervention, publication, and online as well as
offline discursive spaces—that animate the space of Sarai.
Although Sarai opened its doors to the public of Delhi only a year ago, the
ideas that crystallized into the actual making of the space have a history
that goes back to 1998 in Delhi. The 1990s 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 the summer of 1998. There was a sense of dis-
quiet with increasing urban violence and strife, dissatisfaction with restric-
tive modes of thinking and practice within mainstream academia, the uni-
versities and 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 kept alive by clusters of teachers and
Author’s Note: This article is based on a talk given by the author at Sarai, on the oc-
casion of Sarai’s second anniversary in February 2002.
TELEVISION & NEW MEDIA

Vol. 3 No. 4, November 2002 387–395
DOI: 10.1177/152747602237281
© 2002 Sage Publications
387

students in the universities. New ideas, modes of communication, and

forms of dissent were being tried out and tested on the streets.
It was from within this ferment of ideas, rough and ready plans, and
fragments of proposals that a series of conversations on film history, new
media theory, media practice, and urban culture between Ravi Vasudevan
and Ravi Sundaram (fellows, Center for the Study of Developing Societies)
and Jeebesh Bagchi, myself, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (the Raqs Media
Collective, Delhi) was able to mature into the conceptual foundation of
Sarai.
Sarai (the space and the program) takes its name from the caravan-serais
for which medieval Delhi was well-known. These were places where trav-
elers could find shelter, sustenance, and companionship; they were tav-
erns, public houses, meeting places; destinations and points of departure;
places to rest in the middle of a journey. Even today, the map of Delhi carries
on it twelve place names that include the word Sarai. The Sarai Initiative
interprets this sense of the word sarai to mean a very public space where dif-
ferent intellectual, creative, and activist energies can intersect in an open
and dynamic manner to give rise to an imaginative reconstitution of urban
public culture, new/old media practice, research, and critical cultural
intervention. The challenge before the founding group was to cohere a phi-
losophy marrying this range of concerns to the vision of creating a lively
public space where research and media practice could flow into each other.
We were interested in the way in which we could see the urban space we
were located in begin to reveal itself to us as a dense communicative
network.
We saw this network as a matrix within which new and old technologies
and practices of communication—ranging from print to photography to
film and the internet—were able to constantly renew a dynamic media
ecology. It was evident that the network was kept alive by a technologically
astute street-level creativity in the making and transmission of signs,
through informal appropriations of new media forms. At the same time, it
was besieged by powerful state and corporate media interests that sought
to regulate access and act as gatekeepers.
Sarai was the focus of our desires to understand and intervene in this
space of contested meanings and transmissions. It took two years (1998-
2000) to translate this conception into a plan and then into a real space and
to design a workable multidisciplinary program of activities.
Today, there are eighteen people working at Sarai on a range of projects.
There are media practitioners, academics, designers, legal researchers, pro-
grammers, and cultural workers from a variety of backgrounds. We have
an active fellowship program, and Sarai has visitors and interns working
with us who come from different parts of India and the world. There are
screenings, talks, exhibitions, and a calendar of seminars, besides the

media lab and the outreach program. All these activities only make us real-
ize how much more there is still for us to do at Sarai.
What follows is an attempt at communicating some of the excitement of
being in Sarai, and I hope that by bringing the reasons for that excitement
into what we (ever since the first Sarai Reader) have grown accustomed to
calling the “Public Domain,” this text can suggest something of the many
energies that animate Sarai as a space and as a cluster of activities and
interests.
We have often been asked, What do you do at Sarai? Where in all the
spectrum of activities and projects is the focus that animates Sarai?
I will try and answer this with a series of instances of the kinds of work
and the processes that have been at play here. But before I do that, I would
like to dwell on two terms—collaboration and commons—that have trans-
lated into key concepts for us.
So what do these two words—collaboration and commons—mean when
we deploy them to describe or qualify what we do, and also who we are?
For us, collaboration denotes those encounters and processes that entail a
synergy between discrete forms, practices, and cultures. These can be
between media practice and media theory, between designers and
researchers, between programmers and artists, between people in a basti (a
squatter settlement) and people in a digital lab, between practitioners
across borders and cultures in an electronic public domain, and between
languages.
Typically, the city as a cultural form is the arena in which such encoun-
ters are played out to their fullest potential. A program such as ours that
foregrounds the urban as a category for reflection in this sense mirrors the
sensibility of the city.
Sarai renders these reflections public through a constellation of media
practices ranging from print, video, and sound to the internet and digital
art. All this contributes to, and takes place within, a notion of the com-
mons—a metaphor taken from the ways in which resources and space have
been held together through history and which is now deployed to suggest
an accretion of cultural energies and materials that are openly available and
that are built over time, through shared endeavors, in the public domain.
The commons is the frame within which collaborations take place. This, we
would suggest, is how the city, media, and the public domain hang together
in our frame of things.
How then does this translate into actual practice? I would like to offer a
few instances from the past year at Sarai. A residency that Sarai shared with
Khoj, an artists network, to host Syeda Farhana, a photographer from
Dhaka, Bangladesh, led to her creating a hypertextual photographic instal-
lation on Bangladeshi migrants in Delhi in collaboration with Joy

Chatterjee in the Sarai media lab (see www.sarai.net/compositions/

images/farhana/Html/index.htm).
The work done by her constituted not only a stand-alone digital work
but also the nucleus of a set of materials in the Sarai archive of the city. There
are several levels of interaction here: between Sarai and another institution,
Khoj; between Farhana and us at the media lab; between photography and
digital media; and between art practice and an archival imperative. This is
an example of the ways in which the word collaboration comes to mean
what it does at Sarai.
One of our print media fellows—Frederick Noronha—is working on a
documentary history of the free software movement in India. His research
methodology involves an active posting mechanism. He posts his queries
onto a series of electronic lists, and the queries and the responses, as well as
what he writes in the form of notes, observations, and essays, are made
available online. In this way, an archive of materials is formed out of the
growing correspondence between him and his subjects, for all of whom the
project that he has embarked on is essentially a collaborative venture to
write their history together with him (see http://opennews.indianissues.
org and http://linuxinindia.pitas.com).
There are nineteen other such grants; with academics, activists, inde-
pendent researchers, and media practitioners working on a variety of pro-
jects ranging from histories of urban localities to soundscapes to graphic
novels and reportage.
These various research and practice projects that are in a sense located
outside Sarai are offset by a central research and theoretical agenda that ani-
mates a lot of the intellectual work that goes on at Sarai. This is the cluster of
activities governed by a research emphasis called the “Publics and Prac-
tices in the History of the Present.” Work in this area is underway as a
unique set of activities that involve practitioners, theorists, and researchers
in a repertoire of explorations. Although on one hand it might involve pho-
tographic documentation of the lobbies of old cinema halls, or the electron-
ics bazaar at Lala Lajpat Rai Market, and detailed ethnographies of media
spaces, it also involves practitioners, researchers, and theorists at Sarai
working together to arrive at conceptual categories with which to think
through the very idea of what Ravi Sundaram likes to call the “messiness”
of the contemporary!
Collaboration also informs the making of the Sarai Reader 02—The Cities
of Everyday Life (see www.sarai.net/journal.reader2.html). It has been from
the very beginning a collective endeavor, with five of us at Sarai interacting
closely with Geert Lovink from the Waag, now in Sydney, and then with us
at the media lab working in tandem with Pradip Saha, the designer of the
book. I think that in this case, the results of collaboration are very visible.

The richness of textual forms, and of approaches, and yet the clear presence
of a focus on the city as an object of knowledge, interpretation, and reflec-
tion of this order is seldom possible to achieve without the coming together,
the concert, of many energies, curiosities, and passions.
What is even more interesting is that it is clear to us that the book in its
print form is very much something that emerges from those aspects of new
media practice that interest us at Sarai. This can be substantiated by the fact
that this is a copyleft work and is produced through a collaborative edito-
rial arrangement. But I think that this new medianess is true even of the
form and argument of the structure of the book. The texts that constitute the
book may be arranged sequentially, but they follow a hypertextual logic
(and can be read through each other in a way that a linear arrangement of
texts may not be) that is also a result of our increasing online engagements.
Take, for instance, the online dialogues culled from the Reader List. The list
itself emerged from the publication of Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain
(see www.sarai.met/journal/reader1.html) as a loose discussion group
that wanted to look at the contents and themes of the first reader. Over the
year, it has grown into an active discursive community, and many postings
made on the list have now entered this year’s book in print form. A book
gives rise to an online community, and the online community gives rise to
content for a book (e-mail: reader-list@sarai.net).
Public engagements that have found their way into the book are not only
online ones alone. An important section in the book emerged out of the
workshop on cinema held at Sarai, and Ranjani Mazumdar, Ira Bhaskar,
and Moinak Biswas, each of them independent film scholars (Ranjani in
Delhi and New York, Ira in Delhi University, and Moinak in the Depart-
ment of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Calcutta), have had their
insights relayed into the book via the workshop. Another example of this
process at work is the way in which a set of film screenings can animate a
discussion that feeds into a text for the Sarai Reader. Nitin Govil (film stud-
ies, New York University) curated a set of science fiction films at Sarai last
fall, and the work that he put into contextualizing the films to a Delhi audi-
ence also translated itself into an essay on the city in science fiction for the
second reader.
This model of creating works and processes that embody an encounter
between different communicative practices is something that we have been
able to arrive at over the past year, and we have been able to do so because
the work we do at Sarai is multidisciplinary. It is an assemblage of practices
and discursive acts, of an interweaving of different rhetorics, of different
modes of address, of diverse technologies of communication.
Another instance of this process at work is the experiences we have
had in actualizing one of our core Outreach activities—the Cybermohalla
Project (see www.sarai.net/community/saraincomm.htm). The Cyber-

mohalla Project is an experimental initiative for the creation of nodes of

popular digital culture in Delhi in collaboration with Ankur: Society for
Alternatives in Education, a Delhi-based nongovernmental organization
(NGO). The word Cybermohalla suggests a hybrid location that has the
open-endedness of cyberspace, qualified by the local specificities and inti-
macy of a mohalla, or a dense urban neighborhood.
The project works with young people living in slum settlements and
working-class neighborhoods who are disadvantaged by lack of access to
cultural and social resources. The project brings together the energies of
community-based social intervention; creativity with texts, sound, and
images; and innovative uses of computers and digital technology while
remaining alert to the imperatives of social and cultural specificity and
autonomy.
The Cybermohalla Project was one year old in May 2002. In this one year,
we have witnessed the confident articulation of the visions of a group of fif-
teen young people, primarily young women, from the mainly Muslim set-
tlement of the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash (LNJP) Basti, Ajmeri Gate, Delhi.
They have acquired considerable technical skills in handling computers,
digital cameras, audio recorders, and scanners and have created wall mag-
azines and basic hypertext markup language (HTML) projects using com-
puters and free software applications. Excerpts from texts written by the
young people have been published in the Sarai Reader. We have also pro-
duced a separate bilingual book By Lanes, which is from the texts, images,
and drawings created by them. The book was published in July 2002.
Making our work public, whether on the web site or through print, is an
important part of our activity. With two Sarai Readers already published,
and a Sarai Hindi Reader as well as a book dedicated to the Cybermohalla
project, it is possible to say that Sarai is as much about print as it is about
other media technologies. If one takes the second reader as an example, it
becomes evident that the coming together of forms and practices has
pushed open possibilities of what the pleasures of making a book can be.
This is why the term new media for us is not so much about the novelty of
computers, multimedia, and the internet as it is about new forms and strat-
egies of practice, about innovative recombinations between old and new
media, between and across print, film, video, television, radio, computers,
and the internet.
We are keen to effect crossovers and transgressions that displace both
old and new hierarchies, which privilege neither tradition nor novelty for
their own sake, and give rise to a more layered and agile form of media
practice that is more reflective of the contemporary in our spaces. This
means being as invested in the making of print objects, visual works, and
soundscapes as in the creation of web content and looking for ways in
which practices and objects can straddle offline and online trajectories.

We are also working on a number of new media projects that examine

questions related to claims and contests around issues of space and access
in the urban environment and explore the idea of a so-called digital com-
mons. We hope to realize at least three to four major new media projects
around these themes this year on a variety of platforms—on the internet as
installations, and in the form of publications. Significant among these is the
“Co-Ordinates Delhi” (authored by Raqs Media Collective at the Sarai
media lab), which will be shown at Documenta 11, Kassel, and the parallel
online environment—the OPUS project, which is an intermedia platform
for locating media and art practice within a digital commons. OPUS will be
a space in which old and new media can meet online and create hybrid
works through dispersed authorship. It is inspired by the basic principles
of openness and collaboration that animate the free software milieu and
bring them into the field of general cultural practice. This presumes the cul-
tivation of a sensibility of creative and intellectual sharing, collaboration,
and free exchange. The OPUS project has benefited enormously from the
contributions of Silvan Zurbruegg and Bauke Freiburg, both students of
digital media (from Zurich and Amsterdam, who have been in residence
with us) and have worked alongside the rest of us at the Sarai media lab.
A central thread running through our work is the politics of information
and communication; the question of, Who can access which tools to say
what to whom, who can know what, what is openly knowable, who is the
object of knowledge for whom . . . and so forth. Hence, our engagement
with technology as cultural form and as the crucible of a new contest of
power is the point of departure of a series of ways of thinking through
issues related to the building of a new creative commons and an informa-
tion commons.
It is this emphasis on realizing a concrete practice located within a space
of the sharing of knowledge and creative resources that explains the key
importance of free software at Sarai. We are interested in free software not
only because it makes economic sense in an Indian context to not spend a lot
of money on expensive proprietary software but also because we believe
there are crucial issues of cultural freedom and creativity that are at stake
here. And the insistence that access and control over the technologies of
communication and information must be opened out is central to demo-
cratic practice of culture. We want to contribute to autonomous, collabora-
tive energies in the field of software, culture, and communication technol-
ogy, which are conducive to diversity. That some of these energies
challenge, or at least are skeptical about, the commodification of digital cul-
ture across the globe is something that we would like to see foregrounded
in a lot of the work that we do.
The emphasis on creating a more democratic notion of knowledge prac-
tices has also involved thinking about enhancing public access to cultural

materials and intellectual resources. Sarai encounters these issues by work-

ing toward a public-access digital archive of contemporary urban culture
by participating in a network of emerging archival initiatives by creating a
free space for exhibition and dialogue at the Sarai Interface Zone, and also
by initiating an Academic Resources Project that hopes to enable greater
access to key texts and documents for the humanities and social sciences to
the university community in Delhi and to independent scholars and
researchers by inviting writers, researchers, and publishers to locate their
work within the public domain.
The thrust on the politics of information in Sarai Reader 02 and a success-
ful workshop on law, surveillance, and the possibilities of thinking through
the ideas that might animate a notion of an infocommons have resulted in
the need for a sustained engagement with the legal regimes that surround
the domain of information, communication technologies, and culture. The
workshop itself (held immediately after the launch of the Sarai Reader 02)
featured discussions and presentations by activists, media practitioners,
and researchers on surveillance, censorship, free speech, free software,
cyber laws, and the right-to-information campaign in India. This workshop
helped lay open the ground for a public debate on the politics of informa-
tion, as well as the domination of the media and communication technolo-
gies by entrenched interests.
A direct result of the workshop has been a new Sarai research engage-
ment with the legal universe that surrounds the assault on the idea of a cul-
tural commons by the regimen of intellectual property rights. A legal
research project to look at the law, commons, and intellectual property has
recently been inaugurated at Sarai. This project will be coordinated by
Lawrence Liang and Sudhir Krishnaswamy from the Alternative Legal
Forum, Bangalore. It will involve analysis of constitutional provisions,
case laws, comparative legal histories, legal philosophy, and documenta-
tion and comment on current matters. An online discussion list—
commons-law@sarai.net—has also been initiated to facilitate greater dia-
logue and discussion on these questions and to build a community around
this research.
Sarai is interested especially in those media cultures that lie in the
shadow of technological and social elites. We are interested in speaking to
critical voices that produce and live the new media, which may exist in the
street, the software factory, the worlds of the local videowalla, the neighbor-
hood Public Call Office/cyber cafe, the gray markets in music, computers,
and other mediaware. This is the electronic everyday, which resides in the
shadows of the spectacular media space conjured by the media empires in
South Asia and will be very much an area in which Sarai’s work is slated to
grow in the near future.

I hope that all this gives a sense of who we are and what we have been up
to in the past year. It is evident, but I will say it regardless: We are busy, we
are public, we are open, and we intend to stay that way.
Monica Narula (e-mail: monica@sarai.net) is a media practitioner, photographer, and

cinematographer. She is a member of the Raqs Media Collective and a coinitiator of
Sarai, at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

Search All, Venues, Artists Submit
Raqs’ “Reverse Engineering” Scrutinizes How Love Leads to
Consumption and Fear Fuels the Economic Crisis
by
Sehba

Installation of Raqs Media Collective’s “The Euphoria Machine” at Nature Morte Berlin
Muhammad
Published: April 24, 2012
Raqs Media Collective’s trajectory runs the gamut of media art ranging from video installation to
printed matter, creatively unraveling, among other things, the system of capital that the world is so
deeply entrenched in.
The New Delhi-based collective consisting of media artists Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, and
Shuddhabrata Sengupta was formed in 1992. Since then they have produced over 90 works and
exhibited all over the world.
Their most recent show inaugurated the Berlin extension of Delhi-based gallery Nature Morte. The
show, titled “Reverse Engineering,” is part of an ongoing series “The Euphoria Machine.” The large-
scale installation on display consisted of two demonstration tables, various drawings, prints and
monitors. It is meant to depict an inversion leading to the financial crisis, which is fuelled by fear and
sentiment rather than by euphoria. (view the slide show for images).
ARTINFO caught up with Raqs for an in-depth view of the ideologies that drive their artistic
practice.
How are you pushing the boundaries of art with your media pieces, curatorial
endeavors and theoretical texts?
Our interest is in creating afterimages, the kind of things you see when you shut your eyes. We want
the awareness of our work in art— be it as artists, curators or writers and interlocutors—to be
awakened in the consciousness of those who make up our publics not just at the moment of contact,
but also long afterwards. The effect of a Raqs artwork has to be the visual-tactile-conceptual-sensory
equivalent of a snatch of music that doesn’t get out of your head, that you keep humming to yourself,
sometimes even without realizing it. And yet, it has to demand of you an extension of your own
thinking and feeling capacities.
A Raqs work asks you what you want to be, and then creates the conditions for you to listen to
yourself, making you read yourself and the world, differently. The things we are doing today are
intended to get under your skin and stay there. That is why we are here.
Can you tell us a little bit about the inner workings of Raqs' collaborative process?
Everything that we work with is fished or floated in the current of our constant chatter and in the
things understood in silences and incomplete sentences.
It is not as if the ball of an idea, be it an image, a fragment of text, a sketch or a set of instructions, or
a curatorial proposition, once chucked by any one of our three minds is automatically destined to
travel, as if in relay, in the direction charted for it by the person who first threw it. The interception of
the idea, and the turn that may be given to it once it is caught may change the very direction of its
flight altogether.
We are sometimes asked who does what in the collective, and the simple answer is that we do not
have a formal division of labor. It was to resist the particularly deathly alienation of creative work in
the media industry based on a fetish of ‘individual’ laborr that we forged a collective practice that
guaranteed our creative autonomy.
The “Euphoria Machine,” revolves around the hypothesis that the human desire for
joy, beauty, satisfaction and love fuels economic growth and consumption, how did
you arrive at this conclusion?
Sometime after the Second World War, Edward Louis Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, a
key strategist of war-time propaganda campaigns and the intellectual godfather of the advertising
and public relations industry, applied a key discovery he had made during the fashioning of war
propaganda to the future success of Capitalism. The discovery was this—in no other war in human
history, had wars been fought in the name of democracy, peace and prosperity. They had been fought
for land, for the expansion of a particular dynasty or ruling group’s power, for religious zeal and for
other concretely political purposes. The propaganda campaigns of the Second World War however,
successfully named a different kind of motivation for war—the desire for happiness, peace, prosperity
and liberty. The identification of common virtues with the war machine proved to be a very successful
motivator.
Once the war ended, Bernays realized that the same process could be replicated in ‘peacetime,’ only
this time, people must be made to realize that contributing their labor to capital, or buying goods that
they did not necessarily need (in order to keep the machine of capital running) could also be done by
identifying these acts with basic human drives for beauty, health, happiness, love, joy and
contentment. So, people were told that they could feel a profound happiness if they bought a shoe.
This was a subtle but significant shift, in that it divorced a good from its function. A shoe, for
instance, was no longer something that covered and protected your feet;; instead, it became a key to
your personal well being. A job was no longer something you did to earn a living;; it became a mark of
your special identity as a human being. The building blocks of Capital were internalized as personal
drives.
To us, this marriage between deep-seated internal drives and the running of the vast impersonal
network of a global economy is the secret of the ‘Euphoria Machine’.
Why do you choose media and new media as the medium to effectively communicate
your ideas?
Because it enables us to carry a significant part of our studio in our backpacks. We have nomadic
ways, we follow circuits and routes, and media-based practices free us from having to be tied down to
a particular place or location. Also, we are interested in the ethics and politics of circulation, of what
happens to a message when it gets transmitted, at how things scale up or down with reproduction
and replication.
If each of you had to select one piece that meant the most to you, since your inception
as a media collective, what would it be?
Our website currently lists and documents around ninety works. So to pick three would be quite a
task. But a random pick could include, “Escapement,” because of the way in which it tells us the time
through emotions, “The K. D. Vyas Correspondence,” because of the way in which it revisits the
Mahabharata and tells a new story about the world today, and the “Capital of Accumulation,” for its
odd combination of forensic analysis, ghost story and an exploration of the legacy of Rosa
Luxemburg. Now who among us picked which work? That is not the kind of information that escapes
the machines of the Raqs Media Collective.
What next for Raqs?
We are soon opening a solo at the new building of the Photographers’ Gallery in London in May,
even as 30 full-scale billboards paper the city of Birmingham as part of “48 SHEET”. A theatre
production, ‘Seen at Secundrabagh,’ that comes out of a collaboration between us and Zuleikha
Chaudhari opens at the Vienna Festwochen in June. We are teaching at the Wide Open
School at the Hayward Gallery in London and have solo shows coming up later in the year at the
Gardner Museum, Boston and at Nature Morte, Delhi. Hopefully we will soon be finishing work
on a ‘Casebook’ about the Raqs Media Collective. Finally, we are very excited about an experimental
exhibition we are curating, titled “Sarai Reader 09,” which will open in August at the Devi Art
Foundation.
Other than this, work is apace on many new ideas – we have dreams to harvest, art to make, planes
to catch, trains to connect to, books to read, things to write and a future to imagine, everyday.
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7

Raqs Media Collective

A SOBER INTERLUDE AT SCHOOL

Education ordinarily presumes a retreat, or a period of waiting, so as not to bur-

HOW TO BE AN ARTIST BY NIGHT 73

Is school a place, an institution, a set of facilities, a situation, a circumstance,

74 RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

Whenever we think of a school, it is useful to remind ourselves that the mean-

HOW TO BE AN ARTIST BY NIGHT 75

In Hindustani (north Indian classical) music traditions, riyaaz, or the everyday

76 RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

(2) UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: The willingness to be open to all the possi-

HOW TO BE AN ARTIST BY NIGHT 77

(4) NON-(UN)EQUALITY OF PRACTICES: Generative contexts attract many dif-

78 RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

(6) INCREMENTAL RECORD: Building an archive of works incrementally (wheth-

(7) INTERLOCUTOR: The various kinds of accumulations that we have de-

HOW TO BE AN ARTIST BY NIGHT 79

CODA: THE WISHING TREE

It is said that on an unmapped island, sheltered in the curve of a hidden bay,

80 RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

HOW TO BE AN ARTIST BY NIGHT 81

Wonderful Waiting For Rain

Wonderful Waiting For Rain

competing knowledge systems and epistemic frames, has given way to

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Tel: +852 2815 1112

We have 15 minutes for questions.

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COLLECTION RESEARCH LEARNING BEYOND AAA SUPPORT US MY ARCHIVE

taking on mediocrity & mechanization

AUGUST 6, 2011 by HUMANITIESUNDERGROUND

Off Modern: A Conversation with Raqs

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Sarai: One Year in the Public Domain

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Sarai (www.sarai.net) is an interdisciplinary program of research and creative experimen-

TELEVISION & NEW MEDIA

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students in the universities. New ideas, modes of communication, and

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Chatterjee in the Sarai media lab (see www.sarai.net/compositions/

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mohalla Project is an experimental initiative for the creation of nodes of

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We are also working on a number of new media projects that examine

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