What is the most urgent need that you have?
To create contexts for creativity and self-expression in societies marked by high degrees of inequality, through old and new media practices.
What is the best/interesting case or project on new media arts that you have recently experienced?
One of the most innovative new media art/ research practices that Sarai has been engaged in is the Cybermohalla project. The word cybermohalla means a cyber neighbourhood in Hindi and describes a programme of researching, writing, engaging in media and art practice in labs located in disadvantaged neighborhoods of Delhi.
The context in which these works are produced is one of a new duality in which cities in the South are simultaneously becoming sites for the generation of wealth through accelerated integration into the global economy and also becoming sites of global unpredictability and precariousness.
The works are produced through practices of sharing of thoughts, ideas and expressions, through which lab practitioners produce concepts and works. Skills, forms and materials are introduced into the labs not with a fixed, predetermined purpose or instrumentality but rather for experimentation and playfulness with forms. The works are produced in a variety of forms including html works, animation, booklets, audio-video works, wall magazines, stickers and diaries, web logs, broadsheets etc., through the use of low-cost consumer technology and open-source software.
Works at the locality labs are produced in dialogue with the Sarai Media Lab where professional designers, artists and media practitioners work on individual and collaborative projects. They are also an engagement with the locality, drawing upon shared histories of using forms, even as these are transformed in new media contexts.
This is a form of critical pedagogy, the cultivation of distinct ‘voices’, speaking through experiences of the city and on the basis of rigorous peer dialogues and criticism. The voices that are embodied in the different works forge new vocabularies to debate, contest, and oppose conceptions and practices of collective social life. They provoke us to consider other ways of dwelling in the city.
In your opinion, is there a potential for change on and change through a policy level, i.e. has the status of policy as an accelerator/ a meaningful factor for practice changed?
There is indeed immense potential for change in the domain of cultural creativity and new media art through policy. However, for this to happen, certain reorientations become necessary. In countries such as India, with their rich tradition of arts and crafts, there has been a natural inclination to focus on the ‘traditional’ sectors and how new design tools and marketing may enable their future growth. New Media practices, when they figure in policy domains, are within a larger rubric of ‘culture industries’ with a marked focus on cinema. These focus areas need to be revaluated.
New Media and art policies in countries such as India have been obsessively concerned with providing access. These would now have to enter the post-access scenario and ask ‘after access what?’ This may take a number of routes – a move away from ‘lack’ to ‘authorship’; from transmission of knowledge through experts to policies that enable dialogic contexts; and a shift from receiving ideas and concepts to processes through which a multitude of these may be generated.
Policy must also recognize that media and art works are produced and circulated not only by professionals but also within communities that inhabit rather fragile living/ working spaces, between the cracks of the legal and the illegal, formal and the informal. Only through such recognition, would they be able to address the needs of these other producers.
