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Dear All

Below is a report of the Tactical Media Lab at Sarai which was held on the 14, 15 16 of November. Feedback welcome. Also available online at www.sarai.net/events.htm

best M

Tactical Media Lab @ Sarai

On November 14 - 16, 2002, Sarai hosted the South Asian Tactical Media Lab (TML), one of a chain of such events, that are taking place in different parts of the world (Amsterdam, Barcelona, Cluj, New York, Delhi and Sydney) as a run-up to the fourth Next 5 Minutes Conference (N5M4) in Amsterdam in 2003.

Over three hectic days free software enthusiasts, programmers, graphic designers, filmmakers, artists, activists, members of NGOs, telecommunications experts, students and media practitioners from Mumbai, Dehradun, Kolkata, Dacca, Kathmandu, Tehran & Delhi shared ideas, experiences, problems and grievances, explored varied uses of tactical media, discussed strategies, designed posters and websites, disbanded opinions and formed new ones through panel discussions, presentations, installations, workshops and a film screening.

The event lent itself naturally to the crystallization of a loose coalition of tactical media enthusiasts in the Asian region. From the very begining it was positioned as being a 'process' in the course of which the participants would uncover the energies of a network ... after three days this network was brimming with ideas of many possible collaborations to counter everyday local situations. We hope to sustain these energies in the months to come.

Day 1 of the Tactical Media Lab at Sarai, November 14, 2002

The first day began with a very well attended public conversation between Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Sarai and the TML's "Mystery Guest" - David Barsamian. David Barsamian , the founder and director of Alternative Radio, an independent, award-winning, weekly radio program produced in Boulder, Colorado, is well known in Delhi through the publications of his interviews with Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmed.

Barsamian, who happened to be visiting Delhi at the time was invited by Sarai to open the Tactical Media Lab, which he did with a very inspiring invocation to media activists to be positive, energetic, creative and humorous and not turn into moaners with dwindling audiences!

The conversation with him led to a very lively discussion in which the question of "free speech", particularly in conflict ridden societies like South Asia's was actively discussed. The TML got off to a very active and lively start as a result of this and through the next few days the importance of free expression, new ways of reaching the public domain and the necessity to be inventive and creative recurred several times in the conversations and presentations.

The afternoon of the first day featured presentations by the people at Sarai working on the Cybermohalla (Cyber Neighbourhood) Project.

Shveta Sarda, Ruchika Negi, Joy Chatterjee and Ashish Mahajan from Sarai, with Azra Tabassum from the LNJP colony Cybermohalla Compughar, talked about the processes involved in setting up digital media labs using free software in the LNJP squatter settlement and the Ambedkar Nagar Resettlement Colony in Delhi. Issues of access, technological flexibility, creativity and different ways of looking at the city were discussed. Shveta presented some of the work done by the Cybermohalla project, Joy and Ashish spoke of the software and hardware configurations involved in operationalizing each lab, Ruchika read from the journal that she is keeping of her interactions with people on the street, and Azra spoke of how the process works to steadily remove layers of fear in terms of her engagement with the urban environment.

Following this, Pradip Saha, Managing Editor Down to Earth magazine, spoke briefly about using humour and subversive fun as an essential element in designing an effective communication strategy by activists

This intervention was followed by a panel composed of Shekhar Krishan, PUKAR , along with Sanjay Bhangar from Indymedia, Mumbai; Arun Mehta, telecommunications engineer and Internet activist; Partha Sarkar of the Bytesforall Network, from Dhaka, and Shilpa Gupta, from the Open Circle Artists' Collective in Mumbai.

Each presentation featured candid discussions on the possibilities and limitations of media activism in South Asia. While the panelists were often of the opinion that, barring very specialist fora, online discussion lists have not taken off as expected in South Asia, they emphasized the need to develop effective communication strategies that engaged with public concerns in a demonstrably public manner.

The Indymedia Mumbai group spoke of their efforts to involve communication students in the university to develop an effective web presence, especially in the context of online actions commemorating the anniversary of the Bhopal Disaster of 1984, in tandem with the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, earlier this year. Arun Mehta spoke of the feasibility of low-cost and low-tech strategies for radio as a tool for building sustainable, community controlled communications networks in the rural areas of Orissa in Eastern India. Gaurab Upadhyay from Bytesforall, Kathmandu, intervened with his experience of alternate radio networks in Nepal and discussions revolved around how to use the technology, and available networks, to suit urban conditions.

Partha Sarkar spoke about the experience of building the Bytesforall network, which he initiated from Dhaka, together with Fredrick Noronha, who is based in India. Bytesforall has now grown into a pro-active South Asia wide network for people interested in the social usage of information and communication technologies. He led us through the evolution of Bytesforall as an online forum where technicians, activists, and people interested in the issues of development network and brainstorm together. He also pointed out how discussions on Bytesforall have, by being focused on concrete and practical issues, and by discussing all matters in a spirit of knowledge-sharing as peers, have so far managed to transcend the fractious 'political' barriers that exist in South Asia.

Shilpa Gupta from the Open Circle collective talked of public art intervention experiments that she and some members of her group have been involved in, especially the Aar Paar Projects that brought together artists from India and Pakistan for exchanges of portable art objects and posters which were then exhibited in tea stalls, grocery stores, and other public spaces. She also spoke about the another artist-led initiative called "The Reclaim Your Freedom Week" earlier this year in response to, and in protest against, the violence in Gujarat in March 2002.

The discussions that followed the presentations focused on the need for creating an active discursive community of artists, practitioners and others that could step out of the "responding to events" syndrome that seems to characterize much of artist/practitioner inspired activism, in order to move towards more sustained forms of public-practitioner interfaces that draw on the energies of everyday forms of resistance and communication. Event-centred protests, often take on a "token" character, even as they sap the energies of the artists/practitioners/activists who get involved, and also lead to hierarchies of people who "deliver a message" as opposed to people who passively "receive a message".

Day 2 of the Tactical Media Lab at Sarai, November 15, 2002

The second day was devoted to Free Software. The morning session started with a general presentation on Linux, its ideas and practices by Kishore Bhargava from Linux Users Group, Delhi. This was followed by a presentation of Knopik and LAP (Linux Access Project) by Supreet Sethi from Sarai.

A lot of pertinent issues and queries were raised on the implementation, usage and the philosophy of the projects. Arun Mehta from www.radiophony.com demonstrated the software that has been developed for Stephen Hawkings (http://indataportal.com/software/hawking.htm)which was written in visual basic and he made a public request to the audience to render the same on a Free Software platform.

The second half of the day concentrated on the localization efforts within the Free Software /Open Source platform. Ravikant, from the language programme of Sarai, briefed the audience about the problems non-English users face - related to fonts, encoding standards, keyboards and web design. Gaurab Upadhyay (bytesforall, Kathmandu) and Arash Zaini from Linux Iran, talked of the progress being made in localising Nepali and Persian respectively. Gaurab discussed the differences between Nepali Devanagari and Hindi Devanagari and was of the opinion that Unicode is so far the best available solution. From the audience Niyam Bhushan clarified certain basic issue about fonts, glyphs and typefaces. But the presentation that truly inspired everyone was Arash Zaini's who has recently translated the KDE desktop in Persian. (KDE is a Linux-based-programme package that provides efficient mail handler, calendars and organisers apart from the usual functions for browsing, editing, word processing, graphics and games). After interactions we realised that with only slight modifications the same desktop can be used for writing in Urdu as well. Arash then took us inside KDE and showed how effortlessly and flawlessly each of the applications worked. It was a revelation to learn that only four people could create this in just four months. He also fielded questions on the whole idea and process of translation and the public reception of the package.

The concluding panel of the day was an open discussion on 'Collaborations and Contributions: Practitioners and Users in the Free Software Movement - the making of a creative community'. This discussion, attended by Raju Mathur, Leo Fernandes, Kishore Bhargava and others from the Linux Users Group, Delhi; Sharad Kukreti from Dehradun, Trevor Warren from Media Lab Asia, Mumbai, and other participants, focused on issues of freedom and programming culture and aroused strong reactions from both Free Software practitioners and others in the audience. Critical debates in the international Free Software/Open Source community were reiterated in local contexts.. debates that were mirrored in the film, 'The Code: Story of Linux', that was screened at the end of the day.

Day 3 of the Tactical Media Lab at Sarai, November 16, 2002

The third day of the Tactical Media Lab began with a session moderated by Ravi Sundaram from Sarai on "ICT and Civil Society: Can we think beyond the Development Paradigm". The participants in this discussion were Leo Fernandes of the Free Software Foundation (India), Trevor Warren (MIT Media Lab, Asia), Gaurab Upadhyay (Telecom activist, Kathmandu), Arun Mehta (Telecom Activist, Delhi), Jeebesh Bagchi (Sarai) and Shekhar Krishnan (PUKAR, Bombay)

The discussion focused on the problems of limiting software interventions within a social frame strictly of "instrumental" and "developmental" paradigms. This was based on a critique of the notion of "development" itself, and how it often perpetuated top-down models of social processes.

The second session of the day was a presentation by Shaina Anand of her Tellavision Project and the allied Chitrakarkhana.net website. This project aims to document social and political processes in Bombay, post September 11.

She showed footage from her film in progress and made a presentation of the website and hopes to tie in responses from the film viewing process on to the interactive parts of her website.

The discussion focused on what needs to be done to create a language of image-making and viewing that ties into everyday concerns of young people in a way that reflects their lives and conditions, rather than reproduce a "political" rhetoric that might serve also to alienate and distance large numbers of people, while speaking only to the converted.

The final session of the day was a round table on the need for a network of new media networks in Asia. The participants from Iran, Bangladesh, Nepal and various parts of India, spoke of the need to carry the energies that they had discovered through their meetings into the future. Plans were made to set up a Tactical Media Asia discussion list hosted by Sarai, and everyone was keen to initiate a cluster of collaborative processes, like for instance a free software desktop in the Urdu language as a concrete instance of collaboration between people at Sarai and the LinuxIran group.

The TML ended on a very positive note, with people taking away many ideas for future collaborations, and everyone agreed on making a strong Asian representation and platform at the next Next 5 Minutes !

WORKSHOPS:

Cybermohalla Workshops: Leading up to the TML a series of workshops were conducted at the Cybermohalla labs in the working class settlements of LNJP basti, Central Delhi and at Dakshinpuri, South Delhi).

Workshop 01 November 1 & 2, 2002 Furthering the Cybermohalla experience of writing the city, this workshop explored the insider/outsider binary, problematising it through the sharing of daily encounters within the neighbourhood and outside it, through life stories, stories about migration, work and labour in the city, narratives of meeting spaces within the basti, of contested spaces, the production of criminality. The primary forms were writing and conversation.

Workshop 02 November 8 & 9, 2002 This was a fun, hands-on workshop with reels of paper, transparency sheets, colour pens, crayons, scissors, pictures and glue, to produce a wall magazine. Over twenty enthusiastic participants spent two days writing, cutting and pasting material, working on their own and each others' work. The theme for the wall magazine was 'water' - daily routine around it, the material objects, related with it and conversations around community taps. The idea was to explore forms that would allow for a playful text-image relation and collaborative work to create content for a common output, through the concepts of hypertext and hyperlinking employed in print publications. Emphasis was also on the design elements used to produce a publication that would be reproducible through photocopying.

The content generated in the two workshops, along with other forms that have been explored in Cybermohalla (mails, diary entries, ethnographic notes, notes on conversations at the labs) was compiled and circulated among visitors at the TML as a photocopied publication, Cybermohalla Notebook 01.

Print & Web Design Workshop November 14-16, 2002 The workshop, held on all three days of the TML, was conducted by Pradeep Saha, Managing Editor Down to Earth magazine and Mrityunjoy Chatterjee from the Sarai Media Lab.

It was held at Sarai Public Access Zone using free software tools like Open Office [text, vector image design & HTML editor], Gimp [raster image editor] & Scribus [publishing layout software].

The workshop started with an introduction to Tactical Media and different approaches to it. The fourteen participants - students, filmmakers and activists - were shown flyers and broadsheets as examples of tactical media and were introduced to varied print design strategies and to web technology. After this the participants were split into two groups and asked to design a campaign that could be put to use outside the workshop area. As most of them were from the Delhi University they chose to work on issues that are of immediate concern to the student community - Sexual Harrassment & Communal Violence.

Throughout the workshop participants discussed ideas and strategies and on the final day Shuddhabrata Sengupta talked briefly on visual rhetoric and other tactical principles.

At the end of three days each group designed a website and a print campaign. People from both groups presented their work, describing them and their experience in detail to all those who had assembled for the TML.

The first group designed a poster campaign on 'Sexual Harrassment in the City' while the second adopted a satirical position on communal violence - 'How to Orchestrate Riots'. The websites were extensions of the same ideas with more links and images.

The works were warmly appreciated. The participants too enjoyed the process of making creative use of low-cost, easily available materials and designing tools. Many of them were already making posters for their campaigns, and the workshop opened up a wide range of ideas and strategies and helped them to put these in perspective.

INSTALLATIONS AT THE INTERFACE ZONE

There were three installations(Video/sound, Flash/sound, HTML) playing all through the Tactical Media Lab at the Sarai Interface Zone giving visitors a virtual spatial sense of the city.

The works originated from the idea of quintessentially focussing on a sound piece, i.e to make a psycho-geographic scape of various kinds of urban networks, right from electronic communication portals like the telephony networks, internet cafes and call centers to more physical networks like transport portals in Delhi, which would include public transport portals like the Inter State Bus Terminus and the railway station. The idea was to make textural sound recordings at these sites and then develop a panoramic navigational sound scape of several of these co-ordinates in a non-linear pattern.

Installation 1. Traffic media: Modem Telephone Line Parenthesis by Dylan Volkhardt, independent media artist in residence at the Sarai Media Lab The installation was an attempt to look at the (dis)location between the liquid architecture (the sound scape) of the telephone communication network and the physical aspects of labour and cabling.

The video was shot just outside the CSDS where some cable work was in progress. The installation, work on which finished just the day before the TML, consisted of three 15" TV screens playing a video loop at different speeds. The sound track was a long loop playing in the background all through the day, of locational sounds recorded at PCO booths and call centres and worked on in the Sarai Media Lab.

Installation 2. Traffic media: Platform no 12 by Renu Iyer, Sarai Media Lab This was a 2 minute audio/video scape playing as a continuous loop on a computer screen. The video was a 4 box per frame flash movie, shot at the New Delhi Railway Station.

The idea was to look at the Railway Station as an urban navigational spatial network, and attempted to highlight our collective memories of our fragmented everyday recordings of these sites. The soundscape was a layered piece of recordings made at the Station, with ambient sounds and conversations with travellers. Visitors could listen to the soundtrack with headphones.

Regulars at the Sarai caf�, cast curious, at times even perplexed, glances at the screen playing in the background and then went over to engage with the works.

Installation 3. Dilliwale Kaun? Baharwale Kaun? A web installation by Syeda Farhana Zaman and Mrityunjoy Chatterjee This is an HTML web installation of hyper-linked images and texts, looking at the migrant communities in Delhi. The work is based on photographic documentation and conversations with emigrants living in slums and in shrines in Delhi. It explores issues of citizenship, of migration and of related harrassments and hardships faced by the many Bangladeshi migrants on the streets of Delhi. Mrityunjoy Chatterjee, from the Sarai Media Lab, helped Farhana convert photographs and texts to build web-based narratives of the experience of being an outsider.

The installation was available on a computer screen, as was the Sarai digital Interface which is always available on the local network at the Sarai Interface Zone.

Posters were also put up - made from photographs taken at the Delhi Metro construction sites and cyber cafes.

Installation 4. Weather Report by Rustam Vania, Centre for Science & Environment, Delhi The installation which takes a satirical look at the politics of Climate Change was made for the World Climate Change Conference held in Delhi in October 2002. The panels were put up all over Sarai and the CSDS.