DIY radio practice
Interviewing Kaustubh Srikanth (www.foss.in) was very interesting and the community radio project he told me about is a relevant example of DIY media education practice.
Set in the rural community near Bangalore, the community radio station Namma Dhwani broadcast using cable instead of using airwaves since radio licenses are unavailable for most community radio stations. However very recently the government presented the new Broadcasting Act which signifies an important step for community radio broadcasting in India.
The community radio explore the potential of cable FM as an alternative to broadcast FM. I think the process of self education creates networks and encourages participation in the cultural, political and social life of communities and citizens. The Namma Dhwani is the most up front example of self education inscribed in the media practice itself.
“Namma Dhwani as of date boasts of an archive of more than 800 hours of programming in areas like health, education, legal, governance, and culture and so on. Given this, there are a lot of communities and groups/organisations which approach Namma Dhwani for training either in content production or just to set up a station of their own. Namma Dhwani works with a team of four people who hail from the community of Budikote. All four of them are highly trained and skilled in areas like interviewing skills, presentation skills, editing, mixing and so on. The training is usually conducted for a period of three days which ensures that the training process is holistic and all areas are covered. Ideally each organisation or community which approaches Namma Dhwani for a series of trainings which involves atleast four or five training camps lasting for three days each. All these trainings are community to community trainings where the community members of Budikote and the Namma Dhwani team interact with the community which has approached Namma Dhwani for training. This ensures that communication is in the local languages and the learning process is efficient. All the people who have attended the training camps have appreciated this unique method of training” http://www.communityradionetwork.org/news1/Training%20programmesthe persistance of myth
All poetry is mythologizing and strives to reconstitute myths about the world. The mythologizing of the world is not over yet; the process was only halted by the development of knowledge, diverted into a side channel where it exists on without comprehending its own meaning. But knowledge is nothing more than the construction of a myth about the world, since myth lies in the very elements themselves, and there is no way of going beyond myth. Poetry reaches the meaning of the world intuitively, deductively, with large, daring shortcuts and approximations. Knowledge seeks the same meaning inductively, methodically, taking into account all the materials of experience. Fundamentally, one and the other are bound for the same goal. (76)
Bruno Schulz
Participation and governance conference
The conference was held at the Jamia Milia Islamia university, New Delhi and was organized by the Center for culture, media and governance. I was introduced at this conference by Tripta Chandula, who is undetaking her Phd studies at the Univeristy of Queensland.
She presented a paper on a case study on the construction and approach to community radio in a slum community in Delhi. The paper: ” Rethinking community: participation strategies and/in community radio” was a discourse analysis on the intersection of references to the everyday life in the slum and the politics of representation present in the national media. She had pointed out a clear perspective on the way the mainstream mass media are naturalizing the concept and representation of the Other, their marginalized position, the canonical middle class imagination of the dwellers of the slum, which is always in contradiction with the reality of the slum.
She clearly empahised the concept of access to technology and the critique of access vs. users. To stress their particiative process before an actual consideration on ICT being the tools of empowerment was her major concern, whcih was clearly shown in the case study on the needs for a community radtio. The Indian government has very recently changed the law on public broadcasting. There are more possibilities for self sustainability, but the practice needs to arise from the actual community participants. Haven’t really consider the need for a community radio in this specific slum area, the question is what choices are the slum dwellers going to take and who is defining the relevance of increasing ICT use that moves beyond the experiment and forms a practice.
Indpendent people’s tribunal
on the rise of fascist forces and the dismantling of the secular states.
Here in Delhi you can expect to find activities bursting from every corner. I was walking around the Indian habitat center and there i found a poster with the above slogan…I realized I was walking by the Indian Social Institute, where the people’s tribunal was taking place. This is to illustrate the partecipatory nature of citizen self organization ind emanding attention but also in demanding justice across various state military inadequancies and inefficinecy. The tribunal was organized by the NGo Anhad (Act now for harmony and democracy). It was a very emotional experience to hear some of the stories of disappearance and abuse that are happening daily…where no public opinion can be evoked in action, as for the limited partipipation of civic journalism. As I was told by Biju Mohan, even if most tv agencies and newspapers were approached, few of them came to report from the Tribunal and mainly the news that would appear in small format on most press releases.
Biju mOhan is associate professor at the Jahangirabad media insitute, whcih was founded in 2005. This rather new and promising institute is taking media education on the level of social responsibility. Students have most of the time alredy a degree from other universities and at the media institute they focus onachieveing practical skills in web jourtnalism, documentary and filmmaking. I am looking forward to meet the founder and director of the institute Gauhar Raza this coming week in Delhi.
Comic workshop
Last weekend I attended the Sarai workshop on learning about comic novels. A hands on workshop that Parismitha Singh led with great spirit. The room was filled with young and creative people with backgrounds in design, film and other disciplines. The amazing experience of learning about comic culture in India was something I was looking for during my exploration of DIY media and communication practices.
The presentation was amazingly interesting. I got the chance to meet two great comic writers in India.
Their presentation was an an elucidation on the comic novel practice and its constructive variables between storytelling, visual representation and publishing practices. Comics are considered to be situated between low culture and art form, as in the public minds is best known. However there is an evolution in comic novel production in the last few years in India. Mainly the form of comic book that Sarnath is making can’t correlate with the history of alternative culture here in India, since its forms can be artificially found in urban centeres such as Delhi. However his engagment on the urban space and the city show a clear state of melting pot between a mix of experiences that can make an imprint on the perception of everyday life in India.
As the presentation of Sarai research fellow, Amitabh Kumar showed, the most popular form of comic in India is the Nagraj comics. This form of comic is a superhero type of comic genre based on such comics such as Superman. The mainly entertaining character of the Nagraj and similar type of comics and its mass appeal doesn’t povide the cultural and the artistic form of participative media. This probably could be found more in the growing Mumbai comic Club, which is organizing a walkconference where exchanges between participants occur in the city, through mobile phones and a drawing pad.
Here is a more detailed version of my impressions at the comics workshop:
I waited for the weekend of the 17-18 march 2007 with impatience, as my interest in discovering about the present comic culture in India have grown. I attended the workshop out of self-motivation, not acknowledging that I will be in the presence of the leading graphic novelist who has been published in India, Saranth Banerjee. In order to explain a glimpse about the author’s writing I want to bring further this commentary by the journalist Bageshree of the Hindu Times on Banerjee’s graphic novel: “Corridor is an awfully clever book and a delightful read: a freaky, multi-layered, post-modern look at the irony-ridden urban condition. In fact the level of awareness about visual culture and the relevance of the presentation during the first day of the workshop was significantly floating on the level of academic narrative, I realized, while engaging myself in the absorption of the experience of seeing the presentation of the first post-modern illustrated novels in India.
During the first day of the workshop, around fifteen participants introduced themselves in a round of presentations and immediately after we listened to a very concise presentation from the author Sarnath Banerjee, who started to explain the different styles of his works introducing a very good amount of authors, which inspired him Sarnath engaged in the observation of the different motivation, influences and relationships with culture and society that has formed his imagination as a graphic novelist. He continued his very engaging presentation with an interesting introduction to his recently published second graphic novel: Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers. The presentation consisted in an audiovisual format of photographic clips from the novels passages, which were read by a narrator, as the visuals will switch previews on different parts of the story. This presentation was very sophisticated in drawing paths from the work of Western comic authors. Discussion focused on particular visual aspect of storytelling deployed by new formats of merging moving images with comics in their visual narrative.
It was interesting to observe the recent blurring boundaries between media genres, especially films and comics, however examples were mostly drawn from forms of media available to well educated and interested audience. During the discussion, it has emerged that the field of comic narrative in general is becoming a space where genre intersection combined theater, film and literature. I asked the question concerning the way of distribution regarded to the dissemination of Sarnath’s works. “Most of my works, he replied, are found in bookstores, behind the counter, you have to ask the bookshop owner to find it” His point was to highlight the fact that his novels does not reach mainstream audience, as he distinguishes his style and storytelling from most traditional values of Indian society. In regard to this matter, he also co-founded the first publishing house for graphic novels in India called Phantomville, which allows him more freedom for reaching various distribution platforms. Discussion continued about different comic styles and how comics begin to be introduced in the imaginary of culture as they have become a source of inspiration for artists and media makers in India. Followed a presentation of the work made by Parismitha Singh during her fellowship at Sarai media labs and Amitabh Kumar’s presentation of his visual research on Indian popular comics. Parismitha’s style was sophisticated and received a discrete amount of compliments.
During the second part of the workshop, the practical session started with firsthand comics drawing. All of the participants were given the basic concepts and tools used in comics, from story panels to sketching, and inking techniques, which could be applied to story characters and the illustration. Each participant had to produce a comic during the workshop and started to sketch out the panels and storyboards. There was a good deal of complicity between the leader of the workshop, Parismitha and those who approached comics for the first time. During the second day, the practical part of making comics followed after a brief presentation of few more examples of the comic forms used by artists such as Fabrice Neaud, Lewis Trondheim or Julie Doucet. The second day finished with a small exhibition of the work made by the participants, who discussed each other’s styles and about general impression from the experience of using comics.
Tibetan media culture
After a 12 hour bus drive from Delhi I arrived on wednesday morning in McLeond Ganj, the small town where His Holiness Dalai Lama lives and rests between his world round meetings.
In the early afternoon I visited the Tibetan Technological center, which is locate two kilometers away from McLeond Ganj in the Tibetan Children’s village.
I was introduced to the work and the practice of the mesh wireless network and assisted at some hardware repairing. As the four young technical guys, two volunteers respectively from France and Finland and the two very funny and clever Indian computer experts told me the center in itself doesn’t provide any kind of education or teaching practice, however they are open and welcome whomever wants to join and see them at work. After I spend some time explaining why I was there and what was the purpose of my visit, they told me I should meet with Jahel and Michael, the two organizational brains behind the technological center, which would probably know who to seek out for interviews.
It was a real pleasure to meet both of them. Michael took a great amount of time trying to understand my interest in the self organized aspect of the access to connectivity and self organized media production in the Tibetan community, which takes form through various types of media forms. The simplest form I found out walking around the town is the exhibition of various types of street posters, which call on taking action for Free Tibet. The other important media aspect was the potential of the increase use of new media.
I was immediately flown into a spring of contacts of individuals who are enable local art and cultural practices to be reached by the community members and interested publics via mainly new media media production:
the first news aggregate for the Tibetan communit- Phayul
the site dedicated to the cultural promotion of Himachal Pradesh
online call for the Tibetan Olympics planned for the year 2008!
The do it yourself practice of producing and educating oneself about the possibilities new media production is reaching distant and displaced members of the Tibetan Community. Their cultural heritage is maintained and at the level of self organization their commonality with media activist is not superfluous to mention. I am very exited for today’s appointment with Lobsang, who is the initiator of the Tibetan Olympics and as well the Miss Tibet competition. As absurd as it sounds still Tibet is unrepresented in both the international competitions, as their spiritual and political leader, whom I had the great pleasure to see this morning and to listen to his teachings, is still in exile after 50 years of the Chinese invasion of Tibet.
Doors of perception 9
The Doors of perception conference 9 whose theme was Juice: “Food, Fuel and Design” took place in the auditorium of the Indian Habitat Center, the cultural center in Delhi. Sessions were running through the whole day with a break where delicious food was served under unscreened tables . During the breaks a lot of networking was happening as usual, but nonetheless here it was the wonderful experience of the interaction at the Mediawala seminar party that communed the participants. This years attention of the conference was looking at solutions for building future design experiences that would look at sustaining the environment in cityspaces.
I found out between many other things during the presentations that Slovenia is one of the few countries in the world that has developed an original drainage system, which waste of water that comes from households is filtered on the spot, not encouraging the whole process of water waste. To implement this system in Bangalore where there are only few lakes still present in the city area would create an enormous water supply and more important water will be cleared when returning to its natural origin, as Naresh Narasimhan showed in his presentation.
My attention was concentrated on presentatios where media experiences were at the core and here I will focus only on these, not leaving out the fact that I heard nice and sustainable solutions for urban farming, where an essential improvement inside city spaces would happen if interventions would be followed by increased infrastructural planning!!!
mediawala
The festival opening night was a successful meeting point for media creators who presented their work in a playful and engaging procession. The event took place in the very green and inspiring garden of the Global Arts Village which is a space for artists that offers a peaceful surrounding where the energy and creativity of the participants and the many design student volunteers worked in simmetrical ways.
The theme of experiencing street food in many different ways was the drive for our hungry stomacs so even for the eyes was a really pleasant experience as traditional street food was served in leaf composed plates.
Media installation were animated by designed and decorated carts, rolling desk with four wheels on which most street vendors place their bananas and grapes or on which they cook many of the delicious and spicy food you can find on each inch and corner while walking the streets. In fact street and food in India has a direct correlation that was mostly visible in the Food Radio installation. The amazing pottery holding speakers that were fueled with noise and speech.
Yesterday the Mediawala seminar took place at the British Council where most of the artists presented their work which was followed by the welcoming party with dancing music and nice italian pasta and wine.
I will continue with my description of the mediawala festival as shortly as possible but I will be going in less than a quarter of an hour to the Doors of perception conference at the Indian Habitat Center the cultural center of Delhi.
This morning the sun is shining and is getting warmer by the minute and our bodies will be sitting in a presumably large auditorium so lets go and listen for example the future perpsective of Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia!!!
swadeshi
Tonight I am going to the opening of the Mediawala festival at the Global Arts village where I plan to see some sensory media installation and engage in discussion with media artists on the topic of urban arts, mobile technology and hybrid technology in the Indian context.
I am happy that I received a reply from the Tibetan Technological center, as it seems they are interested in my research and probably I’ll be visiting their media lab. Their mobilization to maintain a cultural and religious autonomy besides their physical dissemination in various parts of India shows how the use of technology enable the construction of cultural practices of mobile connectivity and not the other way around. Thus, media education should maintain local experience of cultural mobilization as examples of constructing needs for technological improvement.
In the streets of Paharganj, the center of the tourist hub in Delhi, local telephone boots an stands are arranged with wired telephones and patient operators. Mobile connectivity is growing, but can’t compare to the prices of fixed landlines, however as they told me prices change depending on the contract you have with the operator.
During my stay in India I would like to keep in mind the historical context of national uprise against the colonial rule manifested through the cultural practice that enabled the local production of cotton industry.
The national mobilization of Indian cloth industry consumption, boosted by Mahatma Ghandi’s movement for independence, is an example of economical determination that caused the British imperial rule to reconsider its politics on the cotton industry.
When high import duty was placed on Indian goods in the early 19th century, the British Empire took control over cotton production causing sudden manufacturing crisis in India. The swadeshi (self-sufficiency) movement, linked to the struggle for independence, was an efficient strategy to encourage the production and consumption of home cloth industry.
“Gandhi recognised that alienation and exploitation often occur when production and consumption are divorced from their social and cultural context, and that local enterprise is a way to avoid these problems.” (source wikipedia)
How could the production of technological goods in its cultural context engage in discussion with local forms of media production?Could the contemporary production and consumption of ICT have some parallel similarities with the swadeshi movement? Does the localization of media education manifest in the context of the global culture as social phenomenon?
