|
«
|
December
2008
|
»
|
| Su |
Mo |
Tu |
We |
Th |
Fr |
Sa |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
| 6 |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11
| 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | | | |
|
Minor Practices
Up one level
There are several ways through which a city can be understood. Often, the texture of our daily life does not find the space or the medium through which to find expression and be in circulation. Cybermohalla began in 2001, to understand ways in which these lives, which become muted in the rushing noises of the city, are lived in the metropolis of Delhi. This was an experiment. In this experiment was a search for how technology - including design, internet, media forms - could become a medium for this discovery.
|
Writing texts
|
| |
 |
There has been a sustained and regular practice of writing at the labs since they began. Each week begins with everyone listening to the new texts that all the others in the labs have written. This act of narrating, and listening, leads to thinking about what questions can be asked of each others' experience, what words can be found to link each others' experience. Questions that are asked are often incorporated into the telling. Words and phrases that resonate with others' experience find themselves in newer texts, in other tellings.
|
more...
|
|
|
Making Videos
|
| |
 |
The consumer end digital still camera and newer mobile phones allow for an easy entry into the world of moving images. One shot movies. A still hand movie. A gentle moving hand. A restless image. An urgent image. A naughty image. A domestic scene. There are many ways in which the world of images get named and shared. |
more...
|
|
|
Making Animations
|
| |
 |
Animations, or animated drawings reveal an enigmatic inner world of stories and rhythms. Narration in animations moves along a play of unravelling and revealing that is accretive. Animations, made by all practitioners from the beginning of CM, are created on GIMP. Interestingly, it is the practice of creating animations which pulls and propels practitioners into narrating through drawing - something not all of do on paper otherwise. |
more...
|
|
|
Recording Conversations
|
| |
 |
Over the years, the labs have created a rich archive of recorded conversations in the locality. The conversations have been about the making of the locality, about the experience of the city, about work, incidents, anecdotes, and more. They are constantly worked with, and also catalogued and logged. |
more...
|
|
|
Recording Sound
|
| |
 |
Sound recording demands poise, stillness, an ability to disconnect, a performative competence. Listening to recordings is an act that demands a silence and an ability to move with the flow, to conjure up images, related sounds, voices, etc. In talking and analyzing recordings and listening, a world of recognitions of different absences and presences opens up. A group listening together makes journeys into the various textures of the self and the world. |
more...
|
|
|
Collecting documents
|
| |
 |
The contested terrain of documents haunts urban life. Increasingly, life without documents is becoming daunting. Documents determine access to formal networks. Documents also tell stories. Stories of broken lives, fragile tenures, defiant access, combative claims, capacities of negotiation, dreams of mobility and more are part of the hidden transcripts around documents. The labs have been engaging with documents, to be able to narrate the poignancy, dreams and violence connected with the phantasmic world of documents. |
more...
|
|
|
Doing Street Logs
|
| |
 |
Streets are spaces of banal repetitions, encounter with world of things, gathering of people and occasional events. This is also how streets enter our conversations. To stand still in a street or to observe a street over a certain duration of time could make the street re-appear into conversations and thought with renewed vividness and perplexity. Street-logs were evolved by practitioners in 2004 to engage with the familiar and the banal, to find ways of re-thinking and re-imagining its disruptions, surprises and flows. |
more...
|
|
|
Making photos
|
| |
 |
Photographs are both digital as well as bromide prints. The two create a different dynamics around one another. Bromide prints create an immediate sociality around them through being arranged in photo albums and seen, individually, in groups or by being passed around. Digital photographs create around them a mediated sociality of being seen on the computer screen, or through a limited number of print outs that can then be circulated. They make for quick downloading and manipulation, and find their way into animations. |
more...
|
|
|
Making lexicons
|
| |
 |
An ordinary conversation in a locality is filled with words that conjure up and allude to experiences, imageries, metaphors, popular sayings, settled meanings, habits of usage, conflictual and contradictory deployment, a latent urge to speak the unspeakable among other things. To unpack and re-engage with words and phrases becomes a critical mode to deepen the intellectual journey at the labs. Over the years practitioners have been engaging with the shifting meanings of words and building a lexicon to enhance their own understanding of words. |
more...
|
|
|
Making drawings, graphics
|
| |
 |
For many, the most difficult of practices is to take up a paper and draw; to play with scale, colour, volume. The fear of the "real" scale makes many withdraw into a shell. To play with stories and impressions through computer-aided graphics and pencil drawings is a practice that the labs have encouraged among its practitioners. At times an immense sense of discovery and propulsion has been found in this. |
more...
|
|
|
Making animated films
|
| |
 |
To combine various forms of visual materials like graphics, drawings, animations, photographs with each other and to make linear narratives with a play of time allows for enlivening the lives of material. All materials start opening up a door to a further exploration and activate the search for making an imprint of the self into these materials. |
more...
|
|
|
Playing No-Logs
|
| |
 |
When we speak, how do we make sense of the listener? The game of no-log is played when the listener keeps saying "I didn't understand". Without loosing patience, a practitioner of no-logs keeps developing the argument or the story that s/he started to share. The practitioner has to go on and discover feelings, impressions, imageries, stories, anecdotes, examples, to make it increasingly difficult for the listener to say "I didn't...". |
more...
|
|
|
Searching contexts within localities
|
| |
 |
Localities are perforated with places for gathering, waiting, congregating, gossiping. These could be a tea shop, a courtyard, a staircase, a barber's shop, a cobbler's tent, a broken lamppost by a roadside, a PCO booth, a book shop, a park, a gymnasium. Each of these spaces holds multiple narratives and stories of life journeys. Locating, thinking, enhancing, re-activating dormant or forgotten places is crucial in understanding the matrix of cultural and intellectual life of a neighborhood. |
more...
|
|
|
Reading other writers
|
| |
 |
Thoughts and stories from other places, other times, with different forms keep seeping into the lab to transform the challenges and questions that are being pursued. To read to each other writers and texts that one is excited by, confused by, irritated by, moved by; and to try to build from it helps the labs shape their relation to the world. |
more...
|
|
|
Collecting printed materials
|
| |
 |
Printed materials circulate and get buried with an intensity and velocity which is unprecedented. The DTP revolution has transformed the ambient image world of urban localities. To keep researching the images, words, phrases, formats of these materials provides an interesting vantage point to enter the popular world of work, business, publicity, and cultural motives. |
more...
|
|
|
Conversations
|
| |
 |
Talking through question and answers, and conversations without question-answers. When you talk through question-answers, you define a boundary within which the conversation will flow, choose a target through which you figure out what you want to say. In conversations without question answers, the conversation proceeds through suggestions upon suggestions, where the self has to open up to the other. |
more...
|
|
|
Hyperlinking
|
| |
 |
A postman moves through the neighbourhood delivering letters, sharing an occasional anecdote, accepting a cup of tea, or just rushing past. He delivers news, invitations, money orders, etc. How do we thread his daily journey through our neighbourhood? This practice of threading with stories, images and anecdotes into each others' narratives is crucial to the labs' practice of gathering and making sense of materials. |
more...
|
|
|
|
|
