How does one write the history of the living? Cities, to use a cliché, are imagined. They need images in order to become real. This is true not only of migrants seduced by glitzy advertisements of urban life, but also of the 'settled' who learn to recognise the signs and codes by which the city lives, before they can inhabit it fully. This is a turbulent time, a time when enchantment accompanies ruin, when the glitter of the new commodity space is paralleled by legal violence against those who inhabit the informal networks of daily life. As our cities feel the force of this new globalisation, there are conflicts - and possibilities. There are the emerging private empires that seek to restructure and control media space. In the new media, there are html factories and export-centred companies. But along with these there is also a large community of independent producers of media, free-software programmers, filmmakers using low-cost technology for editing and production, and sound and cassette culture using PC technology. In short, a tactical media for the present. images of the city, its media, both frame the city and are enabled by new technologies of production and dissemination. Our studies are thus simultaneously explorations into representation, technology and reception.

Sarai’s "Publics and Practices in the History of the Present" [PPHP] project, for example, attempts to map the interweaving histories of Delhi and its media technologies to understand how this interweaving provides new conditions for consumption practices and links to global economies in stratified circumstances of urban life.