Author: Sarai

The Many Lives of Indian Cinema: 1913-2013 and beyond

This international conference was hosted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) to celebrate and reflect on a century of Indian cinema. The conference was coordinated by the Sarai programme of CSDS and the CSDS/Sarai-supported South Asian screen studies journal, BioScope. It was part of the Golden Jubilee Celebrations of the Centre…
Thomas Elsaesser – Cinema after Film | Friday, January 10, 7 pm

We invite you to a CSDS Golden Jubilee Lecture on Cinema After Film: On the future of obsolescence of the moving image by Thomas Elsaesser Chaired by Ravi Vasudevan. The lecture concerns itself with the dynamics and consequences of rapid media transfer, especially as they apply to the cinema as cultural memory and artistic practice…
FD Zone Delhi and BioScope Screenings – ‘Pedagogic States’ and ‘The Act of Killing’

Cross-posted from fdzonedelhi. FD Zone Delhi and BioScope invite you to a screening of documentaries on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, at India Islamic Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi. The programme is presented by FD Zone, Delhi Chapter, The Sarai Programme at CSDS, BioScope, and the Centre for Research in Education, Art and Media (CREAM)…
Call for Abstracts – Lives of Information Workshop

Over the past decade, information culture and technologies of identification have become part of popular discourse, with regimes across the world rolling out large modernisation projects aimed at populations and existing structures of governance. A growing body of scholars have turned their attention to the study of information culture and its history. Information infrastructure offers…
Sarai Reader 09: Projections

A projection always involves an incandescent transference, some crossing of a void or darkness to effect luminous landings on a distant surface. Without projections, we would have no cinemas, no city plans, no forecasts, no wagers, no fantasies. Projections convect questions, magnify dreams and illuminate desires. Sarai Reader 09: Projections translates this imperative to act as a transport of illumination to build an axis of central questions…
City as Studio

The City as Studio programme emerged in 2010 to intervene in the shaping of a responsive and engaged milieu of contemporary art and media practices through a cluster of dedicated art and media fellowships tied to a structure of studio situations and processes in Delhi. The fellowship brings together artists, media practitioners, intellectuals, writers, activists, and a variety of audiences alongside a series of cultural and artistic practices in the city of Delhi.
Call for Applications for Sarai Research Associates

The Sarai Programme at CSDS invites applications for 2 research positions, to work on the subject of `media and information infrastructures’. The research agenda is historical and contemporary, archive based and ethnographic, and will traverse a variety of media, including radio, gramophone, cassette, photography, film, television, video, and digital forms.
The Water Cookbook

The Water Cookbook presents ideas from the Sarai project on peri-urban sustainability in Ghaziabad, India. It is a short graphic novel combining pictures with brief stories from daily life in the city.
No Apologies for the Interruption

Power creates rules, makes many implements to reign in possibilities and the impulses to create. But force of life cannot be contained; it bursts through anyway. Energy travels from body to body; each environment germinates countless more. It is of such questions, imaginations and collisions that No Apologies for the Interruption is an expression.
Sarai Reader 08: Fear

Modernity’s great promise – the freedom from fear, now lies in ruins. One can argue that this vision was always compromised – modernity (especially in the form that emerged in the West, under Capitalism) always hid its own fears, and hid from its own fears – the fear of epidemics, of urban panic, of the homeless multitude and of criminal activity. This led to a drive for transparency: for separating the civic from the criminal, the civilised and the barbaric peoples, the human from the non human, life from the machine. With the advent of the mass slaughters of the 20th century, where more died than ever in recorded human history, this promise lay shattered. Today, the drive for transparency has been rendered doubly difficult, with new mobile populations, new networks, new previously unimagined terrors. Sovereignty seems an antiquated slogan of the past, and in the wake of the financial shocks of 2008,
there seems to be some substance in the contention that Western capitalism has entered a phase of possibly long term decline…