media, information, the contemporary

Tag: Cinema


  • Sonic hallucinations and media archaeologies

    Sonic hallucinations and media archaeologies  Public evening with Ashok Sukumaran (CAMP), Ravi Sundaram and Shikha Jhingan The session will discursively move through certain nodes and ideas of working with sonic materials, hybrid media, data sets and information flows that produce unexpected mediatic encounters and contingent moments. What are the archaeologies that can sense this kind…

  • Call for Papers: Twenty-First Century Media? Affective Bodies, Crowds and Collectives

    In the last two decades, digital media infrastructures have spread worldwide, including the global South. Despite inequalities of access, low-cost mobile devices and cheaper broadband have connected large subaltern populations to media infrastructures. The effects are increasingly planetary, initiating a series of debates in media scholarship and cultural theory. Mediatisation has emerged as a material…

  • The Wager on Cinema: Screening 12 – Gender, Sexuality, and Desire

    The Sarai Programme invites you to the twelfth screening of the film series titled, The Wager on Cinema: Gender, Sexuality and Desire. We shall be screening three PSBT films: ‘Zara Nazar Utha Ke Dekho’ (directed by Anindya Shankar Das); ‘Ishq, Dosti, and All That’ (directed by Ritambhara Mehta, Rituparna Borah, Bhamati Sivapalan and Srishti Lakhera); and ‘Please Mind the Gap’…

  • The Mediatized Protest: Hong Kong, Cinema, Telegram, and The Lennon Wall

    The Mediatized Protest: Hong Kong, Cinema, Telegram, and The Lennon Wall Date: 17th January 2020, Friday Venue: Seminar Room, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Civil Lines, Delhi-110054 Time: 4.00 pm Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, 15 September 2019: Young citizens all around you gear up: face masks, gloves, goggles, helmets, knee and shin-pads, biking gear, backpacks and…

  • The Wager on Cinema: Screening 11 – If She Built A Country/ Agar Wo Desh Banati

    The Sarai Programme invites you to the eleventh screening of the film series titled The Wager on Cinema: Maheen Mirza’s ‘If She Built A Country’/ ‘Agar Wo Desh Banati’.  The film’s editor Puloma Pal will be available for the discussion after the screening. The respondents for this film are Fathima Nizaruddin and Sourav Mahanta. Date:…

  • What Time Is It? | 14-16 December 2017 – Report

    What Time Is It? Technologies of Life in the Contemporary 14th, 15th and 16th December, 2017 Sarai-CSDS, Delhi and Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi #whattimeisit A detailed report of the conference is available on this LINK. Conference Programme: http://sarai.net/what-time-is-it-14-16-december-2017/ Concept Have we finally entered the End of the End of History? (E-flux, Journal #57 –…

  • What Time Is It? | 14-16 December 2017

    What Time Is It? Technologies of Life in the Contemporary 14th, 15th and 16th December, 2017 Sarai-CSDS, Delhi and Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi #whattimeisit Have we finally entered the End of the End of History? (E-flux, Journal #57 – Sept 2014). Recent media technological transformations have thrown into confusion many existing political and social…

  • Embalming the Obscure: Unpacking Cinephilia Undead

    The more I explore the cinephiliac circuits of obscure small budget films manifesting itself through networks of social media, the more I am reminded of an old curiosity shop stuck in the corner of a street with all kinds of valuable junk. In this room, the gathered and the collected, the scattered and the discarded, in this room the past and the present, the lost and the found, in this room the dead and the undead. This work of collecting and preserving the past is marked by the increasing importance of the fragmentary (the clip, the tribute, the ephemera etc) where many different pieces fit together, like in a puzzle, where the ludicrous, the ugly, the obscene, the erotic and the horrifying come together to construct a universe of the obscure…

  • Digital Ghosts: Spectral Presences on YouTube

    Geert Lovink made it clear that we have started watching databases rather than films and TV. 2015 YouTube statistics seem to be in serious agreement with that statement with over 4 billion videos viewed every day, between three to four hundred hours of video uploaded every minute. The vast unregulated folds of the internet has created infinite avenues of accessing cinema by way of easy exchange, transfer, uploads and downloads which in turn has created a new cinematic culture. Everybody is contributing to this growing archive of films- fans, cinephiles, production houses, DVD labels and such. In this post I track the creation and sustenance of B-movie YouTube channels operated by fans…

  • Gunda, an unexpected journey: Tracking Cinephilia Undead

    The search for a trashy film can turn into a steeplechase of staggering emotions, a cinematic odyssey ranging from blasts of stunt and fantasy, through a landscape of the dismembered and the splattered, the violated and the avenged, oozing with sleaze and smut and insatiable appetites, intended seriousness, unintended ham handedness and such. Yet, at the end of it all it still opens out into a rather variegated terrain of discourses and counter discourses of cult, trash, the bad object and cultural detritus…