Each year From 2001-02 to 2006-07, we supported a number of independent and often interdisciplinary projects. This has been key to Sarai’s design of a distributed research network. We see this as a foundation for a network of socially available, publicly accessible knowledge in contemporary cultural, intellectual and technological practice. Broadly, the fellowships supported work on the interface between popular culture, urban space and technological creativity. They engage with the creativity of the Indian street, its visual and sensory dynamism, its spirit of experimentation, improvisation and enterprise.

During 2001-08, every year we hosted a small number of residencies at Sarai. Residents were mainly new media artists from South Asia as well as from Australia, Europe and the US. Below is a list of the artists-in-residence over these years.

After 25 years of producing an entire galaxy of superheroes, Raj Comics is the largest comic book publishing house in India. They have published more than 5000 titles and are home to more than 20 characters. But, what is the world of Raj Comics? Who is the Raj Comics superhero? Where does he operate? What does he protect? And what does he protect it from? What role does the trinity of Law, Justice and Authority have to play in these comics? Surrounded by all these questions, a man rides in the city, certain that something has gone horribly wrong and needs to be saved. Certain that this time it is his turn to be the saviour.

For the last almost eight years [2000-08], Sarai, as part of its commitment towards the enrichment of the public life of intellectual activity in India, has consistently supported independent research projects and inter-disciplinary practice initiatives all over the country. These projects, undertaken by a diverse body of researchers and practitioners in English and Hindi, constitute a growing body of work that has emerged under the aegis of the Sarai-CSDS programme of fellowships for independent researchers and practitioners. Till date, this has translated into more than three hundred foundational grants to independent research and practice projects located in more than twenty cities across India. These projects are best seen, not as a set of finished undertakings, but as an array of working questions…

This colloquium, early in the history of the Information and Society Research Cluster at Sarai-CSDS, posits that the ‘sensor-census-censor’ triad may be a useful way in which the histories and contemporary realities of South Asia and Europe may be investigated. Here, we mean the historic affinities, networks and resonances pertinent to the traffic of information between the colony and the metropolis, especially with regard to the operations of knowledge as power. We also point towards the contemporary (and projected) operations of biometric technologies, internet filtering systems, networked surveillance, data retrieval and outsourcing systems that inflect the global traffic in information today.

The Associate Fellowship Programme was undertaken in 2007 to develop a level of interaction between independent practitioners, researchers and scholars that is deeper and more extensive than that afforded by the Independent Fellowship process.

Frontiers considers limits, edges, borders and margins of all kinds as the sites for declarations, occasions for conversation, arguments, debates, recounting and reflection. Our book suggests that you consider the frontier as the skin of our time and our world, and we invite you to get under the skin of contemporary experience in order to generate a series of crucial (and frequently unsettling) narrative and analytical possibilities. For us, the frontier is a threshold waiting to be crossed, a space rife with the seductive aura of transgression…

Horizon of Scanning juxtaposes found materials, thoughts and reflections on the body, to radio waves, to television screens, the coming of street lighting, to acts of reading – scanning operates as a metaphor for control, diagnosis and a recombinant frame (when you search, you scan, and so open up possibilities of newer interconnections). The word travels between different disciplines and practices (from medicine to literature to surveillance to everyday acts).

Are you a non-nerd, a human being who happens to use computers without living inside them? Does that make you curious to find out what the buzz regarding open source and free software is all about? What’s in it for you? Does it work? Is it fun and easy to use? How is it made and who makes it? And how ‘free’ or ‘open’ is it, really? Have you looked long and hard for answers to questions like these in plain English? If that’s the case, ‘FLOSS is not just good for teeth’ could be just what you are looking for.