Dear Friends:
Please circulate this announcement as widely as possible to UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS in Mumbai.
To register for the PUKAR Monsoon Doc-Shop, or for more information, contact Sanjay Bhangar at 3105 0246 (mobile), 2494 5046 (residence), Shonali Sarda at 3259 5974 (mobile), or Rahul Srivastava or Shekhar Krishnan PUKAR at 2207 7779 or mailto:monsoon@pukar.org.in.
Regards,
Rahul Srivastava, Shekhar Krishnan, Shonali Sarda and Sanjay Bhangar _______
PUKAR Monsoon 2003 DOC-SHOP, 19-23 May 2003
WHAT IS A DOC-SHOP?
"Doc-Shop" is a shorthand term for "documentation workshop". In a Doc-Shop, undergraduate students will discuss acts of documentation as a creative and critical exercise, and simultaneously gain hands-on experience with various old and new media technologies.
WHY DOCUMENTATION?
Today all of us deal with information in great abundance. The Internet is a huge archive of information with massive streams of ideas, discussions and stories flowing through its networks. This makes special demands on us as creative and critical people. Any creative and critical engagement today means also learning to deal with such enormous archives, and understanding how they are made. Participating in a Doc-Shop is one such form of engagement.
Doc-Shops help us to develop our conceptual skills and make sense of archives shaped through new media and digital technologies. They equip us to document the world on our own terms. The world around us is mediated by new technologies that shape our perceptions acutely. Yet most of us do not have access to these technologies, nor are we encouraged to shape the mediated reality around us. PUKAR views documentation not simply as a passive act of recording reality, but an active, creative process that allows us to participate in the construction of reality around us.
PUKAR MONSOON DOC-SHOP in MAY 2003
Between 19 and 23 May 2003, PUKAR shall be conducting the Doc-Shop, as part of PUKAR Monsoon 2003. The Doc-Shop will be a week-long series of workshops that encourage hands-on learning of technical skills and equipment, and foster a critical and intellectual engagement with the terms and practices of documentation. The Doc-Shop will be facilitated by a group of resource persons: artists, media producers, documentalists and activists. The PUKAR Monsoon 2003 theme, "On Cities, On Water" will be the main content of the Doc-Shop.
The Doc-Shop is open to all undergraduate students in Mumbai, and will be held for about 20 students. The Doc-Shop will culminate in the production of a small archive of images and words and other productions which can be used in further phases of the PUKAR Monsoon 2003 from June to August 2003 (see below).
Each day will consist of a morning "reading-cum-discussion" session. These will be followed by afternoon "practicals" that will enable the hands-on use of different technologies. After five days, we hope that small groups of students will form who work on specific projects -- a short video, photo-essay, radio or sound story, a piece of fiction or an essay, or any other creative form -- on the PUKAR Monsoon theme of "On Cities, On Water" (see below). The small documentary projects will be exhibited publicly in the week following the Doc-Shop, and will form the basis of future events with local and international audiences in the PUKAR Monsoon 2003.
DAY 1: The Moving Image
Documentary films have a complex story of relating to the modern world, and we begin our Doc-Shop by reflecting on this story. Does the movie camera capture reality as a given? Or does it shape it through the selective eye of the movie-maker? What sense do we make of the huge archive of documentaries that exist today, and how do we evaluate their contribution to our understanding of the contemporary world? Handling a digital video camera and making some samples of moving images will be an important part of the session.
DAY 2: The Photograph
The still photograph has its own language and potency to shape our world and photographic images reach out to us through posters, advertisements and personal photo-albums. How do they shape our relationship to knowledge, with their particular method of recording reality? How does digital technology change the story of the photograph? The use of digital cameras and actually taking photographs will enhance reflection on these issues.
DAY 3: Sound-Scapes
Radio and the Internet have transformed the experience of "hearing" into a specialised zone that makes sound an autonomous space to act upon, for all those interested in documentation. How does one relate to audio archives today? How do audio records produce their own version of visual culture? Learning the nuances of sound archives through digital audio recording technologies and producing audio stories will complete this session.
DAY 4: Words and Writing
Words and texts remain crucial components of documenting reality. A script for a film, or a caption for a photograph, is vital to structure even visual forms of archiving. How do we relate to words and writing as old and new modes of documentation? How do we use words creatively to innovate on classificatory systems and taxonomies? How do we simply become better writers and therefore better archivists, even when using new visual media? Creative writing and "naming" exercises will form part of these reflections.
DAY 5: Web Art
Visual and performing art forms can be seen as the most sophisticated modes of documenting the complexities and nuances of lived experience. That is why we understand the richness of past and the present by relating to all kinds of art forms. However, digital technologies have transformed many art practices in all kinds of ways. We focus on the newly emergent form of "web art" as a space that reflects on earlier artistic traditions, and links the themes of the four previous days as converging in virtual or cyber-space. If the Internet is the most obvious manifestation of the "excess" and "overload" of documentation practices, then perhaps "web art" is a competent way of taking charge -- through participation, creation and subversion of virtual space. Making your own virtual and web-based creations will be a vital part of the learning experience.
About the PUKAR MONSOON
Pedagogic interventions are important to a new generation of urban youth whose critical understanding of society is mainly formed in the space of undergraduate colleges, and through negotiating the world of the mass media. In a spirit of engagement with these unexplored spaces and voices, PUKAR organises the PUKAR Monsoon: a series of lectures presentations, interactive sessions and activities from May to August every year in which college students address a specific theme through a variety of creative pedagogic approaches.
The first annual PUKAR Monsoon, held in July and August 2002 in eight colleges in Mumbai was "The City at Work: Livelihoods and Ways of Belonging". Reflection on the history and economics of everyday life in the city helped students cultivate a critical sensibility about the market at a pre-professional stage of their lives. In the PUKAR Monsoon 2002, we used the idea of livelihood or work as an entry point for student participation in small activities or documentation projects to examine and understand how class and cultural identities are changing in the context of globalisation in Mumbai. Three short video-clips, installations, charts and small essays were some of the output which were then collectively shared and discussed in a subsequent discussion at The Bombay Paperie in August 2002.
PUKAR MONSOON 2003: "On Cities, On Water"
The theme for PUKAR Monsoon 2003 is "On Cities, On Water". Water as substance and as medium has been central to urban development throughout human history. In our city, as in many other world cities, modern urban experience and "structures of feeling" are definitively connected to the city's geographical form as island, and its location on the coastline.
In the context of globalisation, other dimensions of water, and of the relationship between cities and water are becoming increasingly visible and contested in the public arena -- notably, the privatisation of water resources and the infrastructural networks delivering water. One of the aims of PUKAR Monsoon 2003 is to enable young people to develop a critical understanding of these and other relationships between cities and water. We propose that these connections could be explored along four axial dimensions of water -- in relation to its role as conduit, in the promotion of concourse and commerce, and in its dimension as contaminant.
PUKAR Monsoon 2003 will work to create a better understanding of the political and cultural implications of these connections among the student participants, and will also attempt to extend the dialogue with other citizens. We expect that artists, intellectuals and activists from the student community as well as from the wider public in the city and beyond will participate in different ways. Our attempt will be to facilitate dialogue and debate, encourage artistic, intellectual and creative expression, and demonstrate civic-political concerns. _____
PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research) P.O. Box 5627, Dadar, Mumbai 400014, INDIA
E-Mail mailto:secretariat@pukar.org.in Phone +91 (022) 2207 7779, +91 98200 45529, +91 98204 04010 Web Site http://www.pukar.org.in