Sneak Preview: Indiancine.ma Friday, March 15, 2013, 7 pm Jaaga, 68 KH Double Road, Bangalore
In 2013, India celebrates 100 years of cinema. Pad.ma's contribution to these festivities will be a piece of infrastructure that we hope can be useful at a point where cinema is struggling with both its celluloid past and its digital future -- a resource that is intended to not only recollect the heritage of Indian film, but also to reaffirm the promise of cinema as an art form, just as it enters its second century. More and more of it will take place on the Internet, and our aim is to help cinema uncover some of the potential that lies in this transition. Thus, five years after its initial launch, Pad.ma has spawned its first sister project. Indiancine.ma will be an annotated archive of Indian film, and we're currently making the first steps towards building a network of institutions in India -- rooted in, but not limited to, the field of film studies -- to own and operate the site. The initial set of films and metadata is based on Ashish Rajadhyaksha's and Paul Willemen's "Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema", and the Wiki at wiki.indiancine.ma. Our hope is that Indiancine.ma will become a place where film scholars and enthusiasts from India and beyond can not only search and explore, but also write, rewrite, rearrange and reimagine the many histories of Indian cinema. In India, copyright for film works expires 60 years after their date of release. In consequence, Indian cinema up to 1952 is effectively in the public domain, which means that it can enter online archives that are open to the general public. But as most other abstract rights, copyright -- and in this case the fact that it expires -- is not just a given. If the public domain wasn't reclaimed, concretely and constantly, it would simply disappear. And even though in the grand scheme of things, Indiancine.ma is just a small claim, we think it is important enough to devote some of our time to it. Indiancine.ma will be launched later this year, and as of now is still under construction. But as the site is already functional, we'd love to give you a first preview. The archive has more than 30,000 entries, more than 5,000 of which are out of copyright. The hard part, as anyone who has ever dealt with Indian cinema will know, is finding the films. But while our initial set of moving images is small, it is going to grow in the coming weeks and months, thanks to a number of institutions and individuals who have already begun to contribute from their own archives. The site itself is based on pan.do/ra, and was developed by Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lütgert, in February 2013 at Jaaga in Bangalore, with support from the Bohen Foundation and the Goethe Institute. Both Jan and Sebastian will be present to introduce the project, unfold the technology behind Indiancine.ma, and reflect on the politics of building open archives on the Internet. The presentation will begin at 7 pm, be followed by a discussion, and end around 8.30 pm. With all those who want to hang on for longer, we can move the conversation to the rooftop of Ranoosh, just about 100 meters up the road. pad.ma | indiancine.ma | pan.do/ra | jaaga.in | bohen.org | goethe.de/bangalore # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
