Speak Memory Symposium, Cairo - Pad.ma

Duration: 01:17:08; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 21.351; Saturation: 0.047; Lightness: 0.149; Volume: 0.183; Cuts per Minute: 0.493; Words per Minute: 168.082

Namita A. Malhotra, Ashok Sukumaran, Sebastian W. Lütgert, Sanjay Bhangar

Zinnia Ambapardiwala is a physics graduate, trichologist, hairdresser, and system administrator. She is currently the technical coordinator of Pad.ma.

Sanjay Bhangar is a writer and software developer who lives in Mumbai. He is a founder of CAMP (http://camputer.org), and has been involved with the pad.ma project since its inception. He is a big believer in the open-source software development model. He is currently working on a few web-based projects including a web-to-print publishing platform, a resource site for theatre in India, and online mapping and indexing tools.

Jan Gerber is an artist, filmmaker and software developer from Berlin. He develops platforms for the production and distribution of video material (v2v.cc, 0xdb.org, pad.ma, dictionaryofwar.org) and runs informal cinemas and publicly funded events on questions of intellectual property and piracy (piratecinema.org, oil21.org). As a co-founder of 0x2620.org, he is currently working on Pan.do/ra, the next version of Pad.ma and 0xdb.org.

Sebastian W. Lütgert is an artist, programmer and writer. He lives and works in Berlin. He has co-founded a self-organized institution for artistic research in media technology (http://bootlab.org), a cinema for movies downloaded from the internet (http://piratecinema.org) and a non-profit organization for open-source software development (http://0x2620.org). He has initiated various projects dealing with copyright and cinema, and is currently working on a film on capitalism, set in Dubai.

Namita A. Malhotra is a writer, researcher and filmmaker with the Alternative Law Forum (http://www.altlawforum.org). She lives and works in a not-big-city, Bangalore. She works on technology, legality and power and is soon (hopefully) finishing a film on video pornography and a monograph on law, affect and image.

Ashok Sukumaran is an artist whose interests are in archaeologies of media, and in what haunts or underlies network forms and material distributions. Recent subjects in his work include electricity, cycle rickshaws, sea trade, and "the neighbour". His work takes the form of public projects, exhibitions, films, lectures, and long-term collaborations via CAMP (http://camputer.org), which he co-founded in 2007.

PAD.MA - short for Public Access Digital Media Archive - is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non-commercial use. The initiators of PAD.MA conceptualized this archive as a way of opening up a set of images, intentions and effects present in video footage, resources that conventions of video-making, editing and spectatorship have tended to suppress, or leave behind. This expanded treatment then points to other, political potentials for such material, and leads into lesser-known territory for video itself... beyond the finite documentary film or the online video clip. The design of the archive makes possible various types of "viewing", and contextualization: from an overview of themes and timelines to much closer readings of transcribed dialogue and geographical locations, to layers of "writing" on top of the image material. Descriptions, keywords and other annotations have been placed on timelines by both archive contributors and users. The PAD.MA project is initiated by a group consisting of oil21.org from Berlin, the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore, and three organisations from Mumbai: Majlis, Point of View and Chitrakarkhana/CAMP.

http://pad.ma/

Cairo

Okay, I think we will start. First of all, we would like to thank Laura and William for inviting me to Cairo, not just for this session, but also for the two weeks of workshop that we see that it is.

We're really thankful that you had us here.

At the same time, we have to apologize because we got some good advice from you and we decided not to follow it. We're not going to do a project presentation today. If we had to open the session with a joke, if we were obliged to do this, the joke would be, sorry, we don't have a website, which in a way is true because Padma is an online video archive which is open and distributed and which has a lot of densely annotated footage and potentially annotated, contributing footage and annotation further.

But this in itself is the truth. So we're kind of always in this conflict between the use value and the exhibition value of this. We've presented it a lot and we will present it again and again, but it's always been a concern for the media between the use value and the display value or exhibition value.

It's a conversation we can also have with the Bidoun library.

Padma, we can also put it on a shelf, we can flip some pages and we'll see all the covers. There's a lot of interesting stuff in there, but then also how do you make sure that it's been used as a resource, as a tool, for research, for distribution, for conversation.

And we accumulated a lot. And we accumulated a lot of feedback, but today our idea was that we would rather spend it on a few items.

Okay. Hi, I'm Namita, part of Padma, Public Access Digital Media Archive. And this session was supposed to begin with this board that we found on the street walking up to here, which said, waiting is forbidden in Arabic and in English, but as luck would have it, we forgot the board on the table in the house.

So imagine it here. So "waiting is forbidden" is kind of, I guess, what we would have liked to start with.

As Sebastian said, rather than showing the archive, what I would like to raise here in terms of what I want to do in about 70 minutes is to see how do we do this or how do we do the archive in terms of the technique or the craftsmanship, art, labour of building an archive.

And looking at it, and that technique would involve probably two aspects, apart from the many things that a lot of you have talked about in terms of the people, the institutions, the events, the collaborations that take place.

But the two aspects that are interesting for us and something that we have experimented with, which is the law and the technology. And I would like to concentrate a bit on the law.

So I'm going to read a bit and hopefully finish within time.

In the context where exhibition from the archive or what is pulled out of the archive seems to be overshadowing the archive, what is of interest here is to talk about the back end, which possibly might be the more interesting part.

And the back end is the software and often the law, or how do we legally go about doing what we do, whatever it is that we want to do with a collection, an anthology, a database or an archive. The back end is literally what people like us who are doing these projects should be talking about, should be foregrounding and sharing and discussing in spaces like this.

So how do we do this in terms of keeping in mind all the factors, whether it's the people, the material, the institutions, the backups, the software, the relationships, the cordialities, the conferences, etc.

This becomes especially important because what we're doing is a variation or perhaps even an inversion of the traditional state archive, which can be an artist's initiative or it can be a personal group, but basically an archive that is public, accessible and open.

And that may or may not be connected to the state, but it's essentially about being public, accessible and open. You are then trying to do things within a broad legal structure of a country which has probably not imagined such things or probably has not accounted for it.

And therefore, thinking through the modalities in terms of the legal stuff becomes even more essential. The model for the license for Padma is basically the licensing model for the open source community, also which has translated into the Creative Commons license or the other open content licenses that are available.

But at the same time, especially if you are researching in archives, this is definitely apparent to most of us. A legal document is also a cultural document. It informs, as we heard yesterday in the discussion about the police records, about the dignity of a person, about the stories, the motivations, ideas and concepts that people want to work with.

And a legal document for an archive, therefore, should be looked upon as a cultural document in making. Not so much a manifesto or a declaration or ten pieces, which we have also done, which would have been outside, but also perhaps we forgot to do that.

Or it is going to be put outside soon.

But what is the structure that allows this to happen? The actualization of the pledge, as Derrida says about the archive. The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token for the future.

And the legal document is an attempt to make it actual, or a guard to that pledge.

So there are two things that I would like to concentrate upon in terms of the legality. And one would be about the tendency of material to move between meanings, narratives, to belong in more places than one, to belong in contradictory stories, and to mean different things to people.

And what is an archive that allows for the fluidity of such material, or for the differing properties of such material? Then such an archive cannot see the material, image, or video as fixed or as property.

There is cognizance of its properties, which doesn't allow for it to be understood as property. For instance, if you take any big Hollywood film, it is distributed in terms of its intellectual property as a bundle of rights.

It is broken down into different parts, whether it's music, it's content, it's DVD rights, it's European streaming rights, etc. It is broken up into these various things. And so when a movie is being sold, you're not buying a movie the same way that you're buying a book, you're buying a license to see the movie only.

For instance, the Bidoun library can do a lot more with its books than if it was a travelling exhibition of movies, or any of the other travelling archives that we have talked about. It can lend out these books, it can tear out pages, it can burn them, it can destroy them, it can exhibit them page by page.

It can legally do more with a book, because it can legally do more with a book rather than if it was a movie. So if it was a video library, then it could only display the DVDs as objects on its shelves, whose jackets could be read, but the content could be unavailable and unwatchable, because there would be no lending, no public screenings, no burning because you don't own it, because you only have a license to that movie.

So in terms of trying to understand what the difference between the book and buying a movie is. But what is interesting for us for this bundle of rights of exhibition, reproduction, translation, adaptation, pay-per-view, etc., that signify the property status of an object, is how we have tried to invert it in the Padma license, which looks at the properties of the object, in terms of what it is, what it can do, what it can be attached to, and where does it go, and how does it circulate.

This, in the context of the license, has meant that the Padma license applies to what is on the website and what can be downloaded from it, which is a relatively high resolution file, but it's not the original DVD material.

This is also, the high resolution not being online is also a response to the bandwidth situation in the country where Padma is mostly documented, which is India, as well.

But what this in turn means is that a broadcast company or a gallery or an art collector who buys the original material from the artist or the filmmaker, at whatever cost, is entitled to basically a license of display.

Whereas if you look at the material within Padma and how Padma has inverted that license, then there are more rights available for you on Padma vis-à-vis what is available there than what is available in other circuits in which the material might be sold.

In that sense, the license tries to understand the different properties of a digital object that will simultaneously circulate in the art market for a small group of people and also be available for research, study and annotation on Padma to a wider public.

This is possible because of how close the digital copy is to the original. In fact, the original might itself be a digital copy of something. And the license that applies to the digital copy of Padma allows for various things to happen.

By inverting the corporate statutory of the Bundle of Rights that allows for more profit to be sucked out repeatedly from the same product in terms of how big corporations use copyrighted intellectual property, the Padma license allows the user on the website to repeatedly use the same product in material ways.

So as they would say here, we are almost here coming in.

The license allows for searching, annotation, downloading, clipping and possibly in the future also creating a timeline within the archive itself and exporting that.

In the sense of wanting to create an active archive, Padma is designed around things that you would want to do in and within an archive. The design or those designs that we have on images and videos of the relationship between video and text are part of the law, the code, the content, the collaborations and all that surrounds it.

Another aspect which I don't know if I have the time but maybe I can touch upon briefly is that one has to deal with legally is the aspect of intimacy, privacy or images that are sensitive and provoke a certain kind of anxiety.

The automatic response of an archival project when confronted with issues about anxiety, about what happens if images are circulated or become public, is to address it by entering into legally binding contracts with contributors that set down in stone what are probably very fragile and ephemeral conversations and connections, that are probably either part of longer conversations that people have been having between contributors and archivists, that could change later along the road, or they are ephemeral tenuous connections that cannot possibly be captured within a legally binding contract unless you make it at least a hundred pages long, and unless you make a contract that is very contextual and very time bound.

Contracts with the contributors to the archive saying that they do not object to the use of the material in, or the use of their own images in postcards in books and CDs that they don't object to how it is placed within the catalog, to how it is captioned, and therefore ensuring that they don't object via a legally binding contract is not about respecting either the images, the videos or the contributor, but it's about ensuring obviously that the archive or the organization behind the archive does not face any liability for what happens.

It then does not have to be drawn into a conversation about the properties of the image or what it can do or what it can mean. It merely needs to get a legal document signed and it is literally in the clear.

What is more of a challenge is to have these conversations repeatedly and to be tied to them, but to still engage with the anxiety and to begin to understand it. Whether the filmmaker's arrogance of control over meanings of the material, the archivist's anxiety about what she is allowed to do with the images that she has been given so generously, the artist's pressure to make it look good, and these are pushes and pressures, not all of which we succumb to and negotiate and not all of which we take seriously, sometimes they are derided, but there are conversations that are continuously taking place.

What is avoided here is the idea that you can do away with responsibility through a legal license or through, that you can do away with responsibility through legally binding contracts, but that you have to engage with them and you have to do it also through the legality and also through a social context.

So PADMA is a tool in some ways that allows us legally and technically to do many things. It seeks to build a legal scaffolding that allows things to happen. And this is of course a process and there are iterations to the license as well.

Illegality also allows for an insight about what works and what doesn't work in the state archive or in any other kind of institutional archive that one walks into, because it's fairly obvious within the first five seconds of walking into a library or a video store or a state archive or a small library within an organization what you can do and what you can't do.

It takes about five seconds to figure out where the limits are.

While the state or the national archive is interested in the process of making history, law and narrative, the alternative or the non-state archive or the non-institutional archive becomes invested in the idea of representation and therefore also in some cases in the instrumental use of tools such as law and technology instead of thinking of them as structure of edifices that can be changed and can be remade to change the rules of the game.

But by being a representational archive or investing in representing those who are left out or redeeming them or giving voice, the understanding of the material that the archive deals with also becomes fixed in some senses and it is not allowed to shift between meanings.

The defunction then becomes of this material to be displayed rather than research, rather than curiosity.

By moving out of a representational logic, the archive can then do other things. It doesn't need an artist's practice to make it lighter. It doesn't need an artist's practice to sort of play within the archive.

It itself can be as big as surprising things are possible. It can escape the double-line that art produces affect and history produces fact, as has been the case with most presentations so far. Which is not to deny that there is a political impulse of archiving, but that impulse has to be placed within the structure of the legality of the technology as well, and not only in aspects of the content, but especially not only in aspects of representation.

So the archive cannot represent in entirely anything, but neither is an archive merely than fragments of representation, or at least Parma does not seem to be such an archive, or to have an uncomplicated relationship between what works in and out of the archive.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Some of us are going to repeat ourselves.

There's an idea of repetition here in general, because the previous version of our workshop was called Don't Wait for the Archive as well, and this version was called Don't Wait for the Archive, but again, still Don't Wait for the Archive, Don't Wait for the Archive Part 2. Repetition is good, I think.

So, Namita kind of alluded to the kind of curious about relate, and framing its idea differently, in this idea of the travelling archive, the archive that travels.

And, you know, this idea comes from art, doesn't it? From exhibition practices, from the art of display.

And isn't one of the qualities of the archive, is that it's a somehow reliable source, that it's somehow the place where you go, it's the kind of final backup, it's the place where you go where you, if you haven't found something elsewhere.

And if the archive comes and leaves, there is something, isn't there a bit kind of sad about that? Or is this the archive this tease, you know, and the tease is of course important, and is this part of what they're doing? And I'm trying to, I'm saying this not as a critique, but as a kind of general way of trying to talk about a set of contradictions that Namita's already pointed to in some way, that are here in this space, in this space of the history of art, and the space of the history of the archive, and how those two meet.

There's a piece of writing that we did in Beirut, it's called 10 Theses in the Archive, and it will be available outside, it's a set of polemical proclamations, and it will be available later outside.

But one of those deals with this conflict of the archive and the exhibition, and I wanted to lay it out in some different terms, and talk about some of the experiences that I've had in the five or six days that I've been here.

Because the conflict really is that this, between forms of exhibition value, display value, and other forms of value that the archive can have.

And in a way this is a kind of perversion, or in many ways an unfortunate twist, at the end of the kind of very valuable insight of the last several decades, especially in the art context, that artists can have something important to do with, and say about the archive as a form.

So, in our visit to The Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CULTNAT), for example, which was presented yesterday, I don't know if it was here, we had a very extreme example of this split, which Hal Foster, in a text whose reference is found in the text, in the 10 Thesis text, in a 2002 text, points to as a split in the museum, between the kind of display function of the archive, and its memory function, right? So the museum displays things as spectacular, presumptive objects, while the memory function of these objects resides often in the storerooms of the museum structure.

But CULTNAT has a, you know, as a vast and important archive, has a very peculiar and extreme form of this, and I can see some of it here, maybe.

It's a bit outside of town, and most people don't access it, and yet I think that it's an important site for the potential kind of question around the archive, in the context of Pyrrha.

So this is a...

So the first thing we were taken to is this nine-stream, it's called the Culturama, right? It's a nine-stream projection, patented number 29513, I think, which, which, and everyone knows this, but from, which attempts a kind of panoramic view of various aspects of the archive of Egypt.

It's a display of the archive, right? It's a kind of classical view, primarily.

Now...

I'll let that play for a bit. There are various forms. We only saw one show out of, I think, a dozen or so.

Two, three, six, five, one, two.

And this is an interactive nine-stream kind of display room, in which a person leads you through the kind of aspects of the collection that have been put into this display. There are three layers of information, but, of course, this is a very kind of small part of what KultNet actually collects.

And I think the conflict is, obviously, that the archive is a large thing, and to display it is an impossible... in some ways an impossibility, and there are always attempts in different forms to try and kind of solve this problem.

And CULTNAT does it in a specific way, which is display function, which involves three large rooms called showrooms. I mean, they have other kind of hints towards what this is doing. I mean, there's a room, for example, with interactive screens, which is supposed to be this kind of an area where all the other projects are talked about, but this room doesn't have any seats, so you can't actually use this for research.

The final, the third room that we visited is a room in which you are asked to wear 3D glasses, and you see a 3D version of old photographs. And some of this is quite cool. It's technically complex.

There are various technology partners and so on.

And, you know, can we do something else with this? Can we take all these 250 people and the massive amounts of infrastructure that goes into some place like this and turn it away or try to relink the display function or this ability to kind of really show it off into something that we find in the archive? That's kind of one question.

And in Beirut, I had written a kind of line in the thesis that talks about the archive versus the exhibition and whose title is that "the past of the exhibition kind of threatens the future of the archive" because of this displayability, this ability to now have a kind of sensual capacity.

Ashok brings in thesis no 8. from http://Pad.ma's 10 thesis on the archive.

#8. The Past of the Exhibition Threatens the Future of the Archive. see: https://pad.ma/m/documents/OH

So, and I'm going to read that line out.

So, the challenge for the archive which today threatens the exhibition with its own sensual ability to relink and re-articulate the two functions which in Hal Foster are separated, that is memory and display, is how not to end up as a spiral ramp or as a flea market.

The spiral ramp being the classic modern museum form, if you like, from the Guggenheim. In other words, how to avoid the tyranny of the two historical freedoms. One, the kind of modernist, both formal strategies of audience participation in the spectacle.

And two, the kind of post-modernist eclecticism by which anything included and curated could be accorded exhibition value.

And I wrote this in Beirut. And then, luckily enough, I'm not picking on CULTNAT, but there's these kind of strange examples that keep popping up. On the CULTNAT website, we found the outside-glass spiral ramp for it literally.

And of course, I don't mean, you know, I don't mean this in a literal way. I don't mean, you know, that this is... But there's a difference between this, between what, in an old quote by Irit Rogoff, what is described as accessibility, which is this kind of marketing of access.

And access as something closer to the question of the archive. And access as something closer to the question, to the possibility of what can be done with it.

So there's a difference between the display ability and the participation of the guy who's wiggling his mouse - Sebastian, and a form of access to the archive, right? There is a kind of difference. I think that's important to note.

And to go back to the library metaphor, I mean, when you turn the book from its edge onto its face, you know, that's one kind of transformation that you're achieving, right? And you do that deliberately, and that's, you know, good and bad things about that.

But let's also think about further transformations. Can you open the book? Can you leave PDFs behind? Can you, what can you do with this transformation? And what is, not only what is legally possible and can be legally tweaked, but also what's the spirit of this? Is the library going to desert us? You know? Can we leave something behind? And, in a way, the question always being, how to kind of stitch back together the Hal Foster's kind of wound between the, between the, between this kind of displayability and other values, uses, and...characters of the archive.

So, and of course, this is, I mean, it's, and it, kind of, ability of the archive, which is important for us to discuss because the archive borrows this ability from the museum historically, and historically, I'm saying.

But, it's, of course, not that this conflict exists only in institutional, institutional forms, and I think, um, it's also wanting, uh, affecting and, um, at the back of many projects, uh, the house as camp, and all the time, and Yasmeen's, for example, yesterday, you know, there is this question that we, I think, need to, kind of, deal with.

And, it's not a matter of making a kind of choice between the display and the archive, of course, but, and I'm reminded here of, kind of, kind of, about this, like, don't ever forget, but never speak, about this, right? It's, uh, as a form of memory.

And, I think Padma's very clear and specific response to this is, yes, do remember, and do speak. Because, for us, uh, as you will see if you go on the website, uh, those two things are not totalizing things anyway.

Speaking, and remembering, and showing, are not themselves, in a way, um, they are themselves unstable.

And, so there is no need to, make these kind of, choices, in a way, or they are false choices, right? But we have to still find a way, we have to still find a structure through all this stuff.

And in other words, we don't have to choose, in our case, between memory and speaking, right? And we don't have to, uh, and another way of putting this is that, our motivations, while speaking, are always, in a way, larger than what appears, or than what is spoken.

Um, and maybe there's a, kind of, larger, metaphysical ground for this, but I'll, I'll try to explain briefly.

Uh, and I'm drawing from, the work here of a kind of local philosopher, who is on human own, who lives in Zmalik, and teaches at the, uh, EUC. And Graham-Carmen's theory of objects, basically says that, all things are withdrawn, that, they are never fully exhausted by our interactions with them.

Right? They retain a kind of smoldering depth, that we, can only allude to, that our way of speaking about them, can only touch, can barely touch these depths of the object. So you can do kind of chemical analysis, or digital pattern recognition, or you can use objects metaphorically, or you can deploy them politically, you can write books about them, and so on and so forth, and you can add thousands and millions of keywords, but none of this exhausts the object itself, there's always something hidden, and it always something, has, it always has something more to offer.

And one of the great lessons of this approach, maybe, is that, kind of, ambiguity and opacity are a given feature of all things, of all objects. And this is, I think, a major implication for art practices, because now, in a sense, you don't have to, kind of, artificially generate ambiguity, or, you don't have to produce, kind of, passive-aggressive, pentacles of obscurity, as art.

Art is not, in other words, a kind of, soapy sponge, that you wipe on your own windscreen, so that the world outside, appears complex, right? The complexity is already there, it's outside, and it's a form of trying, and lucidity is, the attempt to grapple with this, kind of, character of objects, this, this instability, this, this ambiguity, that's present in objects, in an honest way.

And to push the frontier of what may be understood, not as here, but as out there, what can be felt, to move, the space of, what can be felt, into a more interesting place.

And, and, and obviously, all acts of lucidity, all attempts of translation, create their own shadows, they point to things that cannot be said, they point to things that cannot be reached.

And this idea, maybe, brings us to the question of open, right? Open. Um, and just one example, because I think Sanch will talk about it as well.

the, uh, the open city, is a, um, it's something we, we found and talked about recently.

This is from, uh, 1942, Manila being declared an open city.

So surrender is the ultimate act of openness, right? But of course, by, this is an act of self preservation. Surrender is an act of self, of, of holding something, of saving something else, right? Surrendering the streets, to save the family, right? Surrendering, opening yourself out, to, to, to keep other things safe.

And in a way, there is always this, I mean, we've all been ripped off, we've all had moments where generosity has been abused. And, I think the question is continuously, uh, to, to, and, maybe Sanjay deals with this more specifically, but, there are so many different forms of open, right? And, we need to discuss this, I think, for forums like this, to understand what this, is doing.

Because this is open for business, this open, you know, as we said in our workshop, this kind of, what happens a lot in open source communities now, this, this open, they're open, so that we can close a number of deals, right? Or, is it, what kinds of open can we, can we speak about? Because, I mean, in India, there's a reverse, there's a kind of, very strange reversal of this open, because the open, is decreed by government, for example, for certain kinds of state education, that you have to use open content.

That means that you cannot use certain historical material that was published earlier under a different license. There's a massive, kind of move, which takes many, many years, to try and produce open content for education.

Right? So, to think about, uh, openness, is also to ask about how it can be reproduced, and, how do you institutionalize it? Sure. And, how can this, kind of generosity, how can this outward movement be given more power? And maybe these are some of the questions that, uh, I think we should discuss.

Thank you. Thank you.

I'm, I'm not used to reading, but, um, Dr. Khaled yesterday, talked about, um, his experience of the role of technology, in the archive, and, um, how in its, precise cataloging, and ordering of things, uh, in the conversion from the imprecise analogue, to the digital, uh, has increased modes of surveillance, and served to restrict access, uh, becoming more of a barrier, than realizing, uh, its emancipated, emancipated promise.

Um, I would agree. However, it, it, it is perhaps simplistic to blame bad construction on the hammer that is employed, or blame the microphone for the hate speech that it amplifies. The technology will always be a tool, and today's instantly networked digital technology, with all its promise of instant reproduction and infinite archival, has the potential to amplify greatly.

Um, in the context of the state archive, with the state's inherent tendency towards surveillance, categorization, and strict hierarchical divisions, and policy to exclude that which is not convenient to its nationalist ideal, of course the technology will amplify these tendencies.

We cannot wish this technology away. It will not pass like a bad dream. The minority of your children's growing lives will be archived on Facebook and other digital repositories. Images of you caught on surveillance cameras will be archived on servers somewhere.

The logic driving these archival processes are hidden from view, following the arbitrary logics of their owners.

This hyper-mode of digital archival has a tendency to overwhelm, to make us feel we have no control over its processes, and can cause us to surrender, to wait, to be archived.

It's forbidden.

What would we do if we could become the creators of these tools, and not just users? How might we build them differently? How might we conceptualize modes of archival and actually implement them, if waiting for the archive was no longer an option? Of course, there's a different impulse here than the state archive of various digitization processes that serve to increase hegemonic values.

There is a different impulse through Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.

For me, the question is a bit about process.

Numita has spoken a bit about the legal processes and thinking behind Padma, and of course its practical implementation in terms of a legal license.

I'm going to try and enumerate some of the technological processes and practices that frame the software development aspect of the project.

First, I'd like to read a short poem.

It's called The Zen of Python by Tim Peters, trying to talk about some of the philosophy behind the Python programming language.

Apologies of some of the technical references that are not apparent to all. The Zen of Python by Tim Peters.

Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit.

Simple is better than complex.

Complex is better than complicated.

Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts.

Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules, although practicality beats purity.

Errors should never pass silently, unless explicitly silenced.

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

There should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it. Although that way might not be obvious at first, unless you're Dutch.

Now is better than never, although never is often better than right now.

If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.

Namespaces are one haunting-grade idea, let's do more of those.

I've just wanted to leave Greed that aloud in a crowd of people for a long time.

Coming back to some of the imperatives behind Padma and our open archive.

One, an open archive is as much about open processes as it is about open access.

In practical terms, this translates to all our source code being open, a public mailing list, development activities discussed on a public wiki, not being afraid of putting our mistakes and doubts out there in an iterative fashion.

Two, the data layer and the presentation layer are always separate.

Thus, coming back to one of the theses, the archive is not deducible to the particular form it takes.

It allows for multiple ways of representation and usage in terms of the API structure it offers for other websites to take the data that's on the website and represent it in various ways.

Three, a digital archive does not require things to be put in a single shelf. It does not require a strict hierarchical categorization model. It allows for more open and flexible taxonomies with multiple points of entry.

Four, the best way to preserve material is to give it away.

In digital terms, as a practical implementation, all the video in Padma is offered as storage files, and the best way to have backups is to actually give the material away and then people have a copy of it and read it back at some point and not put it in a centralized server.

Five, there is no canonical truth.

In practical terms, this translates into all the material on Padma being infinitely layerable with layers of text, allowing for infinite amounts of discussion and layering and does not follow a wiki model which aims at kind of a canonical truth.

Two things. Six, the archive is never complete. Since there is no canonical truth, the archive can never be complete. So why wait to put it out there? The same goes for the software. There's no perfect archival model or platform and it is always an iterative process.

There is no need to wait for completeness. Seven, an open web-based archive follows open web standards and uses only non-proprietary code in its making. It does not compromise itself in a rush to be accessed or be accessible to tools that do not support open standards.

The archive is built to last.

Eight, an open archive is open on both ends. Material can be freely accessed, downloaded and reused.

Material can also be freely uploaded, annotated, categorized and contextualized. Nine, and nine, an open archive is hard work. None of this happens by magic. With over 300 hours of fully transcribed video material, around 150,000 layers of annotation and approximately 30,000 lines of source code, there is a significant amount of human labor involved.

There is of course the website, Padma, which we are not going to show or demo because the archive is not really meant to be presented. The archive is meant to be dug through, explored, and I personally prefer browsing a website archive at 2 a.m.

in my pajamas in the comfort of my own home rather than on a projector scene in a conference.

In practical terms, you can find a link to a how-to as well as answers to other technical questions on our wiki. It's wiki.pad.ma, that's w-i-k-i dot p-a-t dot m-a.

And you can use the contact form on our website, you get in touch if you have any questions or difficulties. I just want to say hello. Thank you.

One thing that Pad.ma is really good at is being long. Everyone here who has been in Beirut in April knows what I'm talking about. For how much longer is this session supposed to go on, before we can have a discussion?
collaboration
cooperation
parasite
Transcript based on: Notes on Collaboration

One thing that Padma is really good at is being long. Everyone who's been in Beirut knows what I'm talking about. How much longer is this session including discussion? Yeah, because I think we have, there's so much already of it.

I mean, I've prepared a long, I've prepared a thing, I collected a couple of ideas about collaboration because that seems to be the question for today, towards a collaborative model of knowledge production.

The tagline for this last day of the symposium is "Towards a collaborative model of knowledge production?", and I would like to take a brief look at what this "collaborative model" could be.

I think we have to look at collaboration and find a way to do it. I think we also have to disassemble this term of knowledge production and look a bit more precisely at the functioning of this knowledge production.

I do have the impression we might have to disassemble the concept of "knowledge production" too, but maybe we can still do that later.

But if we have 10 minutes, and since we have a discussion later, a discussion session later on, I think I can carry over a couple of ideas to that session. And if there are questions in the room and if we have 10 minutes, then we should discuss because there's so much that otherwise would be.

I always say 10 minutes, because when I say 10 minutes, people take 10 minutes.

Go ahead, I think, you know, the audience.

My one-line abstract would be that collaboration can be quite a mess, and that we should refuse the temptation to steer the discussion we are having today towards just a happy collaborative ending.

Okay, so let's see. If we would take a look at what the collaborative model could be, then, okay, my one line abstract would be that collaboration can be quite a mess and that we should maybe also for today refuse the temptation to steer the discussion we're having towards purely like happy collaborative ending, if you want.

Florian Schneider
None of these ideas are particularly new or specifically mine, I can point you towards a few theorists of collaboration, and a few texts they have written, but what I wanted to bring to this table is not actually based on readings, but more on observations.

None of my ideas about collaboration are particularly new or specifically mine. I'm pointing towards a couple of theories of collaboration, a few texts they have written. But what I wanted to bring to the table is not based on reading so much more than observations.

First of all, I would have to make a terminological distinction, between collaboration and cooperation. Collaboration and cooperation do not form a simple opposition, but lets for one moment assume that they did.

If we talk about collaboration, we would have to make a terminological distinction between collaboration and cooperation.

Collaboration and cooperation don't form a simple opposition, but that's for one moment assuming that they would be. The distinction is not so much rooted in the terminology of these two terms, but rather in the historical use.

It is a distinction that is not so much rooted in the etymology of these two terms, but rather in their historical use. Since if we want to go towards collaboration, we have to talk about the collaborator, about the figure of the traitor, the one who works with the enemy.

Since if we went towards collaboration, we have to talk about the collaborator. And the collaborator is the figure of the traitor.

It's the person who works with the end.

Because that is what we do. We are not entirely contained within the generosity of our groups, within respect and solidarity. Working together may happen in a surprisingly brusque and not at all generous mode, where the collaborators follow, above all, their own interests and agendas.

Because that's what we do, what we also do. We're not entirely contained within the generosity of our groups, within respect and solidarity. Working together may happen in a surprisingly brusque and not at all generous mode, where the collaborators follow above all their own interests and agendas.

And on the other side, you have cooperation, which is what usually takes place in larger organizations, and often goes by the name of team work: the tightly choreographed and synchronized interaction between specialized units, task forces that, maybe more than anything other, communicate effectively. Plus a variety of procedures and protocols that have been established, like self-monitoring, self-evaluation, etc, in case something should go wrong.

And on the other side, you have cooperation, which usually takes place in, let's say, larger organizations. And often book was by the name of Teamwork. It's typed in for a choreographer. It's synchronized.

It's very much about communicating effectively. And there are a variety of procedures and protocols.

Self-monitoring, self-evaluation, in case something should go wrong.

If you want a simple dichotomy, you have networked collectives on the one side, and "the institution" on the other side. But I do not think this black-and-white opposition will take us very far. To talk about collaboration would be to look at a dark and muddy shade of grey, which I think is much more interesting.

So if you wanted a simple dualism, there would be network collectors on the one side and the institution that appeared yesterday also on the other. But I think it's not that simple in the end. And this black and white opposition wouldn't take us very far.

And what Palma is interested in is looking at this dark shade of grey in between these. Quite a muddy shade of grey.

Collaboration would mean to abandon two ideologies at the same time: both the romantic notion of fair exchanges between equal partners, but also the puritan ethics of abstinence, of keeping your hands clean, and avoiding any contact with your enemies.

And I guess collaboration would mean to abandon two ideologies at the same time, both the romantic notion of fair exchanges between equal partners, but also this kind of puritan ethics of abstinence, keeping your hands clean and avoiding any contact with the person.

And this is why I would propose, as the "model of collaboration", the model of the parasite. The organism that drops onto, and lives inside, another organism. To quote from Michel Serres: "The parasite invents something new. He obtains energy and pays for it in information. He obtains the roast and pays for it with stories... He establishes an unjust pact."
michel serres

And I think if one would want to think about a model of collaboration, I think the model of the figure is the parasite. It's this organism that drops into, obviously, it lives inside another organism.

Michel Serra in his book, The Parasite, says, the parasite invents something new. He obtains energy and pays for it in information. He obtains the roast and pays for it with stories. He establishes an unjust pact.

Between the parasite and the host, you will find an almost entirely abusive constellation. The parasites just sucks. Parasitical collaboration does not look for use value, it looks for abuse-value. But it is precisely this type of abuse that will make the host move, and absorb something new.

So between the parasite and the host, you almost always have an entirely abusive constellation. The parasite just sucks.

Parasitical collaboration doesn't look for use value, it looks for abuse value.

But it's precisely this type of abuse that will make the host move and absorb something new.

And again, lets not draw a too simplistic pretty picture of a world that has hosts on one end, and parasites on the other. The parasite is not binary. As Michel Serres says: "The parasite parasites the parasites." Within collaboration, you are never just the host, and never just parasitical. And this can be quite a mess.
michel serres

And again, let's not draw a too simplistic picture. This is not a world of hoses on one hand and then parasites on the other.

As Michel Serra says, the parasite parasites the parasite.

Within collaboration, you never just host and never just persecut. And this can be quite a mess or at least complicated.

Especially since collaboration itself never appears in pure form. Abusive collaboration, and more bureaucratic cooperation, are not a clear-cut opposition, and there is no dialectics in which they would give way to a third, higher form of working together. Each of these modes requires the other, for its own ends.

Especially since collaboration itself never appears in its pure form. Abusive collaboration and more bureaucratic cooperation are not clear-cut opposition. And there's no dialectics either in which they would give way to a third, higher form of working together.

Each of these notes requires the other for its own ends.

Without a minimum of cooperation, collaboration would rapidly disintegrate. And without a bit of collaboration, cooperative environments would come to a standstill. But the advantage of collaboration is that it can form a parasitical relation to managerial or bureaucratic cooperation. Whereas cooperation usually fails to manage, or integrate, or otherwise neutralize the collaborator.

Without a minimum of cooperation, collaboration would rapidly disintegrate. And without a bit of collaboration, cooperative environments would come to a standstill. But the advantage of collaboration may be that it can form a parasitical relation to managerial or bureaucratic cooperation.

Whereas cooperation usually fails to manage or integrate or otherwise neutralize the collaborator.

Collaboration is sometimes confused with, but distinctively different from, the currently dominant ideology of self-regulating markets. This idea of purely egoistic participants in exchanges, where by the magic of the market, the fittest will survive. Collaboration is not an economy of accumulation, it is not a trade. It is an economy of expenditure.

Collaboration is sometimes confused with, and I think it's also important within the context of this symposium, it's sometimes confused but distinctly different from the current ideology of self-regulating markets.

The idea of purely egoistic participants and exchanges whereby the magic of the market the fittest will always survive. Collaboration is not an economy of accumulation. It's not a trade in that sense.

It's an economy of expenditure.

The need to collaborate arises from specific situations. Sometimes you just cannot be performant, and effective. Not because it is boring. Which it may be. But because you simply cannot do it. There are situations in which you have to form somewhat excessive and unfair collaborations, because their intensity is what makes production possible. And the art is then to find a type of meta-stability that makes them sustainable.

And the need to collaborate arises from specific situations. Sometimes you just can't be performable and effective. Not because it's boring, which it may be, but just because you simply cannot do it and you're working on something else.

There are situations in which you have to form some more excessive and unfair collaborations because their intensity is what makes production possible. And the art then is to find a type of, let's say, meter stability that makes it sustainable.

Collaboration does not shield itself from the affective energy that flows through working together. It taps into destructive energy, in order to produce. The first parasite may steal your ideas, the next one may steal your best friend. None of them will do your bookkeeping, or even the dishes. And at some point, these will have to be done. But at the same time, you may be able live at someone else's expense, to draw resources from other networks or organizations who are willing to open themselves up, even if only temporarily, to this economy of collaboration.

Collaboration does not shield itself from the effective energy that flows through working together. It taps into destructive energy in order to produce. The first parasite you encounter may steal your ideas, the next one may steal your best friend.

None of them will do your bookkeeping or even the dishes.

At some point, bookkeeping and dishes have to be done. But then at the same time, you may be able to live at someone else's expense, to draw resources from other networks or organizations who are willing to open themselves up, even if only temporarily, to this economy of collaboration.

In the context of Pad.ma, none of these considerations are theoretical. They are all entirely practical. You can easily see this by the composition of its producers, a group of groups. We first of all have to collaborate amongst ourselves.

In the context of Parma, none of these considerations are theoretical.

They're all entirely practical.

You can easily see this by the composition of its producers, a group of groups, who first of all have to collaborate amongst ourselves.

0x2620
alternative law forum
majlis
majlis
point of view
With Camp you have an artist collective that has its background in filmmaking, architecture, and software development. To bring these fields together is not trivial. You also have Camp, the space, that draws much of its productivity from the fact that it allows itself to be multi-dysfunctional. Or the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, a lawyer's collective that started as a reading group, but could also, easily, perform the function of a critical film studies department. And I leave it to someone else to describe the various double agendas of 2620, which is Pad.ma's Berlin component. (And then Pad.ma has been founded in collaboration with two more classically cooperative NGOs in Bombay.)

Like with Camp Gale, an artist-productor that has its background in filmmaking, and in architecture, and in software development. To bring these fields together is not trivial.

You also have Camp a space that draws a lot of its productivity from the fact that it allows itself to be multi-dysfunctional.

Or you also need to turn its law from and back to law. Law is, like, that's not as a reading group, but they could just as well be on their way to becoming a thermostat.

And I invited someone else to describe the double agenda of 2620, which is Parma's Berlin for the moment.

And there's various operative organizations around us, with co-founder and Parma's, that we are going to take them. I would, of course, support a co-partner of productive misunderstandings, but it's definitely a spiraling movement around the blind spot that may be its actual core, the individual extraction of services from a variety of shared resources and shared concerns.

I would not go so far to call Pad.ma a productive misunderstanding, but it is definitely a spiraling movement around the blind spot that may be its actual core: the individual extraction of surplus from a variety of shared resources, and shared concerns.

Also see Down and Out in All the Wrong Places (Berlin 2010) - III. Mauerstraße
How do you avoid that everyone falls back into their respective "fields", the artists make art, the software developers develop software, the bookkeepers keep the books, and the frequent flyers travel? What coalitions can you form to prevent these forms of specialization?

Now, how do you avoid that everyone falls back into their respective fields? The artists make art, the software developers develop software, the bookkeepers keep the books, and the frequent liars, etc.

What coalitions do you want to present these forms of specialization? And I guess it's the same when we're talking about collaboration among art-having initiatives. With Parma, we're looking for hope.

And I guess it is the same when we are talking about collaborations among archiving initiatives. With Pad.ma, we are looking for both: hosts, and parasites. You have to talk to Google, to filmmakers, to social activists... at the same time. They are not not going get the same story. You have to push things in directions that can be conflicting, just to get some room to move. It is good to operate within your competence, and with responsibility, but sometimes, you also have to play.

We're looking for hoses, because we need hoses, but we're also looking for parasites. There is this space where you can suck.

So, we have to talk to, let's say, Google and filmmakers and social activists at the same time. We have to use Amazon and art. There's no way around it. And this is not going to be the same story. You have to sometimes push things in directions that can be very conflicting, just to get some room to move.

And I think it's good to operate within your competence.

It's good to operate with responsibility.

But sometimes you also have to claim.

aaaarg
And maybe Pad.ma is not even the best example for a collaborative approach. There will be the session with aaaarg, later today, and maybe there is some resonance. Also, yesterday, there was a bit of desire to talk about Wikileaks. And in case we do, I guess we will meet the parasite, and the collaborator, again.
wikileaks

Maybe Parma is not even the best example for a collaborative approach. We'll have the session with ARC later today, and I hope there's some resonance when it comes to these questions.

And also yesterday there was a bit of desire to talk about, I was surprised to talk about Vicky Leaks here. And in case we do, I'm pretty sure we meet again the parasite and the collaborator.

Thank you. Do you have any questions or comments? Yes, please.

Yes, it's Mark from Arts Collaboratory, so I'm very glad that you could define what collaboration is and what the difference is with cooperation.

I had a question for Namita, and this also refers to the need for repetition, that I didn't really quite understand the legal ramifications and the contractual obligations and agreements that Parma is making with the contributors.

Are you using creative commons as that's the standard that you're using? That's the only thing that you are using? Sorry, I guess that part was a little unclear, which also is like, because we didn't show the website, we didn't show the license on the website, which we can.

So in terms of legal ramifications of this, what we basically have, what we did was to formulate a license, which anybody who is either contributing and especially is using Parma is automatically signs off on, as you do on another website, where you'll need to do a license when you're using the material on it.

So that license is the terms and conditions for using the website, both in terms of contribution and in terms of taking material.

It's not the creative commons license, it is a play with the general public license, it's called the PGL, but it's basically an open content license that we came up with because of various conversations that were happening with filmmakers and artists, and therefore it has certain kind of tweaking, the aspect of different resolution material being available, the fact of how this material is being available on Padma is something that's covered through the technology aspect and through the raw aspect, but maybe it would be better if that's dealt with off this table or so.

Just to complete that thought, the basic idea is that the same material is available, the material is available with the artist or the filmmaker in the original form and what we make available through the website is a relatively high resolution material and it allows for a bundle of rights, but at the same time the filmmaker or the artist can sell their own material in other circuits and other spaces.

Hi, I'm sorry. I have a question regarding to a certain militant approach to archivism, or at least a militant rhetoric, he speaks about surrendering and collaborators, and I kept thinking, wouldn't the true militant archivist act be not to archive, not to accumulate, not to create archives.

where i live, the archive is pirate

It seems to me that you are sort of burning the car and then maybe saying that it actually has a message instead of the message being the message itself, the car is burning.

I'm curious. I'm curious about militancy and archivism. Could you elaborate? I don't know if this was a question, but it's just a curiosity here.

It's surprisingly hard, that question. The acoustics are so...

No, no, sorry, sorry, sorry. No, I mean, what can you say, like there's a couple of, there's a proverb, good archives copy, great archives steal. Of course, yeah, no, sure. I mean, I think it would be, it would be, unfair to reduce, and it never occurred to me that there was something militant about it, actually.

No, there's urgency in it, of course, like there's urgency in it. There's stuff that leaks out of it. There's stuff that...

No, but militant? I mean, you have to deal with the world around you. You have to, I mean, you... The archive is in crisis, the traditional archive is in crisis, and the kind of the environment, the ecosystem, if you want, in which Padma operates is also that kind of, it's crisis, of course, and you have to...

You're not in this vacuum where you can just restore all the old stuff, you know? Sorry, but I don't even understand your question, or what you were trying to assert.

My understanding is actually that militants, and militant groups archive extremely well.

They do it for internal reasons, and accumulating knowledge and experience.

But some of the best archives I've seen are the archives of militant groups. It's not true that they're trying to destroy it against...

So maybe we should clarify...

It's actually a wish to elaborate on militant.

Un-militant rhetorics compared to the whole idea of archiving.

And I think that there's a pirate, there's a Jolly Roger on one of the computers up there.

where he lives, there is a blind spot

There's a presence of piracy, and of terrorism, and there's a rhetoric of Ten Commandments, and there is this whole rhetoric surrounding this, this archiving, and I think it's very interesting. And I'm not saying that, I'm not saying that, I'm not saying this as a critique, I think.

I think it's a very crucial point.

And I think there's something crucial about the Black Pandas claiming that they wanted to carry arms because of the American Constitution when they were struggling with the American Constitution. And there is something in legacy, like speaking about legal terms as they were truth, while battling them.

And that's my curiosity. I don't think it's a straight-up question, but it's something that I thought of listening to you guys.

Apart from all that, you also don't watch some issues.

No, I mean, you definitely hit a very nice flying spot, apparently, and let's talk, I mean, it's true. Well, I mean, in terms of the pirates, I don't know where you live, but where I live, the archive is pirate.

The basic nature of it. And so, there is no contradiction.

There is no contradiction between certain kinds of investigation of what lies beyond the property idea that is given to you and the idea of the archive, right? There is no contradiction. So, the archive is a kind of thing, fundamentally.

Although historically, nobody owned the archive. It was collected, stole, borrowed, kept.

But, you know, this is not the question of the world. It's the question of exactly what the archive has already been, right? And trying to push that into a further movement or into a logic that can sustain it.

Yes, M.G. had a question.

That's more of a comment, but do you think it's true, Ashik, that in a way, Padma was initiated as inherently like a critique of the archive? Because maybe if you talked about the start, the foundations of Padma, like the questions it was grappling with in the context that it was grappling with, it would be more clear to people that it's not against the archive, it's kind of using and critiquing simultaneously.

As I understand.

But, there are different founding points.

One of them, one of them was that there is an existing, there are many existing archives in Padma, right? And this is not, I'm not talking about a lot of other conversations that I have. Before this, I'm giving you this one starting point as an example.

So, there are many attempts to make this archive public, right? I mean, it's kind of a kind of line that yes, we have to make this system. But how? And with what kind of statutes? With what money? And a lot of this, you know, there's a tradition in India, I think, of making films, for example, with money from development funds, from animal husbandry, from poultry, you know, from money you get from other places.

I mean, there are vast numbers of, there's vast kinds of production that is done in the room of other things. And now this material sits, very interesting material at times, sits without any other line.

So, one of the organizations who provoked Padma's kind of inception in a way was a large organization, which is part legal, part cultural, which had a vast archive of material from both Bombay and Kashmir.

And they had an archive, which was an offline archive, sitting in their office for a couple of years, and they were not able to figure out a way to use it. They tried to invite people to it, they tried to post events, exhibitions, etc.

around it.

But the basic, so, that's what happened. We had, I mean, a few hundred hours of their material, which we felt was very valuable, and that was one of the starting points for any moment. So, it's in a way very straightforward, and that story is common here as well.

And it's a question, I think, of what we can bring together, or what the leaders, what all the properties of this intervention are, which makes it, which makes it, where we can start to have a discussion really about what distinguishes this form of openness or access from another.

Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions? Thank you.

Thank you. Any other questions? Yes, you see.

Sorry, I have to... Yes.

I have to react to your talk or your usage of Calpnet in your presentation, which I found slightly shocking in the current context, you know, the point for which you used Calpnet's website, it was very obvious, we all know this, and I must say I found it very facile.

So, you probably think that you used that website to illustrate a sort of very simple and superficial showcasing of materials on the part of state institutions, but to me, it was very disappointing in the sense that you refused to understand how institutions work in the local context, and that there are people within these institutions who actually tried to change it off for a good context.

So, that, like, surprised me, I thought it was counterproductive, your presentation. It did not actually critique your understanding of how real life actually operates in Egypt, for instance. State.

No, no, no, no, no. Within which context people actually operate in this country who try to change or provide different contexts? No, I understand. I acknowledge that I know nothing about it. I came here by the way.

I made that clear. Yeah. Well, that doesn't take away from the fact that it exists. You've been to Calpnet, yes? I assume.

You should. I mean, it's a, I mean, it's a massive institution. We work with institutions all the time. I'm not critiquing an individual person who works there. In fact, we, anyway, the point is that life isn't a spiral ramp, right? It's, it's not necessarily the mode of representation exists, and we have rights to talk about it, right? Irrespective of n number of justifications we can use to say that the designer was, you know, was sleepy that day or, you know, we could say a number of things, right? But it exists.

It nevertheless exists. It was passed. It is representative of a certain managerial ethos within the organization, which we must, we must, and you must more than we, uh... But we all know this managerial ethos.

We all know, we all know that this is a project of the Ministry of Culture to showcase Egypt's heritage. Yes, ma'am. We all know that this is hugely problematic. Yes, ma'am. But why did you say anything yesterday? This is not the question.

This is not the question. Because it's a non-stop because we all know this. But showing... The whole point was, what you can do with this? How can you go beyond that? Yes, of course.

Of course. The question, what has to be asked at every level? It has to be asked at the level of the room in which a million dollars are spent, right, to produce a certain showcase. It has to be asked at all these levels, right? And why didn't anybody say this yesterday? If we knew this, is it a silent knowledge of all? Because we didn't feel the need to.

I mean, this is not so much a... I mean, it would be a bit flat if you made this a Padma versus Kalman kind of thing.

Strangely enough, Kalman was one of the very, very few institutions in Cairo who actually came to the Padma workshop with concrete contributions and questions. It's not about that. Precisely. But I mean, this is...

This is...

We could also talk about... I mean, this is... There's a... There's a... There's a... There's kind of a limit to exhibition value if you want. It's this display...

It's this celebration of accessibility that in itself prevents access. And this was just taken as... This was an illustration for that. It's not so much about... It was just to... We've all... We've all produced these things.

Kind of.

We...

We... We're always kind of at this edge of...

Of... Producing this type of exhibition structure that is so much farther than its own kind of visual image. And I want to just quickly say something. We were talking about this last night. I don't think it's a combat versus Padma.

I think it's state and institutions versus YouTube.

We were giving an example yesterday of whether it was good that Rotana bought the film archive from the Egyptian government. It is good because they broadcasted it and then people recorded the broadcast and then they uploaded to YouTube.

If I want to find something like an old film from the fifties, I now go to YouTube. I don't... I don't even think about...

That the state would provide this film for me either now or five years ago.

And I think this is where the discussion is. Yes.

The other person here. Annika.

I'm wondering if maybe we can return to the spiral grand just briefly and consider it in another way. And that is, of course, in this audience we have a lot of people who are collecting material that we imagine will become an archive.

And so there's been this discussion about what grounds material may be surrendered to us. And there's an understanding that whether we can legalize it or not, and surely you cannot, the expectation is the person giving the material over has a deep investment in the spiral grand model, meaning the perfect transparency of the display technology and the effective power of the image that enters into that particular space.

So I've spent a little bit of time on the Padma site and I really appreciate the use of video and this idea that we can somehow code video in a way where the original...

that the technology somehow becomes a copy that has more free use. But in terms of this more physical material, how do you see this sort of sense of obligation to agency, desire on the person surrendering their material to appear in a certain matching of the spiral grand and a sense of what images can do from memory? And in a case like Padma, how do you cross this sense of what's expected of the material versus what can be done with the material? I think Sanj mentioned that Padma is one, even for the material that's in Padma, this interface does not limit other websites using the material on Padma on Padma and its annotations in any display format you choose.

So you can use Padma material on the full screen on your website or in your classroom or in any other form you choose. So the archive, this is only one instance of the possible interfaces that Padma would have.

It's designed in that way. And so other websites or other participants in the archive can and should use the material displayed in any form you choose. So it's not limited to what you see here.

Just to quickly follow up, I mean I'm totally convinced by the idea that circulation is the best way to preserve material. But the idea is that there are other expectations for what an archive might do.

So this feeling of militancy or somehow crossing a boundary seems to come from a sense that digitizing and commenting in deep annotations might be some sort of violence to the sense of what an archive responsibility is at the point of a person surrendering a person in it.

What kind of violence? I mean we can talk about it. Well it doesn't seem to respect the item in the way that sort of socially were produced to understand an archive respecting an item.

The museal encounter versus a digital grey background, densely annotated, busy interface with an item.

Can I just give a short response? This kind of reminds me of this workshop we did in Panama where I live where a lot of artists who wanted to give the material into Padma were concerned about the fact that it looked very different from how it would have looked like when they exhibited it, which I think kind of correlates to what you're saying.

How do you want to see the material that you're getting into an archive? Now there are various levels at which it can be answered. One is that you can easily download the material and put it into your own ways of looking and seeing it, however you're comfortable with it.

But there are also various ways in which Sanjay has been working on how different ways in which it can be looked at or different ways in which it can be seen. But at the same time, I think this is part of an ongoing conversation that we have with everyone.

And yeah, there may be ideas that people have about how the material should be seen, but it is also interesting how many people desire annotation and how many people want for the material to be alive in certain ways and annotation allows for, or descriptions of transcription and keyword, which allows it to be searched and found, allows for something else to happen with it as well.

So one doesn't necessarily only have to look at what the design might be, which might be exhibition, but it could be. So that's the conversation, right? So find out.

Mirena Arsani is at a question about Celine. Hi. I had a question regarding the archival impulse within the legal frame. And maybe I'm trying to bridge between different realms, like the institutional realm, let's say the researcher or the Padma interface.

And I was thinking, and maybe this is not a question directly addressed to you, but is there a way that institutions sort of translate that legal negotiation in a more sort of public way, so as to understand what intimacy means and what it means to back intimacy and what are the relations sort of regulating archive donations or archival research within an institutional framework? So is there a way to have public conversations on legal agreements and institutional framework? So is there a way to have public conversations on legal agreements and institutional framework? And then my second question also relates to the law.

And I just question how do you reconcile this sort of archival impulse within an legal framework and the unjust pact that Sebastian was referring to? So do you have to think about other ways of thinking the law in that sort of collaboration? Does it raise this question as to how to negotiate a legal discourse around the archival? I think the idea about public conversations is kind of, it would, I think it's also part of the reason why we choose to do a lot of our collection of workshops and this whole idea of creating a social context where you have a discussion around something where challenges are made and questions are raised and it's not just a presentation after which nothing happens and nothing is said.

And that allows for something to happen. Like I remember the Beirut workshop was exceptional precisely because of the ways in which very difficult conversations are made and in different ways.

So the archival impulse, the archival impulse, the legal framework and the unjust collaboration, I think it is in some ways what we're doing is parasiting on an idea of how the law would work or does work in terms of intellectual property.

There is ways in which one can challenge it and use open content licenses in a different sort of way. But we're kind of parasiting on a certain idea.

But yeah, I'm getting kind of maybe not really thought to respond to many things.

So we've already had a question.

Then we're going to take a break at the discussion. Okay. I just don't want to be too late in the program.

Let's see.

Well, let's see how much this takes. It's not really a question.

It's more common about this idea of violence to the culture, which I think is really important actually.

There's something about, I mean, we had a very good lecture by Beatrice about this. There's something about how your website appears that maybe for some people it is rather violence. But we have to remember something quite important.

It's not in the archive or in the museum that there's such a thing as neutral modes of display. Nothing of that is neutral. We know that all these modes of display are completely embedded in ideologies and power systems.

It's just that we are used to them, so we don't see them anymore. And so there's a certain kind of blindness towards all these embedded ideologies, which is that when we look at this, we feel that it does violence to the material.

Whereas the only thing that I think you're trying to do and that we have to actually do in relationship to the work that we're discussing here is maximum transparency. And I don't mean that in any kind of naive, modernistic way.

I just mean explaining where the material comes from, how it got there, how it's treated, where the original might be, and who the people involved are. And I think we can't be somehow naive or reactive towards this kind of display.

Right? Yeah, again, Todd? Well I think that it looked for me this is a workshop, as well, last week.

And for me and maybe some short question that I kind of keep asking, like, how come I can kind of come in here with these collective agreements that there needs to be a visible archive? We can't hear you.

Oh.

Yeah. OK. So I find that we kind of all enter into the collective agreement that there needs to be a visible archive and that we need to illuminate all of these things that are kind of dark or missing and I wonder why it would be, you know, immediately coming here with us to go and like not question it in the, you know, that's one thing.

And then also I feel like that maybe comes off based on the idea of an archive existing in a position, sorry, I'm asking you better, but exist in a position to question state law, right? Or let's say like a stable law and like a pirate archive kind of plays with it.

Like there's a discourse that kind of happens or whatever, an alternative archive of some kind is having discourse with something else and then moving it. But in a situation like here where state law and archives kind of operate in a pirate form and are completely unstable in and of themselves, it kind of, I kind of question how then, like, what kind of strategies one needs to find? And, you know, perhaps it's about sort of, I mean, yeah, like swimming and flying, or I don't know what it is, but kind of finding some other kind of strategy.

And perhaps it's sort of this parapsysical strategy of one kind, but how does that kind of exist kind of exist also outside of the planet? I do think it's like, I don't know.

It was a comment. No, or did you want some? Okay.

I just, I question it just a little bit.

I don't know if you want to respond or just because I have to kind of keep up, keep time. Maybe we can, and I want to leave time for Sean who has his presentation coming up.

Maybe do you want to, do you feel compelled to respond something now or? No, I can open. Okay, so let's take a brief five minute break and then return here.

Yes, thank you. 12 for 35. Thanks.

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