Keynote- Radical Archives Conference: Archives and Ethics

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Shaina Anand is a filmmaker and artist, co-founder of CAMP, a collaborative studio based in Bombay that combines film, video, installation, software, open-access archives and public programming with broad interests in technology, film and theory. CAMP are co-initiators of the online footage archive Pad.ma and the cinema archive indiancine.ma. Pad.ma is a web-based video platform and software that offers a practical technical and legal framework through which video footage can be shared, cited and reused. Pad.ma proposes that film and video-based "production" can be thought of as an expanded field of activity. For example, as a filmmaker publishing video that is not a film, a researcher probing documentary images, a film editor organizing footage using the archive, a writer commenting on one or many video pieces, an artist working online, or an institution offering material for public use. Pad.ma as an interpretative archive encourages recirculation and debate around material that is often easily forgotten. It was launched as a public website in 2008 and is a collaboration between members of CAMP, Alternative Law Forum and 0x2620.org. In 2013 this group announced indiancine.ma, which aims to act as an online encyclopedia for Indian cinema.

Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh introducing Shaina Anand

We are so thrilled to have Shaina Anand with us today and she did in fact come all the way from India although we partnered with a lot of other people to also bring her over to this part of the world.

Shaina is an artist and a brilliant one and part of the collective camp and Ashok Sukumaran who's also part of camp is also here today although Shaina will be speaking to us primarily about her work with Padma and I'm especially excited about that because I also have been working with Padma and with Shaina and with Ashok on a project the African Film Online Archive as part of Padma.

Padma is a web-based video platform and software they offer a practical technical and legal framework through which video footage can be shared cited and reused. I'm not going to say any more because I want to leave Shaina as much time as possible to talk to you.

And their work has been shown locally and in many places including most recently with Mariam.

Shaina Anand's keynote on Archives and Ethics at the Radical Archives Conference, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, in April 2014. Organised by Chitra Ganesh And Marian Ghani (Index of the disappeared)

Shaina Anand is a filmmaker and artist, co-founder of CAMP, a collaborative studio based in Bombay that combines film, video, installation, software, open-access archives and public programming with broad interests in technology, film and theory. CAMP are co-initiators of the online footage archive Pad.ma and the cinema archive indiancine.ma. Pad.ma is a web-based video platform and software that offers a practical technical and legal framework through which video footage can be shared, cited and reused. Pad.ma proposes that film and video-based "production" can be thought of as an expanded field of activity. For example, as a filmmaker publishing video that is not a film, a researcher probing documentary images, a film editor organizing footage using the archive, a writer commenting on one or many video pieces, an artist working online, or an institution offering material for public use. Pad.ma as an interpretative archive encourages recirculation and debate around material that is often easily forgotten. It was launched as a public website in 2008 and is a collaboration between members of CAMP, Alternative Law Forum and 0x2620.org. In 2013 this group announced https://indiancine.ma, which aims to act as an online encyclopedia for Indian cinema.

Thanks Mariam and Chitra for having me here. I was just thinking about when I met Chitra and it was 1998 so that's 16 years in the spring of 98 and I've had the good fortune of collaborating and working closely with Mariam in the last two years and personally quite looking forward to see their newest iteration of the index of the disappeared.

Jack spoke about the spirit of the archive in that it should be a place of radical and critical generosity and I think you pretty much stole my line. Maybe I don't have to give a keynote on the ethics.

I mean there's this spirit of an archive is something quite important and relevant to what I'm going to say as well. So I'm going to base this talk on a set of practical experiences that ate friends and co-workers, artists, lawyers, coders, hackers, activists and filmmakers had while conceptualizing, developing and running an open source online archive of video based out of India.

“ Ethos [ἔθοζ] as “Habit” and Êthos [ἦθοζ] as “Character”: What Are Ethics? Two competing nouns developed in Greek from eiôtha [εἴωθα], “I am in the habit of” ( Sanskrit svada-, “character, penchant, habit”; cf. Latin suesco, with probably the same root *swedh- as ethnos, a “people” ): ethos [ἔθοϛ] and êthos [ἦθοϛ]. Both have the same original meaning, “custom,” but they evolved in different ways. Ethos came to mean “habit, custom, usage” and refers, for example, to “the custom of the city [ethos tês poleôs ( ἔθοϛ τῆϛ πόλεωϛ )]” ( Thucydides 2.64 ); ethei [ἔθει] is thus opposed to phusei [φύσει], “by nature” ( ”“and êthos [ἦθοϛ]. Both have the same original meaning, “custom,” but they evolved in different ways. Ethos came to mean “habit, custom, usage” and refers, for example, to “the custom of the city [ethos tês poleôs ( ἔθοϛ τῆϛ πόλεωϛ )]” ( Thucydides 2.64 ); ethei [ἔθει] is thus opposed to phusei [φύσει], “by nature” ( so Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics 10.9, 1179b20ff., contrasts the doctrines of those who think we are good “by nature, by habit, by teaching,” cf. 1154a33 ). Êthos, with an eta [η], refers first in the plural to the places where animals and men habitually stay ( “The familiar places and the horses’ pasture [ἤθεα ϰαὶ νομόν],” Iliad 6.511 ), and in the singular, to one’s habitual way of being, or disposition, or nature.”

Excerpt From Dictionary of Untranslatables Wood, Michael, Apter, Emily, Cassin, Barbara, Lezra, Jacques This material may be protected by copyright.

Ethics comes from the Greek word ethos which means character. Ethos with an eta in plural also refers to a habitual place for dwelling or an abode. Ethos with an eta in the singular refers to one's habitual way of being, disposition or nature.

The interplay between ethos habitual place or habitual way and ethos character is anchored in practice, in the virtues of practice or of doing, in the techne or the know-how. For things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

Dancers become dancers by dancing, painters by painting, archivists by archiving. When we got together in 2007 to build an archive by building an archive, a simultaneous, collaborative and wonderfully adulterous process that turned lawyers into filmmakers and film scholars, artists into coders, filmmakers into pirates and all of us into archivists of sorts, we asked and defined for ourselves what the character of this archive could be, what could be its ethos.

As a first, and because some of us, myself included, come from film and documentary practices, we looked at the ethos of filmmaking, its habits, customs and usages.

Itself a highly collaborative form of working, the foundations of documentary filmmaking lie in the triangular relationships between subjects, authors and technique, and the ethics that comes into play as these forces act against each other.

This could be seen as stage one in the process of filmmaking, the moment of capture of images.

Stage two usually involves the process of preservation and preparation. Digitizing, logging, transcribing, research and note making, marginalia and scripting. A lot of text, numbers and XML get added to the video material.

A final or third stage that often could be a long while in the making is the finished film.

But that need not be its only destiny. The first characteristic of Padma was that it would be an archive of footage, not finished films. That the film was not a whole, but a part of something larger.

And we know this from shooting ratios. I mean, one is to 50 is an average these days. One is to 100. We work with one is to 250 sometimes.

And that the footage could be given as much care as the finished film. That the inside of the film should be as beautiful and as political as the outside.

And what would that mean to look back at the footage with ethos? And that this footage should live in travel and not terminate with the final cut.

Padma expands, as you will soon see, stage two. The processional stage of working with footage. It allows for text to be layered alongside the image as time-based annotations. It throws open the usage of the film and makes porous the boundaries between maker, researcher, camera person, viewer, etc.

The second character of Padma was that its plural ethos, the habitual place for dwelling, the abode, in the digital contemporary, had to be not in a fortress or secret vault or members only building, nor in a shoe box under your bed or backed up by your raid drive only, but on the internet.

And not in some proprietary cloud, but in a true commons. The archive would have to reckon with the ethos of the internet. And in doing so, it would be a formal invention. A specific open source, non-proprietal form down from the code, down from all the code and codecs to the licenses and texts, to the licenses and texts and moving images.

It would draw upon habits of internet use, but create its own ethos of giving, sharing, streaming, downloading, uploading, tagging, self-publishing, crowdsourcing. Pushing for something beyond YouTube, formally new and challenging, open-ended and always radical and complete.

And third ethos, the singular ethos of the contributor, was imagined by us as the figure of the video practitioner, who was personally and politically motivated to make films independently. In India, in the two decades of film being digital, we had quite an engaged scene.

And also a recent history of collective action, that we hoped was one that would align with that of the archive. Born as we were, from the same history, from that shared, from that same shared collectivity.

And I'll just give you a brief note of this history, because it's really important.

And, can we get Chrome up here? Yep.

So, So, brief note on this sort of historical background from where Padma came from.

Roughly two decades of being digital, when we had a robust community of documentary filmmakers, politically on the left.

In 2004, when we had the Hindu right-wing coalition in power, 12 filmmakers withdrew their film from the myth, the Mumbai International Film Festival, in solidarity with other filmmakers, some rather well-known ones whose films were not programmed, as there was censorship by way of pre-selection.

Basically, the jury didn't include a number of films that were submitted to that festival. And this was a very obvious kind of pre-censorship, censorship by way of pre-selection.

So, when these 12 filmmakers withdrew, the boycott spread, and a parallel film festival was organized in the CPIM headquarters, the Communist Party of India headquarters, across the street. Campaign Against Censorship and Vikalp, Films for Freedom, were the twin movements that came out of this moment.

Padma, in many ways, was a response to some of the questions at stake. And yet, back then, when we started Padma, it was these filmmakers themselves who had some anxiety. You know, the ones who were talking about films for freedom.

They were the same ones who had a lot of anxiety about the freedom.

And this is interesting, right? Filmmakers work collaboratively. They work with subjects. And yet, they have this kind of very strange proprietal ownership over their material. And this proprietal one is not necessarily monetary or about the property itself.

They often say things, and we've all heard this, we often say it too, that I've taken a while to build this trust with my filmmakers, with the subjects. They spoke to me because they trust me.

When I edit this stuff and sculpt it into a film, I will do certain things and shape its politics. But I'm not sure the footage can be, you know, shared with others in that sense.

So filmmakers privileged themselves as being the owners, the custodians of their subjects' images. The filmmakers said things that were said to them in trust. That they had built deep relationships with their subjects.

How could they set this material free? It wasn't ethical. Overcoming this proprietal ethos was, and still is, a challenge. And we continue to have conversations with filmmakers about their responsibilities.

And we began, I mean, this is an ongoing thing. It has changed. You know, this anxiety that we began with in 2007 is totally different in 2017. But, I mean, my point here is that one has to think beyond these issues.

And we've been thinking a lot about them, and I just want to pull out an early pre-Padma moment. It's actually a talk that says, Archive Fever and the Delirium of Copyright. It's a workshop we ourselves had organized as a conceptual framework to think of what Padma would look like.

And it wasn't ironical, but the title of this workshop in November 2007 was Archive Access and Anxiety. But here's a short clip by Laurence Liang. Also one of the, he's a co-founder of Alternative Law Forum, but he's also one of the founding members of Padma.

And I hope we have baggage to play. For a director, ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Now this is very strange, because Marx had told us that commodity fetishism was about the, you know, kind of erasure of social relations to the act of production.

But Benjamin suddenly talking about this in terms of intimacy.

Connecting is a way of telling and transmitting experience through objects. Another statement. And the final one is the collector's attitude to his possessions stems from an older sense of responsibility towards his property.

And three very interesting kind of clues that I want to kind of connect. Because what it seems to suggest to us is the possibility of thinking of intimacy as a way of rethinking ownership.

And thinking of ownership via the terms of relational proximity rather than exclusion. Relational proximity in terms of how close you are.

Relational proximity to the other people and the other people.

Maybe it will wake up. Maybe it will wake up.

Can you read the text instead? Because it's also transcribed. Or should I read it out? Or I'll read the text out? Stends from an older sense of responsibility towards this property.

I think a very interesting kind of clues that I want to kind of connect. Because what it seems to suggest to us is the possibility of thinking of intimacy as a way of rethinking ownership, and thinking of ownership via the terms of relational proximity rather than exclusion.

Relational proximity in terms of how close you are to an object, in terms of how you relate to the object itself, as a way of completely reverting it. So I come to my own, you know, crude attempt of translating myself and my own.

But I try to translate my own into Nindi, the closest that I tend to a grey atmi.

Where apnaabhan does not refer merely to an act of exclusion, but to an act of relationality, or an act of closeness, or a proximity.

In other words, a relational proximity.

So if you were to consider, for example, these three statements, this is my pen.

An act, an assertion of exclusive ownership. The pen belongs to me, and to no one else.

So when you think of relational proximity, and you were to try to translate it, you would not say this is my mother as I own her, right? Or this is my friend as I own him or her. So when you say this is my friend, you're really talking about an apnaabhan, or an ownness, a feeling of an ownness, which is not a feeling of ownership.

Why do you feel that someone is your own, or the name of me, because of a proximity that you may have to him or her, rather than the fact that you own him or her? The problem I would pose of the contemporary is that the language of intellectual property and the language of copyright attempts to convert the relational proximity to an act of exclusive ownership.

So if you were to consider the third statement, this is my poem. Intellectual property believes that this is my poem, the same as this is my pen. So in other words, it collapses within the logic of the commodity form, whereas in actuality it might be closer to this is my friend.

So one can feel extremely possessive about one's poem, or about one's image, or about one's song, but does it necessarily then mean that one has exclusive ownership about that image? What are...

So for those who...

Is there any Hindi speaker here? But mere apne is... If you look at it in English, it's a bit of an oxymoron, but it's hard to translate it, but it essentially means my own, but the own is never used to say my own pen, but my own friends, mere apne dost, mere apne maa, my own mother.

So this is where he's talking about apna pan as own-ness.

I'll just preload this so we don't have to wait.

I'll read now from a collectively authored text by Padma that was written in Beirut in 2010 in another one of these conceptual discursive workshops where we thought through questions of the archive.

That workshop was called Don't Wait for the Archive, and one of the texts written was Ted Thesis of the Archive, and thesis number nine was something Mariam and me discussed when she was inviting us to speak on the panel of Archive and Ethics.

Archives are governed by the laws of intellectual property... Archives are governed by the laws of intellectual propriety as opposed to property. Beyond the status of the archive as property, lie the properties of the archive, which can destabilize and complicate received notions of rights.

They establish their own codes of conduct, frame their own rules of access, and develop an ethics of the archive, which are beyond the scope of legal imagination. If the archive is a scene of invention, then what norms do they develop for themselves, which do not take for granted a predetermined language of rights? How do practices of archiving destabilize ideas of property, while at the same time remaining stubbornly insistent on questions of propriety? Intellectual propriety does not establish any universal rule on how archives collect and make available their artifacts.

It recognizes that the archivists play a dual role, that they act as the trustees of the memories of other people, and as the transmitters of public knowledge. This schizophrenic impulse prevents any easy settling into a single norm.

Propriety does not name a set of legislated principles or proper etiquette. Instead, it builds on the care and responsibility that archivists display in their preservation of cultural and historical objects.

The digital archive translates this ethic of care into an understanding of the ecology of knowledge and the modes through which such an ecology is sustained through a logic of distribution rather than accumulation.

It remembers the history of archivists being described as pirates and scans its own records, files, and databases to produce an account of itself. In declaring their autonomy, archives seek to produce norms beyond normativity and ethical claims beyond the law.

So here's Sebastian Lodgert, another founding member of Padma.

And since I'm the only one on stage here, I really need to acknowledge other people and have them speak for themselves.

This isn't transcribed, so we can actually...

There are basically simplifications to laws...

that govern this world of digital data exchange. That's Moore's law and Murphy's law.

Moore's law in its most vulgar form says everything becomes twice as cheap, twice as fast, twice as big, whatever, every 18 months.

And Murphy's law in its original form says whatever can theoretically go wrong will eventually go wrong. And in his special case, it just means every bit of copyrighted material will eventually be copied illegally.

These are kind of fundamental laws of the information age.

And it's historically a relative, very new situation. And I think it should not be feared, but rather embraced.

But there is a lot of anxiety, always. Also, it doesn't really depend on where you go. You would find it in all kinds of different types of contexts.

And the question of... The issue of anxiety brings us to the question of the rights.

And the management, which has become so fashionable of rights. The goal of digital rights management, which is the big term... The umbrella on top of all these attempts to make bits, keep numbers secret and make bits behave differently.

The goal of digital rights management is basically to suspend the fundamental laws of information. As such, actually, rights management is just a fancy new name for plain old censorship.

In the context of cinema, rights management is an attempt to end its history once and for all. To transform cinema into the art of making sure that nothing can be seen. Making sure that nothing can be copied.

That this DVD doesn't work on this computer, operation or permitted. That this download will expire in two days. That this film won't run on a digital screen. That this archive will be lost. Encoded in proprietary, unreadable formats.

Gone. Forever.

And this doesn't just affect the archivist or the so-called consumer.

But also the producer, the director.

You need to sign contracts before you can make an interview. You can't use certain footage because it's unclear who shot it. Or you can't film this building. Because the architecture holds a copyright to its visual features.

And it seems as if, in a way, the world of rights management takes, like, the most concept of the spectacle and then even escalates it further. It's not just what you see is what exists. And what exists is good.

But now it is even what you see is what your rights are.

And these rights are good. And I think at this very point, I think, digital practices of the digital and the practice of cinema.

The important line.

There are basically, in two days, that this will...

Because the architecture holds a copyright to its visual features.

And it seems as if, in a way, the world of rights management takes, like, the divorce concept of the spectacle and then even escalates it further. It's not just what you see is what exists and what exists is good.

But now it is even what you see is what your rights are.

And these rights are good. And I think at this very point, I think, digital practices of the digital and the practice of cinema have to team up, have to form some sort of coalition. And that's also what, in the end, PADNOG may be about, in a way.

It may be part of a larger effort to help images escape from the realm of morality and rights and to make them enter, again, the domain of politics. Because in the end, all these so-called moral or legal problems of cinema, or making video, what am I allowed to film, what am I entitled to screen, are a matter of politics.

The image of this kid.

So, as a first-time user, I guess you know that we've been inside PADMA. And this is our way of remembering things, lest we change our own ethics at some point. So, we archive and make, oh, the screen resolution makes PADMA look quite strange.

It's harder to read and it's breaking up.

Yeah, it's still breaking up.

Anyway. So, as a first-time user, if I can see my search bar.

Maybe we'll have to skip the, I wanted to do a short, some sort of a demo, but I can't see my search.

Let's go here and see.

This is so frustrating.

Oh, well. Let's not go into that. I was just going to do a really crude, basic search. We can maybe try to do it from the homepage.

It's just a resolution that's crunching a lot of the fields in PADMA. It looks much, it doesn't look this way.

Let's just try here. So, I was just going to do a very preliminary, unsophisticated and direct way of entering an archive. We're searching for a word.

And even though it doesn't show up there, that's the bug. Like, it's not displaying what we're searching.

It's found some 90 videos, right? This is just doing a search. And let's see.

So, there's the word. Yeah? It's actually unethical. And let's listen to what's going to say. It's just a day of practice, It's and a combining integrity.

And the country between Serie 2. So the word, the search was not in a full transcript, but it appeared in what's called an annotation layer. And this is one of the key features or properties of Padma, which is that it follows the same logic of time coding and logging that we use when we make films, or SRT, the subtitle tracks, that put text over image to time code.

So that word there was over this span, and again, we're having a display problem, but you would see the time codes here. But I won't go into the text stuff, it's online, you can see it, but you can see that the full text search happens only because there's immense labor and care gone into the material, right? This is not just tagging and saying, ah, ethic tag or something.

Also, this is an interpretative archive, which means different points of view can jostle. You could go in and layer and, you know, debate with, have some kind of discursive dialogue with the material.

This was really important in terms of thinking of the ethos and the property of the archive. Do we want it to be flat and canonical, which means the author does the first level of annotation or some expert? Or do we want the wiki model that says, I do it and Mariam betters it and Jason can make it even better? Or do we want, like, the multitudes of opinions to rub against each other? And of course, we chose to do that.

It's really easy to add layers and annotations and so on, but let's go back to our search and see. I'm just using the search to, that was a revival of an ancient form of Persian storytelling, like the play that was being done was Das Thani Sedition, which was a play against, talking about Binayak Sen's arrest.

Let's see what ethics mean. Yeah.

So here it appears in a transcript.

I understand what I'm saying, that if I have said you're speculations, then you have the right to carry this to me. But when I'm saying it is wrong, then you are going too far.

See, she didn't know which one I thought it was because I was going too far.

So there it appears as a, in a transcript and not as an annotation. Some places it may appear as keywords, here I guess it'll appear as translation because this is Arabic.

This is footage from a film camp made in occupied Palestine, in the city of Jerusalem.

I won't play all of this, but here it's a translation from Arabic, but there's the word ethics that comes up. I think it comes up in a couple of places in that footage.

And you see what I mean, the span where this is. And these things can be cited. If I want to send you this notation or this citation, all I do is double click on it, highlight the span, and this is the link that is sort of like the permanent citation for this bit of text.

And this will not change.

I mean, the text may be modified if the person who contributed it went and changed it. But that link then becomes something that can be cited academically, can be referred to, can be embedded into other places, into blogs and stuff.

Mariam wrote an essay for the New York Review of Books where she actually embedded clips in this way from the Afghan film archive that we were working with.

So, I mentioned that we were, that the archive is primarily about footage and not finished films. And this morning I received, we received a really nice email from a collective called the Uramini project.

And they've been contributing material to Padma. I just want to, it's net timing out, it's not fun.

But I just wanted to show you different clusters of footage.

But while it loads, I just, so Uramini project is a group that's been traveling through India, looking at the rhythms of work and leisure through rural India. And what's interesting about that process is all the footage as they travel goes up into the archive.

And it's only now that they're working on that final cut of the film.

There's another contributor, I just, I just forget this, it's getting too, too laborious. Maybe when I'm done with, yeah, I'm sorry, this is just a resolution thing.

It should have been shown here.

So that's an example of, you know, like close to 94 different bits of footage, very long pieces. Then they travel through India, going up in Padma. Their travel logs and their diaries get published as essays.

And then it's going to be a while before they actually come. They're working on it now before they take it out to craft their own film, right? But it's already logged. It's already been shared. It's already made public.

And, you know, Langlois said films need to be like Persian carpets. They should be walked upon. And so there are already people, and he also said the best way to protect film is to project film. And it's funny because if you try to search this line online in Google, it'll say, did you mean the best way to preserve film is to protect film instead of project? But, yeah, I was talking about this email we received in the morning.

It was from Ura Mini Project who said, we just want to tell you, thank you for pointing us to the footage of Sunil, whose material they met online in Padma. And I'm trying to get his material up. Here's Sunil Kumar.

And he has been, you know, an MA student of film, studying the cinema of Jafar Panahi, but never really having made films. He's a political activist.

Travels through, by foot, into Chhattisgarh district, a new state in India, looking at hydroelectric power plants. And Ura Mini took this footage from Sunil to make a film on power plants in Chennai and just sent us an email saying, now our new footage is coming back in.

And as we speak, Jason and Brian here have been also using this footage and annotating it and connecting it to, they're here, they're from Beaver Group. You may know them.

I'm going to put this internet thing, it's getting a little tedious, but I will just show you.

Yeah, no, just the longer it takes to load. But yeah, so this is Sunil's material and now it's being annotated on by somebody else who's using the material in an interesting way. And this is really the sort of distribution of the sensible and this kind of relay that makes Padma quite rich as a repository.

There's a lot more footage, but in the essence of time. I'm not going to go there. There was one particular project that I wanted to bring up. Also because politically it's actually timely to speak in some ways about its failure.

India has started voting. We went to elections and there's a probable chance that the chief minister of Gujarat, the architect of the pogrom in 2002 may just become our prime minister.

It's, yeah. So in one of these collective moments, I mentioned Vikalp that sort of helped shape Padma. Another collective moment was the shared footage collective that had happened in the aftermath of Gujarat.

And this is me posting somebody else's link on the India Media site in 2002. I'm used to making titles, so shared footage became shared footage.

But ignore that.

Or maybe we can come to it later with some dark irony. But there is a need for 78 filmmakers in Gujarat right now. This was only to get your attention. The figures only in approximation. The true figure could be anything from one to 554.

It doesn't matter. The fact is there are not enough of us. So this was a call people who sort of eventually, a group of filmmakers who call themselves the shared footage group, put out. And a number of filmmakers did offer their cameras, tape, time, and skills into documenting things in the immediate aftermath.

And, of course, their main reasons for doing so were quite exemplar and important, document the destruction, record testimonies mainly for legal purposes, help in understanding the mechanics of the problem, and show us the silver lining.

250 hours of footage, loads of Excel sheets, people volunteering their time, and then these tapes were in shoeboxes all over India for close to a decade. In 2012, on 20th of February, we launched a small part of the shared footage project.

20th of February marked 10 years of the program.

And a lot of it is online. Actually, if I see it with my admin, there's close to 200 videos. But what you may see online is only a few things. And that's pretty much because the project was fraught with so many complications and contradictions.

So here's an example of the stuff that went up, right? There was digitizing involved. There was a computer script written to censor audio and to blackout video. So wherever in the log sheet there was A, colon, audio was blocked out for that span.

And wherever there was V or AV, it was audio and video.

So to relive this archive also became a very traumatic experience for some people. The custodians of the archive didn't exist, or they didn't want to take responsibility. It was under their shoeboxes and we helped bring it out.

But then who was going to take collective responsibility to bring out a seemingly important archive? And I'm just going to do a next, next. And this is also one of the ways Padma works. You can do cut detection and you can jump from clip to clip.

Now just have a look at the A's, yeah? This is a, I think it's an hour long video.

All this means there's a blank in the, in the, I wish you could see the time code because this is coming every like 25 seconds. There's a censor. A mentions landmark, A mentions locality.

It's going to get started. Sorry about this guys. But it's all online.

You can go back to it. Let's just go where we were.

A mentions inspector, hash MN4. You don't know who hash MN4 is.

A mentions locality, mentions inspector MN4. Mentions location AD27. Mentions landmark, mentions local. These are audio. There are also, there's a lot of footage with the B as well.

Interview with MN23. Okay, name should be protected. That, that, a Hindu resident of AD4. Locality is obscured again. A mentions locality. Village.

It goes on. You get the, that inspector. I mean, he's dead. We found out.

But, yeah. So what happened was, even though we spent close to a year digitizing those tapes. There were old formats. Hi8. Video 8. VHS. Mini DV. Had volunteers work closely with the material. It started getting so fraught.

So the, this, this particular hour of footage is totally depoliticized. Right? The, the, the method of the pogrom. Right? You, you, you, you, you get wise the neighborhood in a certain way. You have election cards.

You know where people live. You block the main entrance. You know the railway over bridge is there. People may flee from there. So there's another mob waiting here. All this location. All this specificity is, is obscured in the archive.

The police officer who, everybody in this. There's, there's, there's, there's about 25 hours from this one neighborhood. Every, everybody mentions hash in and four.

But he's not there. And his name happens to be PSI Moti. So in, you know where to really go back in this failure. Because this just got too tedious. We have the material.

It's very carefully archived. Some of it is online. Some of it is not. And it's still an open question. But it's also an ontological one. Why were we making this kind of archive in 2002? How do you take care of it? Who claims responsibility? And these are kind of questions I hope we can continue to address.

Because this way it, like, it really, it's, it's, it's, it's utterly depoliticized. And, and, and, and soon it becomes irrelevant if you start censoring it in this way. So I'm just going to end with a rejoinder to this kind of situation by, again, going back to one of our ten theses on the archive.

And maybe this is also a question we can ask ourselves, the practitioners who make images. You know, what kind of images really do we want to see circulating? What are sensible images? What are hopeful images? And what, what, what is it that we need to be archiving, documenting, filming, and preserving? The archive is not a scene of redemption.

Thesis number four. Important as the political impulse of archives is, it is important to acknowledge that archives cannot be tied to a politics of redemption.

A large part of what may be thought of as progressive impulses in the historiography, progressive impulses in historiography is informed by a desire to redeem history through the logic of emancipation.

The resurrection of the subaltern subject of history, the pitting of oral against written history, and the hope that an engagement with the residue of the archive will lead to transformative politics.

Benjamin's thesis on the philosophy of history has served as an important intellectual reference point for such initiatives.

Benjamin says that the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not an exception, but the rule. We must, we must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.

Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency.

Archival initiatives have unconsciously continued this theological impulse. The desire to document that which is absent, missing, or forgotten stages a domain of politics which often privileges the experience of violence and trauma in a manner in which the experience of violence is that which destroys the realm of the ordinary and the everyday.

Thus, if you examine the way the histories of the oppressed are written about, it were as if life is always subsumed under the threat of death, and that living is forever condemned to a shadowy existence under the idea of bare life.

The subsumption of life into a condition of bareness is as illusory as aesthetic practices which attempt to redeem experiences from the clutches of time and history. If the archival imagination is to rescue itself from this politics of redemption, it will have to allow for a radical contingency of the ordinary.

It will have to engage with forms of life which exceed the totalizing gaze of the state as well as its redemptive other. Radical contingency recognizes the possibilities of surprise in the archive and the possibility that a descent into the ordinary suspends the urgent claims of emergencies.

Thank you.

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