Costelloe-KuehnMemo29

MEMO29: Describing Practice, to Make an Analytic Point
This memo should include a 200-400-word description of a practice that you have or may observe, during your research, leveraging the description for analytic insight. The practice you describe could be a communicative practice, a technical practice, a bodily practice, or some combination of different kinds of practice. You can flesh out your description imaginatively if you don’t yet have actual detail. For an example, see my “Biopolitics and the Informating of Environmentalism.”

Catapult Arts Caravan? <-- or better as an "event"?

JATAN Trust is a “rural digital media collective” developing and mapping “information from below” on local knowledges, experiences and struggles ([|jatantrust.org]). Since 2004 JATAN has been focused on the critical and complex geopolitical issues surrounding water in India. JATAN combines traveling media production and presentation with a more permanent “museum of cultural memory” and a website that combines satellite mapping technology with digital video clips. I am interested in how they combine new media (online representations, satellite technologies, GPS mapping, etc.) with more established knowledges, technologies and practices (indigenous knowledge of geography and agriculture, video cameras, screening films with portable projects in public markets, etc.). JATAN weaves together locally collected interviews into videos for presentation in public places as part of a festival with local musicians, singers, dancers, etc. These video screenings are designed to “re-present” the audience back to itself and foster deliberation over, and better articulation of, local knowledge. JATAN is currently developing a digital arts media lab that is intended to elicit participation from populations that have often been excluded from new media use. Although place-based production and exhibition is a key focus for JATAN, it is also tied into national and transnational webs of funding, expertise, knowledge, and media. Documenting and the “sensed, partially articulated awareness of specific other sites and agents to which particular subjects have (not always tangible) relationships” and following these connections will illuminate political and economic processes spanning different locales and continents (Marcus 1995, 111). I will participate as an audiovisual producer and research intern with JATAN for four months.

Practice of video/sound/multi-media editing late into the night with the collective at JATAN, summer 2008.

Everyone working on the project had a different skill set. But held in common was a dedication to //the project//. One one level, the project was a sort of activist media training camp. It drew together activists from many different struggles throughout India, but most were involved with environmental justice in one way or another.

It is my impression that in the literatures in which "alternative media" is discussed, it is usually conceived of as an object, as a product. Bringing the //practice// of alt. media to the forefront highlights many underrepresented questions: How does the form of collectivity constrain and enable participation by different groups and individuals? What new subjectivities are produced in the //process// of alt. media production? What new forms of community and collaboration?

Practice of media production/editing at the Sanctuary during Wafaa Bilal controversy.