The arrival of video ushered in a new logistics of access, circulation and production of audio-visual forms. Analog video introduced new infrastructures and legal contests for film circulation and viewing cultures, set new terms for amateur and professional practices in home videos, documentary and commercial works, pedagogical practices and civil society activism, and has been a key dimension of the history of surveillance. This workshop seeks to track this history and also to consider the shifts engendered with the arrival of digital video. Video is now experienced and consumed on television screens, mobile phones, laptops, tablets, substantially shifting the nature of viewing cultures and media practice. Video circulation has had extraordinary currency through MMS circulation, `sting’ and citizen journalism, and YouTube uploads, engendering new senses of velocity and impact in the social and political effects of video forms, and new questions about the boundary between the public and the private, about morality and obscenity. Research into video is as yet incipient in the Indian context, and we hope to encourage multiple lines of analysis to engage this complex and urgent field of media research.

Workshop themes include –

Media Archaeologies

Legal Histories of Video regulation and contest

Film industry and video technology

Analog and digital video

Video in documentary and activist filmmaking

Production, distribution and circulation of video technology

Obscenity and Morality debates around video

Video circulation, social and political mobilization

Video surveillance

Video and Aesthetics

Social Media and Video

Abstracts should not exceed 300 words, and should be sent to dak@sarai.net by December 31, 2014, with the subject heading of ‘Proposal for Video Workshop.’

Authors of the selected abstracts will be notified by January 15th, 2015.

The Video Workshop will be held on February 21, 2015, at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.