The Media Lab: News & Events

This was the first conference held under the aegis of The Media Lab. We wanted to turn it into an occasion for reflection on the tasks at hand then for the Lab as well as on the media world in which such a project had to find its intellectual location.

With each advance of digital techniques the demise of cinema returns to haunt us. Will the future of cinema dissolve into the widely scattered space of the image, both social and private in nature? What we have as reality on the ground is a confluence of celluloid and digital tools rather than a total replacement of one by the other. The existence of the ‘digital intermediate’ in mainstream filmmaking itself testifies to the interspersed functions of celluloid and electronic processes. On the other hand, the advance in digital tools itself is often measured against the standard of celluloid potentials, the latter providing the yardstick for reproduction of reality. The logic of exchange and convergence rather than total replacement is underscored, again, as we find cinema effortlessly incorporating the video in its frame of vision, in its movements, in self-inflicted diffusion of the cinematic into protean forms of image and sound.

Will the future of cinema be its dissolution into other formats? Will it exist side by side with the displacing agents? Will the cinematic sustain even as the cinema mutates? Can we write on cinema with the same categories and objects in view in a few years from now? With such questions buzzing in the backdrop, we wanted to host this colloquium to connect the concerns of Film Studies with concerns about the futures of cinema. Film and media scholars, visual artists and media practitioners came together to reflect on questions of history-writing and archiving of film, critical and practical adaptations of the medium, and the reformulation of Film Studies as a discipline in the face of challenges brought about by the digital media on the one hand and what is known as Digital Humanities on the other.

The conference, held on November 7 & 8, 2008, was supported by the Navajbai Ratan Tata Trust and Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai. The venue was the Vivekananda Hall, Jadavpur University. It was inaugurated by Prof. Pradip Narayan Ghosh, Vice-Chancellor, Jadavpur University (JU). The two conference coordinators were Abhijit Roy and Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee, Joint Coordinators of The Media Lab.

Titles of the papers/panels were: The challenges of film preservation in the digital age; Of jesters, clowns and pranksters: Video responses on Youtube and the condition of collaborative Authorship; Film Studies and Digital Humanities: Conjectures on a possible interface; The Pasts and Futures of Celluloid; Beyond the frame: how film can escape the cinema; Together against the mafia: Godard, Scorcese, Bit Torrent; Photoshop landscapes and ‘after-narratives’: On the digital futures of Bollywood; Digital mediations: Interface between celluloid and New Media; Images beyond the screen: Publics, Critiques, Mobilizations.

Scholars, who made presentations at the conference, were: Josef Lindner, Preservation Officer, Academy Film Archive, Los Angeles; Matt Hanson, independent filmmaker and artist from UK; Sebastian Lutgert, independent writer, programmer and artist from Berlin; Peter Reiner, film critic, Christian Science Monitor, USA; Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore; Madhav Prasad, Professor, Centre for European Studies, The English and Foreign Language University, Hyderabad; Jeebesh Bagchi, Senior Fellow at SARAI, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi; Manas Ghosh, Lecturer, Department of Film Studies, JU; Abhijit Roy, Reader, Department of Film Studies, JU; Nishant Shah, PhD student at CSCS; Madhuja Mukherjee, Senior Lecturer, Department of Film Studies, JU; Anindya Sengupta, Lecturer, Department of Film Studies, JU; Arijit Bhattacharya, Shruti Ghosh and Jopann George, Project Fellows at the Media Lab and T.Vishnu Vardhan, PhD student at CSCS.

The papers presented at the conference are going to be collected in the 8th issue of the Journal of the Moving Image.