Workshop on ‘Law and the Image’, September 15-26, 2008
This workshop was conducted by 3 legal experts and media artists, Namita Malhotra (Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore), Lawrence Liang (Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore) and Shaina Anand (Independent Media Artist, Mumbai). The workshop coordinator was Dr. Subhajit Chatterjee, Lecturer, Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University.
The inaugural speech was given by Dr. Moinak Biswas, Head, Dept. of Film Studies and Coordinator, The Media Lab. He began by introducing the aims, methods and practices that constitute the Media Lab as a unique space facilitating research and initiation into the growing practical interface between academics, digital media and art practices.
The series of lectures, screenings and demonstrations that introduced the field and emerging debates to the participants were conducted by Namita Malhotra. Her discussion opened up a series of pertinent issues informing contemporary debates around Law and the Image , broadly around three basic paradigms : Laws regarding images, creation of the “Law” through the image and legal readings of Images. The following two sessions on September 17 and 18 were oriented around a set of readings that addressed the significant issue of digital reproduction and copy culture. The discussion was set forth by a couple of short screenings such as Copy Shop (Virgil Widrich, 2001) which demonstrated how media artistes and filmmakers themselves were beginning to confront the issues of duplication and its various cultural ramifications thereby driving media scholars to engage with such debates. The ongoing lectures were followed on September 19 by the screening of a recent film by popular artiste Michel Gondry (Be Kind, Rewind, 2008), which in a humorous vein dealt with some of the significant debates raised in the earlier workshop interactions. Sessions on September 21st consisted of a set of screenings and presentations curated by Namita in order to introduce the range of critical debates around the issue of media surveillance in its numerous forms. The screenings included short experimental films which utilized modern survelliance technologies to chart personal narratives. At the other end of the spectrum were recent documentary projects from India like The Great Indian School Show (Avinash Deshpande, 2006), which presented a lurid yet sensitive account of various political appropriations of surveillance technologies at regional levels. Sessions held at the Vivekanda Hall on September 22 and 23 were open sessions conducted respectively by Shaina Anand and Lawrence Liang. Anand’s interactive talk and audio-visual presentation titled ‘Surveillance and Tactical Media’ centred around the problematic issues raised by the rising network of surveillance technologies that are gradually penetrating various aspects of the global citizen’s public and private lives.
Lawrence Liang’s presentation in the next session titled ‘Legal Imaginations: Interfaces of Law and Cinema in India’ focused on the dynamic and often astounding relationships between world of legal theory and film theory. His presentation consisted of two parts–Firstly it sought to examine the social life of law in images to explore how the presence of questions of law and justice creates an idea of a cinematic jurisprudence which is unique and different from the jurisprudence of legal theory. The second part of the presentation looked at how the law makes sense of cinema as a legal object, and covered issues of censorship, spatial regulation and protection of film as property. He argued for an approach that could enable us to take law and culture more seriously as a critical area bridging the divide between legal theory and film studies.
The sessions on the following two days were conducted by Namita and focused on the practical projects by various artists in the field. Namitha introduced the participants to recent projects conducted by the Altenative Law Forum in the form of remixes, collages or digital interfaces (Kaun Mille Dekho Kissko, 2003; Now Showing, The Cinematograph Act, 1952) which were designed as critical interventions into the dominant representational modes in popular entertainment and academic enquiry. The next day was utilized in garhering and designing the materials and props as well as planting the installation object at relevant sites including a classroom door and a corridor in the vicinity of the Department. The prop consisted of a placard board and a poster announcing surveillance of the surrounding area designed to mimic the texture and colour scheme utilized by local University authtorities. The concluding day of the workshop began with an acknowledgment of the signboards as a part of installation project and the session in which all the participants along with the resource persons shared their individual experiences on the workshop and its outputs. The workshop concluded with handing out of certificates to participants by Rimi B. Chatterjee, novelist and teacher of English at Jadavpur University.