No subject

is the technical-programming team and the other is composed of media 
practitioners and researchers. While the techie team has taken apart 
the hardware to explain how it all works and have ensured that the 
Linux operating system and various free software that are being used 
are running smoothly, the team of old and new media practitioners 
have imparted a variety of skills. These include a knowledge and 
facility with the software of course, but also and very importantly, 
the opening out of modes of narrative and reflection upon one's 
experiences and environment.

So there were sessions in which photographs were analysed, stories 
written singly and collaboratively, sounds recorded, soundscapes 
developed, the economic and social layers within the basti unpeeled, 
and so on.

The software and the media tools that were available were: drawing 
sheets, crayons, simple audio recorders, an instamatic camera, a 
scanner, and GIMP and Star Office on a Gnome desktop with innumerable 
games! (now Audacity - a sound editing software - has also been 
added) 

This process that we all went through was exciting and fulfilling for 
all of us - participants and practitioners, but during this we faced 
a number of what can be termed as problems as far as appropriate 
technology is concerned.

The games that the participants played, even though very useful in 
making them comfortable with the keyboard and great fun, were unable 
to speak to them of their personal experience of mobility, space and 
time. Basically there were no familiar cultural referents in the 
design.

The even bigger problem was that in the process of learning text, 
image and sound editing, their descriptions and understanding of an 
experience became fragmented. The software began to take over the 
complex web of imagination, and began to direct them in fairly 
unidirectional ways. This is because it expects of you to represent 
your experience, or your space, in only one media at a time.

The mode in which they described their experience of space and time 
of their everyday routine, was a complex web of images, sounds and 
narrations. These narrations, in the speaking and in the writing, 
portrayed different levels of intensities. The chaos and the 
immediacy of the spoken narration was brought into order in the act 
of writing. For example, if the spoken text describing a road 
accident gave a very visualized rendering of the incident with a 
complex soundscape, the written text would be not only much more 
ordered, but it would also bring in the self of the writer in very 
direct ways. In that sense, the registers of representation would 
change with the media of narration. But the fact is that if one is to 
truly "experience" the narrative of the incident as an audience, it 
would best emerge when all the narrations are made available to us. 
And this probably holds true for the creator as well.

It can be argued that this fragmentation will lessen once there is a 
greater facility with using software, or by using specifically multi 
media software, like Director for example. Personally, as someone who 
has been educated as a filmmaker and has worked as one, and thus 
comfortable in thinking about sound, image and text in connected 
ways, I still find my work on a computer unable to become adequately 
woven together. And where software like Director is concerned, we 
cannot use it as we are working on configurations for the community 
which are low-cost, as also inspired and informed by the free 
software model. This is very pertinent as community media labs cannot 
afford to buy expensive software - as a matter of fact we have also 
been working on finding out low-cost hardware solutions as well - nor 
can they be pirated as NASSCOM, India's software 'police' 
organisation, is working overtime to ensure that.  But more 
importantly, we feel that the ideas that invigorate the free software 
model: sharing, collaboration, open distribution and modification, 
are ideas that are part of the philosophical basis of the 
CyberMohalla project.

Although here I must add that there is one worrying aspect of much of 
the software design that is happening within the free software model 
- too often it merely replicates what proprietary software does, and 
does not seek a fundamentally different perceptual experience of the 
software. The argument for this is obvious - there is need to prove 
that free software can do it as well - but it can still lead to a 
stilling of newer experiential models of software, newer 
understandings of interfaces.

Yet another problem: It seemed to us that the collaborative nature of 
describing a collective experience or space that the participants 
were very comfortable with in oral renditions began to get very 
individuated. In the normal course of the day, while they would share 
all their other resources - such as food, transport money etc. - they 
would not share their files. I cannot definitely say that this is due 
to the ways software makes you relate to them, but we are wondering 
if that may have a role to play. After all, in all their oral 
narratives, many voices jostled together to express an experienceŠ

So when we media practitioners began to discuss this with the 
programmers, we started thinking about "what are the different 
possible software structures that can emerge from this problem?"
The conceptual derivative that has emerged for us - by which 
creativity and expressivity can be adequately addressed - is the 
notion of "interlinked media", where image, sound and text (spoken 
and written) are seen as part of an unravelable web within the 
narration of an experience.

This is the primary experience from which the Coding Collaboration 
note emerged, and here the terms of collaboration are not between 
programmers and other programmers but between programmers and 
participants, programmers and practitioners.

The participants here, and in this case completely marginal to the 
digital wave (sometimes conceptualized as those on the other side of 
the digital divide), have given rise to an enigmatic problem. The 
response to this problem could give rise to technological 
modifications which are unexpected.
-- 
Monica Narula
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net