India Unplugged

…she’s beautiful.

Yes folks, the Public Access Digital Media Archive went live on March 1, 2008. Just type pad.ma in your address bar and the browser quickly navigates you to the site. The first time I tried it was the day it went live from office. The site didn’t appear, but a message did: “if you are using internnet explorer you have bigger problems that not being able to access this site” I laughed out aloud and turned some bewildered heads in the cubicles next to mine. Then I downloaded Mozilla and deleted the evil Microsoft thing from my hard disk.

PAD.MA is premised on the concept that that the image (here I include still and moving) should be free: freely available, free to download modify and distribute. The trigger for the PAD.MA was when some Bombay based film makers realised that a lot of the footage that they shot would get left out in the editing process, footage that could be of potential use to some one else, even if they themselves saw no value in it. Backed by a belief that this footage should be brought out of the cold storage and made freely available to the general public for non commercial use, five organisations teemed up and PAD.MA was born.

The initiators of PAD.MA are Chitrkarkhana/CAMP, Majlis , Point of View, Alternative Law Forum and Berlin based oil 21

As Lawrence Liang, a member of Bangalore based Alternative Law Forum, one of the moving forces behind PAD.MA put it, “Every year 9 billion hours of footage is shot. This translates to around 24 million hours of footage shot each day”. This includes all kinds of footage like film, video, commercials, you tube variety and so on. This footage forms a crucial documentation of our times. In a sense it captures the zeitgeist of our age: why certain projects were documented and not others; why those were shot in a particular way at particular times and angles; who made the decision to shoot them in a particular way and then omit certain images at the editing table and permit others through to be viewed by the consumer and so on.

When a film maker makes a decision to weave together a coherent narrative out of disparate images it is based on the premise that those images form a logical sequence that leads the consumer of that narrative through a visual journey from point A to B. Crucial to this decision is the choice exercised by the film maker to leave out other visuals in their possession because it doesn’t fit into this narrative. What a pity it would be if these poor neglected images never saw the light of day. For, in their own way, they are just as important as the lucky few visuals that made the film, or the documentary. They were just as adept at capturing the sights and sounds, the smells and textures and the colours and vibrancy of the world unfolding in front of their lenses.

Currently, around 100 hours of footage are available at PAD.MA. These are mainly events in Bombay and Bangalore that document political protests, changing cityscapes, discussions, interviews, dialogues and dissent. The footage is available with text annotations by the contributors in the form of commentary, notes and so on. Downloaded material can be layered with more annotations on top of this first layer. The material on PADMA has been licenced under the PAD.MA General Licence or PGL. Members can avail of all rights granted under PGL which includes the right to download, distribute, make changes, and incorporate into their own work. However, this can only be done under the resolution under which the video has been made available.

At its best, PAD.MA lets members download, distill and recontextualise the available material in new ways that expand our understanding of the image beyond the known tropes of the documentary, news report or feature.

For more updates on PAD.MA tune in right here.