Saturday, July 10, 2010

Pad.ma @ 1Shanthiroad


Call for participation.
From Archive to Application.
Presented by pad.ma

Friday, 16th July, 6:30 PM
Open House and Presentation
@ 1 Shanti Road Studio/gallery
Bangalore

Followed by a weekend workshop
17th and 18th July 2010.
at
Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore

Pad.ma has been running as an online archive of digital video with text annotations for over two years. During this period, the focus has been on gathering materials, annotating densely, and building an archive. At present, pad.ma has over 400 hours of footage, in over 600 "events". Almost all of this is fully transcribed and often mapped to physical locations. Essays have been written over video, and narratives created across different clips in the archive. The focus has been on pulling material into pad.ma.

What are ways to start thinking about pulling material out of pad.ma? From the onset, pad.ma has had an API (documented at http://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/API), a programming interface that allows you to pull video out, perform searches, seek to exact time-codes in any video, fetch transcript and map data, and display all this however you please. It also has a PGPL, the Pad.ma General Public License (http://pad.ma/license) that allows for the reappearance and reuse of the material for non-commercial, research and pedagogic use. Through the experience of running the archive, there have been various imaginations of multiple, layered, time-based annotations over video: pedagogical tools for learning and discussion; presentation tools that juxtapose text and video in new ways, essays and other writing formats enabled by rich and context-specific media; and relinking and mashing up the material in ways we haven't thought of yet.

At the workshop, we hope to explore some of these imaginations for video on the web, and video's new qualities as a result of online practices. We invite video-makers, writers, coders and other enthusiasts to participate. (Considering the term "application" in the broadest possible way), we invite participants to bring in/or work on their own content (video material, texts or software), combine it with existing materials and tools in pad.ma and develop innovative ways of working with these. The mix of technical and non-tech participation is here a plus, not a minus.

Video-makers could bring in their own footage, clips from popular or unpopular cinema, science or lab videos, ads or news, artworks or documentary films. The idea is to reflect on these different forms of video, using the vast annotation and remix possibilities offered by software. Writers could engage with video critically or creatively, by theorising or contextualising footage, writing over images, creating collective textual narratives or weaving fiction and/or poetry around moving images. Coders could devise new ways in which video and text can speak to each other, and to an online audience. Participants could also create pedagogical units around a particular issue, create a multimedia lecture using pad.ma, or map their city through video, text and code.

The workshop will open with a pad.ma presentation at 1 Shanti Road, on the 16th of July, to be followed by two days of workshop at the Centre for Internet and Society. There will be individual sessions on all three streams (video, text, code) as well as discussions around how people working in them can collaborate with each other. By end of day 1, we hope to have interesting content and application projects that could be developed through the night and following day. Planning ahead will help, so let's begin. Videomakers, artists, writers, researchers and coders, write to us with your project ideas and a confirmation of your participation at pad.ma@pad.ma

Some reading around http://pad.ma:
10 Theses on the Archive: http://pad.ma/texts/10_Theses_on_the_Archive.html
pad.ma's current newsletter: http://pad.ma/newsletter/2010-05-26.html
How to use pad.ma guide: http://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/HowTo
Pad.ma API : http://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/API

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