Narrating the City: What is it?

I have this bit of conversation stuck in my head from the times I traveled in the over-crowded New Delhi, India. It was the everydayness of taking the bus in the morning, reaching work, working and returning back home. I can’t possibly recall the volume of conversations on which I might have eavesdropped or listened purely due to physical proximity- Delhi buses are packed and you stick together as you stand, trying to get where you want to.

 It might have been one of those days maybe.

Two women, one elderly and another in her early 20s board a 507.

At an overcrowded entrance: elderly woman to the other: ‘Push hard. This is Delhi’.

Can a City be narrated through a broken chain of bits and pieces of conversations, utterances picked up in its arcades, avenues, the dangerous and the not so dangerous streets? As against the panoramic skyline as the fingerprint of the City, with corresponding notions an omniscient narrator, what if it is narrated from multiple locations in its everyday where a multitude of narrators find themselves grounded in. What would be the form of that made of narration?

 Borges’ ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ provides a meaningful reference point to understand the inherent fracturing of the linear form that corresponds with the Metropolis becoming an ‘interconnected web of complexity’, Johnson, ‘The Myth of the Ant Queen'.

The notion of complexity as experienced in urban environments is understood I two ways by Johnson. One is the ‘sensory overload’; something that feels like ‘a scab against an original wound’. The experience forms the basis if works such as ‘The Arcades Project’ by Walter Benjamin and ‘Dubliners’ by James Joyce. As Mary Ann Doane notes in ‘The Emergence of Cinematic Time’ that with the advent of mechanical reproduction in the industrial age, a discursive thematics of excess and over saturation started. The excessive and unrelenting continuum of mechanical reproduction is accompanied by Modernity’s understanding of Temporality as an assault on senses.

 The other is the understanding of complexity as a ‘self-organizing system’. This is not the experiential city. It is the city where a patterns of signals emerges where one expected the unplanned noise. The precondition is a rhythm of the everyday, something or someone who happens to be somewhere in the city as a part of a crowd and who chooses to narrate. Narration in this case is more than just a question of coordinates. The map itself begins to ‘flicker’ with the layers of stories and myths that are being beamed from a multitude of coordinates. Something like the Freudian notion of Memory that he describes in terms of resistance and engraving.

 This notion of the multiple nodes of narration and the idea of the narrator herself being a living, seeing person like you and me, as put forth by Robert Grillet’s ‘From Realism to Reality’ makes way for a practice of narrating the City where boundaries between content-form, objectivity-subjectivity, narrator-narratee, construction-deconstruction, memory-present, imagination-reality, high art-popular forms, professional and the amateur continuously dissolve into each other in multiple ways.

Here, I would want to introduce you to the Pad.ma ; a project that has challenged my own critical thinking around documentary/experimental/ narrative work.  PAD.MA - short for Public Access Digital Media Archive - is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non- commercial use. To read more about the project go to: http://godaam.pad.ma/about. You can browse by categories such as Authorship, Art, Censorship etc. To view the city archive, you can goto http://godaam.pad.ma/find?f=category&q=Cityscape. For media practice in our times, the immediate question the archive poses is that of who has the power to narrate. In this case it could be a mobile upload possibly shot by a migrant who works as a set attendant on million dollar budget Bollywood film shoot by the night.