RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE
The Raqs Media Collective enjoys playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs. They make contemporary art, have made films, curated exhibitions, edited books, staged events, collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers and theatre directors and have founded processes that have left deep impacts on contemporary culture in India. Raqs (pron. rux) follows its self declared imperative of 'kinetic contemplation' to produce a trajectory that is restless in terms of the forms and methods that it deploys even as it achieves a consistency of speculative procedures. www.raqsmediacollective.net
The Raqs Media Collective was founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Raqs remains closely involved with the Sarai program at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, an initiative they co-founded in 2000. The Embroidered Digital Commons was included in the Startup States exhibition curated by Laura McLean at Sarai in February 2019.
Co-edited by Raqs, the Sarai Readers are published once a year. Each issue is structured around a specific theme and features articles, essays, reviews & criticism, interviews and photographic essays. The Readers are inter-disciplinary and invite and commission writing by practitioners, academics, activists and artists from diverse fields.
A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons, written by the Raqs Media Collective, was first published in the Sarai Reader 03 Shaping Technologies, Editorial Collective: Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Ravi Sundaram, Ravi S Vasudevan, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and Awadhendra Sharan (Sarai); Geert Lovink and Marleen Stikker (Waag Society). 2003. p357-365.