PAD.MA

PAD.MA is an online archive of video material, primarily footage and not finished films, that has been densely text-annotated. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non-commercial use.
We see PAD.MA as a way of opening up a set of images, intentions and effects present in video footage-- resources that conventions of video-making, editing and viewing have tended to suppress, or leave behind. This "expanded" form then points to other political potentials for such material, towards less-known territory that lies beyond the finite documentary film format or the youtube clip.

The design of the archive makes possible various types of "viewing" and contextualisation: from an overview of themes and timelines to much closer readings of transcribed dialogue and geographical location, to layers of writing: clip-level descriptions and other annotations by both archive contributors and online users. At the moment, PAD.MA has approximately 150 "events" on video, mostly from Mumbai and Bangalore. This adds up to about 100 hours of fully transcribed video footage, which we expect to grow to more than 400 hours by early 2009.

The PAD.MA project is initiated by a group consisting of oil21.org from Berlin, the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore, and three organisations from Mumbai: Majlis, Point of View and ChitrakarKhana /CAMP.