Global Information Landscapes and
Urban Transformations in Asia

Vienna, 20th - 22th of June 2005

Shuddhabrata Sengupta

Bio

Shuddhabrata Sengupta is a media practitioner, artist, writer, and researcher with the Raqs Media Collective (www.raqsmediacollective.net) and one of the co-initiators of the Sarai Programme (www.sarai.net) at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. He is a member of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader Series and works at the Media Lab at Sarai-CSDS in Delhi.

Lecture

"Have You Looked Under Your Seat?" The Domestication of the Culture of Surveillance in South Asia - Preliminary Notes towards a Historical Understanding

Abstract

In this presentation, I will demonstrate the lineage of present day surveillance practices in South Asia by pointing to their earlier iterations in colonial and pre-colonial times. I will link the origins of the systematization of finger printing, anthropometry, census records, and other mechanisms of information gathering to the development of an elaborate political culture around the harvesting of information from society, and try and trace their resonances to the cultivation of a contemporary social and political paranoia.