Raqs Media Collective | Biography
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Raqs is a word in Persian, Arabic and Urdu which means the state that 'whirling dervishes' enter into when they whirl. It is also a word used for dance.
Raqs Media Collective is a collective of media practitioners that works in new media and digital art practice, documentary filmmaking, photography, media theory and research, writing, criticism and curation. The collective began working in 1991.
Raqs Media Collective is based in New Delhi, India and is the co-initiator of Sarai: The New Media Initiative (www.sarai.net), a programme of interdisciplinary research and practice on media, city space and urban culture at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Members of the collective are resident at the Sarai Media Lab, Delhi, where they work on media projects interpreting the city and urban experience; make films and new media works; collaborate on the development of software; design and conduct workshops; administer discussion lists; edit publications; write, research and co-ordinate several programmes and activities of Sarai.
Raqs is currently engaged in a series of different media, art and research projects that interpret city spaces, urbanity and ways of being in the city. Their work has been shown at Documenta11, Kassel, Germany and Emocao Art.ficial, Sao Paolo.
