Indexing “Pandora’s Index” by Lawrence Liang

At the closure of Manifesta7 in Bolzano, we left the exhibition with our bus. On board was one the very best artworks that had been exhibited at the venue: Pandora’s Index that Lawrence Liang choosed to donate to us, which made us very happy. It is a file cabinet which looked like this in the exhibition space (all pics in this post comes from Paul Keller):

Instead of approaching this object from the perspective of the art critic, I tried the archivist approach. Pandora’s Index does not have any metaindex, no overarching register. This isn’t an attempt to write a such, but could rather be some kind of pre-study before an imagined metaindexing. We can then begin in a material side, concluding that the file cabinet is made of metal – probably aluminium, the metal which the exhibition space was formerly producing – and has four times five slots. Of these 20 slots, 13 have files in them and 7 are empty. The arrangement of files look like this:

- – - – X

X X X X X

- – X X X

X X X – X

In the rest of this blog post, I will go through these 13 files, one by one, using the very Western method of starting in the upper left. These notes were essentially written on the road, while our bus drove on the Croatian and Serbian highway, that is, in the framework of a limited space, a limited time, and a close community. It should maybe also be mentioned that I know Lawrence since before, from being involved in common discussions and being very inspired by his presentation in Berlin almost one year ago, where he touched on several of the themes that also occurs in this archive.
Pandora’s Index still resides in the bus, which is now momentarily parked in Belgrade. We hope to make it available to as many interested people as possible in the future.

THE SURFACE OF THINGS
The file contains dvd inlays, likely to be used to pirate dvd:s, produced by a simple colour printer or photocopiers, some of them a bit pixled in appearance. Most films are from Hollywood, some are from Bollywood. There are highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow films. And one computer game, Microsoft’s Virtual Iraq… or wait, that one must be a fake: “It also includes popular games such as Find Saddam, Are you smarter than Bush?, and Spot the Oil”. The fakeness seems to point towards the curiously magrittean title of the next file:

CECI N’EST PAPI UNE PIPE
Starting at the 23rd card, I find information from “4th Global Congress to Combat Counterfeiting & Piracy“. It seems to be a slidé where Nestlé demonstrates how hard it is to distinguish betwen a “real” and a “fake” seasoning sauce. This pretty well sets the tone for the whole file, that is about copies and fakes, from Mona Lisa to someone resembling Spiderman. Every card seems to be a copy of an image found on the internet.
There are instructions for piracy-hunters in how to spot the difference between a “genuine” and a “pirated” cd, claiming that in order to be “genuine”, a cd must have the complete track list printed on the very disc (what?) and definitely not use the mp3 format: “any cd with 100 songs is a pirated one” (I wonder what they say when they find some real grindcore!)
Another favourite in this file is an advertisement where Holostik India Ltd. wants to sell holograms (once regarded an artform) as yet another way to distinguish the real from the fake:

However, the application of a hologram security seal can seal the fate of your duplicate forever! While your product or its packaging can be imitated, a hologram cannot. /…/
Let’s work together to give your brand its own inimitable “holographic identity”.

The ambivalence of the file culminates with the text of an Indian schampoo advertisement: “Look like a different you”.

THE MANY AVATARS OF THE ALL GIFTED ONE
Between a repeated image of women browsing through what could be pirate discs, a dreamlike story unfolds about one or several women. Something about copying as the price for fire. It might be written, or copied, whetever the difference would be.

LANDSCAPE OF INFINITE ABSTRACTIONS
Already while sorting these 84 cards so that they return to the correct order (missing cards: 21, 28, 43-45, 69-70) I recognize that I have come to something like the heart of Pandora’s Index. In this file, Lawrence Liang has written down with a typewriter a large number of very personal stories revolving first of all around films, but also books and records, with keywords. While beyond doubt being the work of a dedicated cineast, it is still not what occurs on the screen that comes to the foreground on these cards, but rather the context. The mass-reproduced objects are used as telescopes towards personal memories which are very time- and place-specific. The parergon of mass culture from the perspective of someone growing up in the 1980s in India.

ROXETTE, The Look (1990)

I would often steal money from my father to buy books and cassettes. When Roxette’s The Look came out, it was the ultimate definition of cool, and I just had to have the cassette. So as usual I punched fifty rupees from my dad and bought the cassette. I must have heard the song The Look at least twenty times in a row. My father found the money missing, and my cousin who stayed with us was blamed for stealing it, as he had been caught stealing money in the past. He denied taking it, but was thrashed quite badly for having taking the money. While I felt extremely guilty, I did not have the courage to admit that I had taken the money, but could not get myself to listen to the song either.

Lawrence Liang also recalls how in his own teenage years in the late 1980s, Indian state television used to broadcast European film every thursday night at eleven. The sex scenes of Fanny and Alexander, Lawrence Liang tells, became his entry gate as a young boy to cineastry. Here are stories about bicycle rides, ashamed gazes and teenage masturbation. There are also indication on how the classification of films as erotic seems to have differed between India and Europe – something which makes one consider if file-sharing indexing sites might contribute to a global homogenization of film taxonomy, or if that has already been achieved anyway.

ANAND, TINNU. SHAHENSHAH (1988)

(Keywords: Sardines)

It was 1988 when Amitabh Bachan and Video ruled. It was a regular practice for people to hire a video player for a day for a hundred rupees and then have friends and family watch the films together. The video cassettes could be hired for ten rupees a day. When Shahenshah was released however, there was premium price of thirty rupees placed on the cassette, and you were only allowed to borrow it for three hours. I had booked a copy of the film well in advance and informed all my relatives and neighbours abour it. There must have been at least forty of us watching the film in a small hall, sitting shoulder to shoulder, leg on leg.

I as well remember the time when the video hardware was rented out. It was called a “moviebox” and was in my own family only used at children’s birthday parties. On the other hand I have of course no association to the pirate street markets described in this file, like Calcutta’s Free School Street. Or the bazaar of Chennai, whose previously flourishing businesses in smuggled home-electronics and perfumes were outrivaled by globalization. Instead, entrepreneurs of the bazaar went into pirated video tapes. Geographical proximity to the south Indian film industry, however, meant a relatively high rate of razzias against the selling of Hollywood and Bollywood films. Some traders then decided to go into some other nische, and here Lawrence Liang tells the story of a friend of his, who every week orders rare and independent films from Amazon.com which he copies, distributes and sells to a small circle of customers which includes several Indian film directors and academics.

Regarding books, the file contains a note on Walter Benjamin’s important essay “Unpacking my library“, and the effect that it had on the ownership status on the book in which Lawrence Liang found it in a library, spotting

a paragraph in which he speaks of the virtues of stealing books and even compares it to the rescuing of princesses. I am inspired, and do precisely that. /…/
I still believe that when it comes to books and stealing, the book often chooses you without your knowing why.

Beatiful! The story also reminds on the time when library lending was still registred on paper, which let library users get a clue in a book’s popularity by looking at a paper tab in the back of it. Computerization has now hidden this piece of metadata from our sights.

A GUIDE TO UNCERTAIN RELATIONSHIPS
A simple, yet very powerful, language game around notions of ownership, in a minimalist presentation:

this is my pen

this is my friend

this is my poem

/…/

this poem is my…

/…/

PEN FRIEND

P-my-oem, P-my-en, Fri-my-end

THE WORK OF LOVE IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION
Here, Lawrence Liang “simply” copies the whole text of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay – by hand. The cards are in disorder. As I sort them, I find missing cards 69-86 and 142.
I suspect that this file is for many people the first one that they open in the cabinet, because of the obviousness of its reference. Rosa Menkmann, for example, commented on this one after riding with the bus for about twenty minutes in Ljubljana.

ANNOTATIONS TO AN INCOMPLETE TEXT
Maybe this text should be incomplete, but as an archivist I can’t just accept that so also here I note which of the 62 cards that seems missing: 7-12 and 56. Then I copy the 23rd of them:

When Srikant already had a kabari shop, shy did he start work as a cable operator? Why did Srikant think of becoming a cable operator?

The series of typewriter-written cards begins with a copy of a recent court indictment. Srikanth Kabadiwallah, a poor 42-year old from the slums of Delhi, is standing accused of copyright infringement. The story of his life in the informal economy is briefly summarized: Moving from a village to the metropolis in 1980, he started to recycle waste for a living, later on managed to move outside the slum and start a small grocery store, before he finally opened an cable operating business in 1996. “The defendant supplies cable net work to more than 800 homes”, the presecutor states, distributing pay-tv to these households without any license. Now he stands accused for the specific case of distributing Monsoon Wedding through these cables in april this year. Because some cards are missing, the end of the indictment can not be read, so I don’t know what punishment that the accused might risk.
However, there is so much we don’t know. After the small gap, the file continues with a large number of cards with personal questions on them, like

Did Srikant start the cable business out of a long-standing desire, or did he act on someone’s advice?

or

Do you ever cry at the movies?

We do not get to know whether the questions comes from the court, or from Lawrence Liang reading the case. We get no answers, but clearly a feeling for how much any court case of this kind must leave out.
The day after indexing this file, we go to a large gypsy market in Belgrade under a bridge. I think about the relationship between second-hand trade and waste recycling, while being happy to find a relatively working tape recorder. The tape recorder is put in the bus, right on top on Pandora’s Index, where it is used to play the remainders of the 100 mixtapes which Altermark prepared for our first bus ride.

THE LINE OF FLIGHT
54 numbered cards (missing: 6-7, 22). Just like the file Ceci n’est papi une pipe, the cards in this file are colour printouts broadly relating to “piracy”, but this one is generally more related to P2P networks, including a number of screenshots. One card shows a visualization produced by the 0xdb system. Another one features 2006 statistic from the anti-piracy organization Indian Music Industry, with the ridiculous fixation with showing off numbers for the war against piracy: 0,6 seized computers per day! 4,5 seized cd burners per day! 6,5 cd:s, and 12,4 cd inlays – per second!

NEW MAPS FOR OLD DESIRES
Browsing this file, one gets a feeling of all the themes coming together. Maps and statistics and silent desires meet Walter Benjamin on an Indian street.

THINGS FALL APART
A number of spiral backs which once held together writing-pads.

ALGEBRA OF INFINITE VALUE
A copy of a ten thousand dollar bill. On its back a copy of an advertisement: “Terrorist groups sell pirate DVDs to raise funds.”

THE MISADVENTURES OF A DEAD CAT
Fragments of some crushed dvd discs. Perhaps found a one of the places where Indian anti-piracy authorities destruct what they seize, by running it over with bulldozer (a scene depicted at a card in some of the other files).

(unmarked)
This last file contains empty cards in a great number.

EOF

At the closure of Manifesta7 in Bolzano, we left the exhibition with our bus. On board was one the very best artworks that had been exhibited at the venue: Pandora's Index that Lawrence Liang choosed to donate to us, which made us very happy. It is a file cabinet which looked like this in the exhibition space (all pics in this post comes from Paul Keller): Instead of approaching this object from the perspective of the art critic, I tried the archivist approach. Pandora's Index does not have any metaindex, no overarching register. This isn't an attempt to write a such, but could rather be some kind of pre-study before an imagined metaindexing. We can then begin in a material side, concluding that the file cabinet is made of metal – probably aluminium, the metal which the exhibition space was formerly producing – and has four times five slots. Of these 20 slots, 13 have files in them and 7 are empty. The arrangement of files look like this: - - - - X X X X X X - - X X X X X X - X In the rest o