Kuldip Powar is the Director ‘Unravelling’-a journey into war, memory & loss, in collaboration with Nitin Sawhney and Goldmiths University and funded by the ARHC. He will be presenting the film at the workshop, followed by a Q&A.

'Unravelling’ recently won the Best Short Film Competition Award at the 13th London Asian Film Festival,2011. This film was also selected for : The Re-Orient festival in Stockholm; The Spinning Wheel Sikh Film Festival 2008 in Hollywood and Bombay Mix Film Festival 2010(Cine Lumiere). ’Unravelling’ also won the Best Short Film at the 2009 Sikh International Film Festival-New York as well as being screened at the Imperial War Museum, National Army Museum, RIBA, V&A & Tate Britain, The Southbank, Museum of London and most recently at The Black International Film Festival, Berlin.

Kuldip has also worked on various film projects that explore the lives of Asian people in Britain. Completed a short film piece Remembrance (2005) funded by the BFI ‘Screen Rootz’ Initiative, poetically exploring post-colonial memory of WWII vis-à-vis personal testimony and narrative. Co-Directed the film, Kabhi Ritz Kabhie Palladium (2003) about the social cinema scenes amongst the South Asian diaspora communities of Coventry, for an Herbert Art Gallery & Museum exhibition. Has experience in conducting oral and visual ethnographies across Britain. Created an oral history archive and directed a documentary (funded by the MLA) titled For the Record: the social life of Indian vinyl in Southall (2008), which was screened at The British Library (2009). Kuldip has also been a member of the  ‘Music In Museums’ meeting group (programmed by the MLA) and has given presentations at The Horniman Museum and The Royal College of Music. He has worked with The Royal Geographical Society as a Volunteer Community Consultant for the ‘Hidden Histories’ and ‘Moving Journeys’ projects. He has worked for the Sorrell Foundation on the ‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme as a Project Facilitator.

He is currently working as an ‘Associate Artist’ for Tamasha Theatre Company, co-leading ‘Small Lives Global Ties' Writers Group.

I'm Lecturer in Future Media in the School of Media, Music and Performance at the university of Salford. Trained to be a sociologist who largely uses qualitative research methodologies and methods and experienced in interdisciplinary research, my main work has investigated user participatory cultures and community-based innovation, especially the socio-technical dynamics in those communities that develop open source technologies and services (hardware and/or software). Membership of these open innovation communities is usually loosely defined, such that whoever share the same interest or a constellation of practices (in the sense of “a community of practice”) can be part of the community. Interactions in these communities are often socio-technical: members not only interact with each other but also with technologies (software, source code, infrastructures, computers, hardware). Also, members of these communities usually are not constrained by geographical locations. As such, inventing, adopting and learning to manipulate new information and communication technologies to facilitate collaboration and communication between members is key to the success of community building. Time is an interesting element in these communities in several aspects and through this workshop I am hoping to develop methodologies and conceptual frameworks for understanding the role of time in this body of work.

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter and a lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. My field of research is interactivity in interdisciplinary artistic practices. More specifically, I focus on durational performative scores, such as Wolf Vostell’s Yellow Pages, or Alison Knowles Identical Lunch. E.g. Yellow Pages presents the performer with a page from the New York Yellow Pages and suggests that during one month they buy the quantities of groceries indicated in the World War II lebensmittelkarte at the designated grocers. Identical Lunch instructs the performer to have the same lunch at the designated restaurant for up to a year. My investigation focuses on two aspects of performance: the body’s cycles of construction and destruction and the creation of a community on the periphery of sociality. I seek to articulate the ways in which actional, interoceptive and psychogeographic schemes generated by eating and walking intertwine to create complex patterns of individual-communal remembering-forgetting