Pad.ma is a web-based video archive, launched as a public website http://pad.ma in February 2009, that works primarily with footage and not finished films. Pad.ma’s interface offers some exciting new ways in which moving images, timelines, text and maps can be linked. It offers a practical technical and legal framework through which footage can be shared. It makes an appeal for thinking about film and video “production” in a number of different ways: as a filmmaker publishing video that is not a film, as a film editor organising footage using the archive, as a writer across one or many video clips, as a scholarly researcher or film student contributing notes or using links to clips as references, as a filmmaker reusing another’s material, as a programmer building further applications using pad.ma’s open source software base, for example.

Pad.ma a collaborative project initiated by five organizations: oil21.org from Berlin, the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore, and three organisations from Mumbai: Majlis, Point of View and Chitrakarkhana/CAMP. The entire archive is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non-commercial purposes. This offline exhibition reveals the many potential ways in which pad.ma can be used.