Media practices in South Asian streets have a history of using the edit, copy and record/paste function to celebrate a culture of shared usage, gifting, reproduction and low-cost distribution mechanisms for high-value information goods. Backstreet CD burners and basement hard drives combine to produce a thriving network of unofficial info trade. This is one of the reasons why a lot of people from South Asia (those teeming brown billions that are taking over the planet and swiping all the software) are so dangerously clever. They pay less to go to school, they run away from school, and end up learning more than those who pay more to go to school. We call this the ecological and economical utilization of knowledge resources. Some people call this piracy.

The Network of No_des uses driftwood from web searches, messages in data bottles, remixed fragments of Hindi and Bengali film scenes and research notes from Sarai’s ongoing exploration of new media street culture in Delhi to present an array of associational possibilities. We are weaving threads that connect basements in Delhi to depots for migrants in Ellis Island, theology to pornography, lost and found notices to the drying up of a sea, Goethe to (desi) Spiderman, food to forgery and death sentences to internet matrimonials. The paths that you take as you travel between the nodes in The Network of No_des bring you surprises, confirmations and detours and make you come face to face with the fact of yourself as a forager in the undergrowth of the information economy. Next time you hear someone being accused of forgery, remember that they were probably foragers who had somehow lost an “a” during a rough day out in the data forest.

This work considers remixing, which is just another word for foraging in an electronic mode. Remixing, repurposing and re-editing are facts of life, as simple, as pleasurable and as necessary for the reproduction of knowledge and culture as foraging, feeding and fornication are for the reproduction and survival of our humanity.

We would like to thank the authors of the films, texts, reports, websites and other messages that we have repurposed in this work for their conscious and unconscious acts of generosity towards our enterprise. As a colony of conscientious parasites (like the ones that inhabit your gut and keep you healthy by helping you digest your food) we welcome all further repurposing of what we have produced so as to keep the epidemic alive. Come, be infected, and spread our contagion. Share what you know and enjoy!