Sudipto Basu
Sudipto Basu is a second year PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies, Concordia University. His ongoing research is about the entanglement of the Cold War-era discourses of population management with infrastructure projects and developmental experiments in the Global South, particularly India. He is a research associate on the Against Catastrophe project (PI: Prof. Orit Halpern), which is a part of the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded Governing Through Design research cluster. He has previously worked on the intersections of experimental cinema since the Cold War, cybernetics and the Anthropocene; post-war Bombay cinema’s political economy and the experimental turn in Films Division India. His written work has been published in APRJA, IIC Quarterly and Critical Collective, and a video essay he co-directed, Tracts of Dust (2018), has shown in Bangkok Biennial and Little Cinema International Festival, Kolkata, among other venues.
| Since 2021 | PhD Student in Film and Moving Image Studies, Concordia University, Montreal |
| 2019-2021 | PhD Student and UGC-Senior Research Fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (Discontinued) |
| 2019 | M.Phil in Cinema Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi |
| 2017 | M.A. in Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata |
| 2012 | B.Tech in Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Durgapur |
- Histories of cybernetics and new media
- Population experiments in the Global South
- Media Infrastructure Studies
- Environmental humanities
- Political economy of media
- Piracy & Shadow Libraries
- Experimental cinema
- The politics of film genres
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Basu, Sudipto. “Blessed are the seeders, for they shall inherit the ratio: The techno-politics of filesharing in a private BitTorrent tracker.” Senses of Cinema Issue #105: Cinema and Piracy. Forthcoming, 2023.
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Basu, Sudipto. “The Presence of Others Affects Me: On the Mutuality of Cinema and BitTorrent Piracy.” Media Fields issue #18: Mutuality. In press, late 2023.
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Basu, Sudipto. “The Riddle of Parallel Cinema: The Film Finance Corporation (FFC) as a Compromise Formation.” Critical Collective. In press, February 2023.
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Basu, Sudipto. “Leapfrogging Modernity: The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE).” ASAP | art. In press, February 2023.
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Basu, Sudipto. “Early (European) Film Modernisms: The Legacy of the Interwar Film/Art Avant-Gardes,” in Film Studies: An Introduction, edited by Vebhuti Duggal, Bindu Menon and Spandan Bhattacharya. Delhi & Kolkata: Worldview Publications, 2022.
- Basu, Sudipto, Özgün Eylül İşcen, and Geoffrey Aung – as Logistical (B)orders. “Refusal to be Refused: On Modes of Resistance to Logistical Capital in the Global South.” Peer-Reviewed Newspaper, Vol 10 No. 1 (2021): Research Refusal. https://darc.au.dk/fileadmin/DARC/newspapers/research_refusal.pdf
- Basu, Sudipto. “Cynical Realism and the Immobility of the Contemporary,” India International Centre Quarterly, Winter 2020–Spring 2021, Vol. 47, Nos. 3 & 4, Special Issue – ‘Indian Cinema Today and Tomorrow: Infrastructure, Aesthetics, Audiences,’ edited by Subhajit Chatterjee, Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, S.V. Srinivas and Omita Goyal. https://www.academia.edu/50924170/
- Basu, Sudipto. “On the Ends of the Network as a Zone of Friction (and Extraction),” APRJA Vol. 9 No. 1: Research Networks, edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Geoff Cox. August 2020. https://aprja.net//article/view/121486/168860
- Basu, Sudipto. “The Sarkari 'Information Film' and its Discontents: Notes on experimental Films Division productions circa 1967-69.” Critical Collective, February 2020. https://www.academia.edu/40950584/
- Co-Rapporteur, What Time Is It? Conference, organized by Sarai-CSDS, New Delhi, December, 2017. See report here.
- Co-organizer, In/Convenience conference (zoom), organized by Global Emergent Media Lab and Platform Lab, Concordia University, Montreal, April, 2022.
- Co-editor (with Jan Dutkiewicz), “Ukraine Dispatch,” Against Catastrophe, June 2022. https://againstcatastrophe.net/ukrainedispatch
- Basu, Sudipto. “KaraGarga: The Antinomies of a Private Torrenting Network.” Platforms symposium, Configurations of Film, Goethe University Frankfurt, October 27-29 2022.
- Basu, Sudipto. “Infrastructural Sabotage as Liberation of General Intellect,” transmediale 2021 Research Refusal workshop, Video conferencing, 21-22 January 2021.
- Basu, Sudipto. “A Cinema of Geotrauma: On the Ambivalence of Demolition in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (2006),” Deleuze and Guattari World Congress 2020, organized by Centre for Culture Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, February 20-22, 2020.
- Basu, Sudipto. “The Ends of the Network as Frontiers of Extraction,” at transmediale 2020 Research Networks workshop, Berlin, January 28-February 1, 2020.
- Basu, Sudipto. “Must we meet monsters at the end of the world?,” at Critical Zone, organized by University of Hamburg, Hamburg, February 21-22, 2019.
- Basu, Sudipto. “Cybernetics, General Economy and the possibilities of a Universal Discipline,” at Disciplinarity in the Digital Age, organized by Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, January 10-12, 2019.
- Basu, Sudipto. “Sensory Precarity and the Big Data condition: a detour through experimental cinema,” at Digitality and Communication: The Cultural Logic of Data Societies, organized by Dept. of Communication, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, September 5-7, 2018.
- Basu, Sudipto. “Before Its Time: The Global Imaginaries of the Experiments at Films Division,” at Encountering World Cinema in India, organized by Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, November 3-4, 2016.
Teaching Associate, Film History (with Prof. David Douglas), Concordia University, Winter 2023.
- Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS)
- Global Emergent Media Lab, Concordia University
- Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Working Group – Sound and Technology