New media art in Southeast Asia

ART

The New Media Art in Southeast Asia

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N collaboration with the Association

of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture, the Intermedia Studio at the Faculty of Art and Design (FSRD) of the Institute of Technology Bandung (ITB) organized an international seminar in Bandung last week, on the topic of New Media Art in Southeast Asia: ASEAN New Media Art, Research and Mapping.

The organizers admitted that their task was a Sisyphus-like undertaking, given Southeast Asia's vast geographical area containing a diversity of cultures, including new media cultures. It is, however, a region that has (the threat of) imperialism, (different degrees of) communism, authoritarianism and the 1997 crisis in common.

Moreover, the research was undertaken by only a selective group of researchers: Krisna Murti (to cover Cambodia), Agung Hujatnika (to cover Indonesia and Singapore), Ade Darmawan (to cover the Philippines), all from Indonesia; Hasnul Jamal Saidon (to cover Malaysia and Brunei Darussalam), from Malaysia; Ark Fongsmut (to cover Thailand and Lao PDR), from Thailand; and Nguyen Nhu Huy (to cover Vietnam and Myanmar), from Thailand. It is asking too much at this point in time to include in the research how artistic developments have enveloped in tandem or differentiated across the region through interregional activities, such as biennales, art fairs, festivals and seminars such as this one.

Upon concluding his graduate studies at the art school of Braunschweig, Germany, and his return home to Bandung, Deden Hendan Durahman founded the Intermedia Studio at ITB’s art school in 2007 to meet the demands of prospective students who wanted to work with digital media and to promote an interdisciplinary approach to make better use of the fact that FSRD-ITB is not a stand-alone art school but is part of a technical university. Moreover, this new studio aims to promote interdisciplin-

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Participants of New Media Art in Southeast Asia seminar, Bandung. ary artistic practices that not only connect with the know-how stored in the university, but also connect to a wider global media culture in Bandung in particular, and Indonesia in general.

The first batch of students have already graduated from this new studio, but, of course, it’s too early to conclude what the impacts are of the studio and its students on the arts to the general culture.

Nguyen Nhu Huy was the first speaker to present his research. Huy is an artist, curator (co-curator of the upcoming Singapore Biennale), art critic, poet and artistic director of ZeroStation, an alternative art space.

He does not like the concept of mapping, as it’s reductive. Instead he proposed ‘documenting, collecting and collaborating’ to

look at how media arts have developed in the once closed societies of Vietnam and Myanmar. Huy stressed the importance of the use of Internet after the 2000s; while Internet opened avenues to the outside, it remains an issue to connect to local audiences, especially so in Myanmar. He suggested that this might be aggravated by the stipulations of international donors who support certain forms of esthetics, while not blaming the artists who depend on these funds.

He also emphasized, rightly so, that for this research to work it requires localizing the meanings and uses of media arts.

The second speaker, Agung Hujatnika, gave an overview of Indonesia and Singapore, especially focusing on the former, but also mentioning an important differ-

PHOTO: FSRD-ITB

ence in the media ecology of these countries: the former can be characterized as organized organically and bottom-up, and the latter as structurally regulated and topdown (unfortunately little further analysis was offered). He is the former head curator of the Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, who co-curated the OK Video Festival in 2003, 2005 and 2011. He will be the curator of the upcoming Jogja Biennale XII, is a lecturer at FSRD-ITB and is also the new head of the Intermedia Studio. Like Huy, he discussed terminological issues—and the semantics of the term ‘new’—concerning new media arts. Moreover, these issues are reflected within a historical context. Media arts is no longer new as we can already speak in terms of generations.

Ark Fongsmut continued on Thailand (ignoring Laos altogether). He is the head curator of the Bangkok University Gallery and also studied political science. His presentation was the most coherent of the seminar, perhaps because he mainly focused on Manit Sriwanichpoom and his series of the Pink Man, which is an acerbic take on modern Thai culture, including his own position, through a photographic series of performances in public space. By focusing on photography performance art, he raised the issues of looking at the developments of technology and the socio-cultural and historical backgrounds of contemporary art practices. I know close to nothing of art in Thailand so I cannot judge if coherence is the same as completeness.

Krishna Murti, the fourth speaker, is a video art pioneer, teacher, prolific writer (he wrote Essays on Video Art and New Media: Indonesia and Beyond) and curator.

And he has an upcoming solo exhibition at Salihara in Jakarta. He discussed Cambodia emphasizing the need to take the wider new media culture into consideration; digital tools such as cell phones and websites and Facebook have revolutionized the way we use media in our everyday lives. These days, artists cannot claim to be the avant-garde in the new media culture. However, we should be wary of technological determinism, i.e. that it is either good or bad (see the relationship between Facebook and PRISM, the work of Indonesian Merlyna Lim could be relevant for this project).

The fifth speaker, Hasnul Jamal Saidon, a lecturer and researcher, curator and artist, discussed the need for a localized epistemology for the electronic arts, his preferred term for new media arts, for which he turned to the cosmology of shadow puppetry (which is after all based on moving images; Krisna Murti vividly demonstrated this by moving his hand in front of the projector and in so doing projected shadows onto the screen). To make this localized epistemology explicit, he referred to artistic practices in Malaysia, ignoring Brunei Darussalam, which he justified by claiming that the latter country only has two artists who can be considered electronic artists and they only recently returned home. (It would have been interesting, though, to hear why there are only two artists working with this medium in that country).

The final speaker, Ade Darmawan, artistic director of ruangrupa (which organizes, among many other things, the bi-annual OK Video Festival), was unfortunately a no show, so the Philippines was also not covered. For pragmatic reasons, researchers, with the exception of Krisna Murti, were assigned to two countries. The seminar results will be published in a book next year. However, hopefully, extended work by more researchers will be conducted and with a stronger research methodology. As is often the case with academic research, research questions open up Pandora’s box to ever more questions, such as how do new media art—for the lack of a better term—practices in Southeast Asia relate to the contemporaneity of new media cultures and the multiple, overlapping histories in this region as well as beyond? ● ROY VORAGEN IS A BANDUNG-BASED ART WRITER.

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