Video Art, New Media and

Digital Technology
TEH 2011
OOI AND YOUNG 2011
Key themes

 Art infrastructure in Southeast Asia

 Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia
 Concepts and practices of video/’new media’/digital art
 Artistic themes:
 Media/consumer culture
 Waste and environmental problems
 Urban-rural divides
 Postcolonial history and cultural traditions
 Identity: race, gender, the body
Video

 Video cameras, mobile phones, webcams

 New modes of practice
 Accessible
 User-friendly
 Ubiquitous
 For youth in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, one of the most immediate, 'natural' and
relevant media for self-expression
 Diverse, casual and often whimsical
Video art

 Global emergence of media/video/new media art in the 1960s (Fluxus movement in the
US and the UK, the work of Koreen Nam June Paik, the Japanese Gutai movement)

 Adapting and criticising aspects of the mainstream media and urban culture
 In reaction to what the French philosopher Guy Debord calls ‘The society of the Spectacle’
(1967)
 What is video art?
 ‘An extension of the body’
 based on recordings of performance art
 to create a type of interaction between the work of art and the audience that is different from the ‘live’ event
 An alternative type of film
 presenting various forms of narrative, such as biography, documentary and fiction
 Installation art
 combining video with other artistic media
 containing a spatial, architectural dimension
 New media art
 video technology combined with other electronic media such as computers, disc jockey equipment and mobile phones
 often the audience can make creative contributions to the works of art
 Consumer culture
 almost limitless borrowing from popular genres such as MTV video clips
 aimed at a general public and crossing the boundaries between art and entertainment
What is new media art?

 ‘Media art’: analogue media such as photography and video

 ‘New media art’: digital media, such as computers
 Most video art is a combination of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ media
 It contains digitally modified film and photo images, or uses the older media as a model for the
application of digital technology
 Other critics and artists give a conceptual rather than technological explanation of ‘new
media art’
 In general, new media art goes beyond the art world as such
 It is both a part of and reflection on social life in general
A diversity of media and formats

 Images cross different formats

 Film, performance, installation and online media
 On a large flat screen
 Often a play on notions of the picturesque in mainstream film
 In a cinema
 Drawing the viewers closer in to the narratives and personalities than in conventional cinema
 As immersive art installations
 A rich sense of place, strong interactivity, disjointed narratives
 Different and changing displays
 Shifting the work's material, spatial and social frameworks
‘The programme of video’

 Video is not just about images, but about the the socio-technical parameters within which
it is made
 A need for contextualisation:
 Who has had access to video, as producers or consumers?
 How has it been distributed?
 How has it interacted with other, older media?
 What does it make possible that was not possible with earlier technologies?
 Is this activity informed by the medium's Euro-American history and aesthetics?
 What are the local conventions and histories that inform its production and secure its legibility?
‘Southeast Asia’

 In the context of World War II and the Cold War

 ‘A product of the imperial-military (British, Japanese and American) imagination’
 Host to Chinese, Indian and Arab visitors for centuries before the arrival of the Europeans
 Global and intra-regional economic and cultural exchange
 Characterised by strong cultural hybridity
Contemporary art in Southeast Asia

 Building institutional infrastructure

 art museums, galleries, auction houses and independent art spaces
 The National Gallery Singapore (2016)
 world’s largest display of Southeast Asian contemporary art
 Singapore Art Museum (SAM)
 no items from before the Asian Financial Crisis (1997-1998)
 collection is restricted to art from Southeast Asia, East Asia and Iran
 Limited but growing art research and art history
 art history is related to political and socio-economic history
 Strong growth of the Southeast Asian art market since the 1990s
Southeast Asian digital/new media/video art

 Remediation of art traditions

 Thematic and narrative engagement with popular and folk traditions
 Improvisation, play, found/‘mixed’ realities
 Generally avoiding didactic aesthetics
 Beyond colonial chronologies, Cold War geographies or Western fine art hierarchies
 In reaction to various forms of authoritarianism in the region
 A social process rather than a finished product
 The rise of Indonesian digital art (see handout and this link:
https://www.policyforum.net/rise-indonesian-digital-art/
Singapore Art Museum and the National
Gallery Singapore
http://23princessroad.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/censoored-by-sinagpore-art-museum-again/
http://www.stylebyasia.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/04-THe-curved-veil-signing-the-entrance-of-National-Gallery-Singapore.jpg
 S. Sudjojono

Pasukan kita yang dipimpin oleh pangeran Diponegoro (1979)

Nyoman Masriadi

The man from Bantul (2000)

Digital photography and historiography:
Agan Harahap

Sejarah x 6
 Digital art collaboration and collectivity:
The House of Natural Fiber (HONF), Yogyakarta

Micronation/macronation: Democratizing the energy (2012)

 Renewable energy:
Micronation/macronation (2012-)

HONF, Yogyakarta
Micronation/macronation (2012-)

HONF
All-female new media art collective: XXLab

Yogyakarta
Domestic hacking

XXLab
Recycling waste: Soya c(o)u(l)ture (2015)

XXLab
Soya c(o)u(l)ture (2015)

XXLab
Winner, Prix Ars Electronica 2015, Linz

XXLab
Lifepatch

Yogyakarta
 Environmental pollution:
Jogja River Project 2011-current

Lifepatch
Jogja River Project 2011-current

Lifepatch
Jogja River Project 2011-current

Lifepatch
Art and environment: Banyu Mili (2015)

Lifepatch, Jakarta Biennale 2015

Art and hacking culture: Biennale Jogja 2015
The work of Krisna Murti (Indonesia)

 Born in 1957
 Graduated in 1981 from the prestigious Indonesian arts academy at Institut Teknologi Bandung
(Bandung Institute of Technology)
 Experimentation with poetry, painting, printmaking, collage, photography, performance and
installation art
 In the early 1990s, Murti became the first Indonesian artist to intensively use the medium of video
 Over two decades, he has created approximately 50 new media art projects
 He is also a lecturer at Institut Seni Indonesia (Indonesian Institute of the Arts) in Yogyakarta
 He has written numerous essays and newspaper articles on video art
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxHzzZbgdiQ
Religion and ethnicity

 Murti has a mixed Javanese-Balinese background

 This enables him to freely adopt and take critical distance
from both Islamic and Hindu-Buddhist traditions and other
aspects of Javanese and Balinese cultures
 Murti prefers spontaneous bonds between individuals with
similar interests and ideas, to communal claims based on
preconfigured notions of nationality, ethnicity or religion
Media, gender and the body

 Murti’s
collages examine how mass communication and
consumer culture influence people’s positioning of the self
 including their notions of gender and the physical shape of their
bodies
 They show how the mass media, especially advertisements,
are perceived by the human senses and have a direct impact
on the body and nerve system
A ‘televisual meta-discourse’

 In his creative work, lectures and writings, Murti has expressed

special concern about the mass media, particularly television
 His work explores how these media have influenced politics,
culture and society, and changed people’s notions of time, space,
body and gender
 The work is not solely cutting-edge contemporary art, but should
also be viewed in the broader context of recent developments in
media and society
A form of television critique

 Krisna Murti’s work shares the same context with:

 viewers sending letters to newspaper editors complaining about the
quality of Indonesian television
 media scholars and observers writing books with titles such as
Matikan TV-mu! (‘Shut down your TV!’; Sunardian Wirodono 2006)
 the Komisi Penyiaran Indonesia (Indonesian Broadcasting
Commission) urging radio and television organisations to improve
their production and broadcasting standards
‘Video Spa’ (2004)
A therapy for the body and mind

 The catalogue presents ‘Video spa’ as an alternative spa treatment

for the eyes (mata) as well as for the mind (mata hati)
 The video installation establishes direct links between three human aspects: the senses, the body
and the mind
 This is inspired by ideas from Balinese Hindu-Buddhist culture, but also refers to the reality of
modern everyday life

 A ‘video therapy’ with slow, aesthetic and relaxing images and

sounds of waterfalls, pools, flowers and animals
A form of media ecology

 Not only about people trying to find enlightenment and to

escape samsara through reflection and meditation
 Also about a therapy to cure people of the ordeals of
internationalised Indonesian media culture
 An alternative to the fast, noisy and intimidating messages of
contemporary television genres such as commercials, music
shows, soap operas and infotainment
‘Albino Karabao #1’ (2010)

 The centrepiece of ‘Albino Karabao #1’ (2010) is a clownish wayang

face in front of a perfume shop at an airport
 The figure, Murti’s impersonation of the humorous wayang character
Gareng, looks straight into the camera
 He addresses the viewers directly, and provides them with a mirror
that shows the ridicule of their consumer behaviour
 It also functions as a parody of contemporary social media culture
 It could be seen as perhaps the world’s first wayang selfie
‘Albino Karabao’ (2010)
 Media hypes

 ‘The Bubbles’ (2003) represent national and international television icons that enjoyed
great popularity in Indonesia at the beginning of the 21st century
 By showing them as floating bubbles, Murti suggests the fragility as well as the
mysterious and unknown sources of the popularity of these and many other media figures
 Their popularity has been at the cost of classical art traditions such as bedaya
 Traditions which have unavoidably turned into ‘media bubbles’ themselves
 Due to their exposure to all sorts of mediation and commercialisation processes
‘The Bubbles’ (2003)
Reconnecting youth with tradition

 ‘Empty Time’ (2002): Slow-motion images of classical

bedaya dance from the sultan’s palace in Surakarta
 The visual effect created by the manipulation of the
images was meant to attract the attention of youth
 A group that had lost interest in the traditional arts
 Dueto their high exposure to the speed and density of modern
communication technologies
‘Empty Time’ (2002)
Old stories, new media

 ‘Wayang Machine’ (2002)

 The video tells the story of Bhisma
 one of the main characters of the canonical wayang epic Mahabharata
 Bhisma’s internal conflict represents the tension between Indonesia’s troubled past and
its aspirations for an uncertain future
 Murti recorded dance movements of the Balinese performer Made Sidia
representing the different characters in the story
 He then manipulated the images to resemble the two-dimensional shape of
the leather puppets used in wayang kulit
‘Wayang Machine’ (2002)
Stimulating creative imagination

 Murti attempted to contrast the mechanisms of wayang theatre with those of the
mass media
 the mass media offer mere imagery with not much for the audience to think or
fantasise about
 the shadows of wayang theatre stimulate the audience’s imagination
 they allow the audience to construct their own story or ‘play the video that is inside of
them’
 Murti has found a successful fusion between the use of advanced technology on the
one hand, and established styles and methods that promote contemplation and
creativity on the other
The remediation of art

 Strong link between fine arts and other forms of creativity

 Performance art, music, textiles, ritual traditions
 Arahmaiani: feminist interpretation of the Ramayana
 an Indian epic narrative found across the region
 Ho Tzu Nyen: theatrical deconstruction of Singapore's foundation myths, colonial and
oral histories
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qAgYzmR1sU
Arahmaiani ‘Not for sale’(1996)
http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2003/arahmaiani/photos/img_06
Ho Tzu Nyen ‘The cloud of
unknowing’(2011)
http://arttattler.com/archivemoveonasia.html
Araya Rasjdamrearnsook:
‘Two Planets Series’ (2008-09)

 Villagers from the artist's neighbourhood in northern Thailand sit in peaceful rural settings
 In front of reproductions of masterpieces of Western modern painting
 They try to make sense of the images
 Art is temporarily demystified
 ‘It becomes a mere thing-in-the-world again, a pretext for idle talk, local gossip and bawdy
jokes’
Araya Rasjdamrearnsook
https://www.google.com.au/search?
q=Araya+Rasdjarmrearnsook&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi22ePu1_3TAhUEKJQKHVxVB5AQ_AUIBigB&biw=1600&bih=791#imgrc=Jb0olgiLJ5YjNM:
Video art in Malaysia

 Since the late 1980s

 In the broader context of alternative cultural discourses and media
 Including cultural documentation, experimental film, social advocacy and education
projects
 Themes:
 Cross-disciplinary practice
 The body in performance
 The influence of new media technology
 Cultural space and conflict
Education and institutionalisation

 1994: SONY Video Art Festival

 1997: first Electronic Art Show at the National Art Gallery
 2000: Flow-Arus: Electronic Media Art from Australia and Malaysia
 1994-2005: Annual Malaysia Video Awards
 2010: Malaysia-Japan Video Art Exchange (MNAX)
 National Art Gallery's Young Contemporaries Award
 E-Art ASEAN Online
The work of Wong Hoy Cheong

 Re: Looking 2002-2003

 Mockumentary: Adopting the format of historic-cultural documentary
 To re-imagine a postcolonial reality in which Austria is a former colony of the Malaysian empire
 Reversing media perceptions of economic and cultural hegemony
 Touching on issues such as migration, racial tension, social inequality, political imprisonment and
historical revisionism
 Deconstructing the impact of television media on the interpretation of politics, culture and history
 In later works, the artist gives the camera to other participants in his projects
 To enable alternative viewpoints
Re: Looking 2002-2003 (Wong Hoy Cheong)
http://www.aaa.org.hk/Diaaalogue/Details/519
http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2004/wong_hoy_cheong/photos/img_02
Nur Hanim Khairuddin's Se(rang)ga (2003)

 ‘A strong critique of Western mainstream media's projection of Islam and more generally
the power of images to influence perception’
 An accelerating montage of sounds and images from the mainstream media
 Osama and Bush, stereotypes of 'fundamentalist' Islam, the 'licentious' West, war and
devastation, a soundtrack of war chants and electric grunge
 In the context of the complexity of Malaysia's social, political and religious make-up
 Its self-positioning as a model of a modern Islamic society and a multi-racial country
Nur Hanim Khairuddin
http://universes-in-universe.de/specials/ivg/tour/e-img-23.htm
Interdisciplinary practice

 The collective Five Arts Centre: platform for inter-disciplinary practice in the 1980s and
1990s
 Combining theatre, dance, music and visual arts
 Often including multi-channel video art, animation, live video feeds and video projections
 Skin Trilogy (1995)
 Rama & Sita: Generasi Baru (1996)
Five Arts Centre ‘Wayang fajar’ (2009)
http://www.fiveartscentre.org/pf07.php
PopTeeVee

 Internet-based network developed by technopreneurs Hardesh Singh and Adam William

 Using social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and personal blogs to
break down traditional hierarchies of distribution
 Alternative programming to create a more democratic media space
 Satirical new programmes
 Appropriating and changing the styles of mainstream television and popular culture
 Shifting audience attention away from the 'maker/author' towards more fluid ideas of
creative participation
 Dependent on who is sharing or recommending the link or programme
PopTeeVee
http://www.loyarburok.com/2010/05/20/the-lb-tee-party/
Key questions

 What is video art/new media/digital art?

 What are some of the characteristics of these contemporary art forms in
Indonesia/Southeast Asia?
 How are the works displayed and distributed?
 How do artists and collectives engage with socio-political issues and collaborate
with local communities?
 What are some of the themes and styles of Krisna Murti’s video art?
 Which themes and styles can be found in new media art from Thailand and
Malaysia?