THE INTER-SOCIETY FOR THE ELECTRONIC ARTS ISEA NEWSLETTER #90 ISSN 1488-3635 #90 December 2002 - January 2003 _______________________________________________________________ * CONTENTS * * REFLECTIONS ON ISEA2002 by Cynthia Beth Rubin * ISEA MEMBERSHIP OFFER * ISEA BOARD ELECTIONS * EDITORIAL by Special Guest Editor Gunalan Nadarajan * NEW MEDIA ART IN KOREA By Eunhye Chung * NEW MEDIA ART IN THE PHILIPPINES: THE BEND IN THE ROAD By Fatima Lasay * NET CULTURE IN INDIA By Nancy Adajania * THE CHALLENGE WE ALL HAVE TO FACE By Young Hay * CYBERARTS IN SINGAPORE By Gunalan Nadarajan In a separate attachment: * Conferences/Symposia/Workshops/Festivals * Exhibitions * Calls * Jobs * Lists/URLs/Newsletters * ******************************************************************** ***************************************** REFLECTIONS ON ISEA2002 By Cynthia Beth Rubin (ISEA Board Member) ***************************************** Turning the Tables on Diversity Culture. Geography. Economics. These are the seemingly separate categories that academics use to understand our societies. Presumably ISEA falls into the Culture category, positioned at the forefront of evolving artistic culture. ISEA's mission, however, "advocates a culturally diverse community, which stimulates a global promotion and development of electronic art practices." The push for Cultural Diversity within ISEA takes many forms. We want to make participation in ISEA more available to more people. To this, we know that we need to address not only Culture, but Geography and Economics as well. The Cultural Diversity Committee has been discussing how to address these issues, with a flood of good ideas, and hopefully with a burst of energy. As we work for more inclusion, we need to take a moment to understand what this first Asian ISEA did to expand the cultural understanding of those of us who have had the privilege of being involved in ISEA for many years. ISEA2002 gave me the gift of other. In Japan, I experienced being 'other' for the first time in many years. My previous travels, from Siberia to Morocco, had only taken me to places where I could blend in, where, until I uttered an accented word or struggled with language, I could pass as local. In Japan, I was always an outsider, always on the edge, knowing that even if I broke through language that I would never pass as a local because of my looks. ISEA2002 challenged my ideas of place. Before and during ISEA we heard criticism that Japan was too far for 'most people'. Since demographically Japan is exceptionally crowded, with many highly populated countries nearby, who are 'most people?' I saw the world literally from the other side. My stop in Hong Kong, combined with visits in Japan, reminded me that this side of the world is filled with exciting evolving culture just as much as my side of the world. It made me think: Maybe there is another side of cultural diversity. Maybe there are ISEA like organizations in Asia that would reach out to people like me. ISEA2002 still suffered from economic problems. We live in a global economy, and as the wealth of empowered nations slipped, the ripples were felt by the ISEA2002 organizers, who had to give up hope of being able to subsidize artists from other parts of the world. Rather than sympathize with the enormous volunteer effort that our hosts put into organizing this event with limited resources, many people who were not able to come blamed this on cultural insensitivity. We might see this from the other side. Our Japanese hosts opened the door for more global communication. The art exhibition at ISEA2002 was a wonderful mix of Japanese and International work. While it is regrettable that there were not more opportunities for panels which included both Japanese and non-Japanese presentations, the exhibitions attracted many Japanese visitors. Wandering the exhibition floor I truly felt the pleasures of sharing of the experiences of absorbing new ideas in a cross-cultural context, by exchanging casual glances with many visitors from the Nagoya public. The concert that I attended, on Tuesday evening of ISEA2002, was similarly played to a wonderful mixed audience. ISEA still has a long way to go in developing strategies to becoming a more inclusive organization. ISEA2002, however, taught me once again that my world view is not the only one, and that Diversity is a multi-faceted issue, or at the very least, a two-way street. ******************** ISEA BOARD ELECTIONS ******************** In a special elections edition of the ISEA Newsletter that has been sent to you this month, you have been introduced to the 10 candidates for the ISEA Board of Directors. At the end of that document, you will find a ballot with which to cast your votes for the 4 candidates you most feel would bring vision, dynamism, and a commitment to furthering the goals and mission of ISEA. Remember, as members, this is your opportunity to be a part of shaping the future development of ISEA. We greatly look forward to hearing from you! You have until December 10, 2002 to send us your completed ballot by fax or by email. Thank you all for your participation! ********************* ISEA MEMBERSHIP OFFER ********************* ISEA would like to welcome and thank its over 50 new members for joining the ISEA network. During our recent membership drive, we have seen a huge rise in membership, both from those taking advantage of our special associate membership offer, and those joining as individual, student or institutional members. We would like to thank everyone that has shown support for ISEA - please keep spreading the word! Please note that the above mentioned membership offer is valid until December 31, 2002. ************************ EDITORIAL By SPECIAL GUEST EDITOR GUNALAN NADARAJAN ************************ The art world has its centres and peripheries - the centres generate the primary discourses and practices that determine the trends and parameters of the possible and the significant while the peripheries reflect their anxiety about the centres by blindly mimicking them or vehemently rejecting them. And in some cases the peripheries just do not know of and therefore care about their peripheral status. Globalization however has, some argue, complicated such distinctions and made them difficult to sustain. It has been argued that there are no centres and peripheries in a globalized world as geographical and cultural distinctions have been made irrelevant by radical developments in transportation, communication and information technologies. While it is tempting and sometimes even useful to assume such effects of globalization, it has been obvious that the globalized world is not one without centres and peripheries but one where these notions operate differently. The notions of centres and peripheries are nowhere more apparent than in the art world where the exhibition circuits, curatorial leverage and artistic discourses and practices issue from and are sustained by certain geographical areas and cultures. The new media arts, being technologically intensive and relatively new, symptomatize this tendency. The fact that those countries that have come to occupy more central roles in the creation and critical discussion of new media arts have relatively little knowledge of what goes on in this field in other more peripheral parts of the world exacerbates this tendency. This newsletter on the Asian new media art scene seeks to redress this situation by providing an initial foray into the new media art scene in Asia. While the idea of the newsletter was to provide as comprehensive a picture of the Asian new media scene as possible, it was also important to acknowledge the fact that at least one Asian country, Japan, has traditionally occupied central position within new media, while some others like Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia have primarily because of economic underdevelopment not effectively entered the scene yet. Though countries like Thailand and Indonesia do have some interesting practitioners in new media it was not possible to gather adequate information for the country reports. The Indonesian new media scene is especially noteworthy insofar as there has been a major annual video and new media art festival held in Bandung. The Malaysian new media artists have played a leading role in the Southeast region but due to unforeseen circumstances it was not possible to get the report from them on time for publication. In this newsletter thus, there are several country reports from namely India, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Philippines. The idea of the reports was not to provide readers with a comprehensive historical survey of the development of the new media scene in each country but to provide a brief overview of the new media scenes there based on specific reference points, media, events, institutions and/or movements involved since the developments in new media arts have always been scattered, multiple and rather non-linear. The newsletter thus presents the diverse approaches and peculiarities of new media art developments in these societies so as to enable a better appreciation of their aesthetic, socio-cultural and technological concerns. The new media practitioners of Asia are, it seems, ready and able to move out of the peripheries and inject fresh conceptual and cultural insights on the emerging technologies. ********************** New Media Art in Korea By Eunhye Chung ********************** South Korea is one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world. The rate of its broadband connection and mobile phone subscription are among the highest in the world. Until recently, new media art has had a fairly low presence in the arts scene, but there are many moves towards imbuing this rich context with rich content. There are a few art galleries regularly hosting new media art exhibitions. Art Center Nabi (www.nabi.or.kr) in Seoul specializes in new media art with a mandate to bring together art and technology. In September 2002, Nabi hosted an international symposium entitled, <Extension: Wireless Art and Culture> along with an exhibition of Maurice Benayoun's first wireless art piece, <Watch Out>. In 2001, Lee, Zune led a group of 12 artists and engineers to create an ambitious interactive installation entitled 'Trialogue' (http://www.nabi.or.kr/e/). In this work, the artists attempted to have a dialogue between three subjects; the human, the natural, and the virtual. Also in Seoul, Ilju Art House (http://iljuarthouse.org) has a media gallery, archive, editing studio and a theatre with a focus on video art and independent film. Also notable is ArtSonje Center (www.artsonje.org), a contemporary art gallery which has recently exhibited a successful exhibition of Tatsuo Miyajima's new media works. Two examples of the City of Seoul's initiatives include <media_city Seoul> biennale (www.mediacityseoul.org), and the Digital Media Seoul Project (http://www.dmc.seoul.kr/english), which is to be constructed on the ground of 2002 Korea-Japan WorldCup Stadium area. Under the theme of Luna's Flow, <media_city Seoul> brought 79 media artists including 37 Korean artists and 42 international artists, and 50 web artists. The website of <media_city Seoul> is designed by Kim, Suzung, one of the most important Korean digital artists who has also exhibited on Nabi website, (http://www.nabi.or.kr/e/exhibitions/online/grids.html). The piece, entitled 'Grid' is a simple and poetic set of interactive digital piece all based on the same rectilinear grid. Other notable Korean artists presented at media_city Seoul include Hong Sung Chul (http://www.sunghong.com/) and Codi Choi. Although there are growing numbers of new media works and exhibitions, the growth is dwarfed by the ratio of new media technology saturation in everyday life. Art remains somewhat separate from the lives of average Koreans, whereas digital experiences are abundant and everyday. Throughout the city, one can find PC rooms, game rooms, people speaking into their mobile phones, thumbing away their text messages. The situation in Korea is unique owing to high broadband and wireless penetration combined with the nascent and yet dynamic new media art activity. This unique situation in Korea challenges us, those who are working in the field of new media art in Korea, to find creativity and artistry not only in the art fields, but in-between where art, technology and culture meet. Eunhye Chung Curator Art Center Nabi, Seoul, S.Korea eunhye@nabi.or.kr www.nabi.or.kr ****************************************************** New Media Art in the Philippines: the Bend in the Road By Fatima Lasay ****************************************************** >From the spirit of the avant-garde in the late 1950's to the apparatus-related and electronic experimentation in the 1970's, a few Filipino artists took the turn towards the digital computer beginning in the early 1980's in the investigation of human-computer interface issues and developments. Some of the first public displays of analog and digital computer graphics were 'Wege zur Computerkunst' at the Heritage Art Center and an exhibition of mathematical art at the Ayala Museum. In the late 1980's, computers began to become tied into networks, finding places from businesses to a few homes. Notable venues for the production and distribution of digital art then were the bulletin board systems (BBS's). These small electronic communities also allowed programmers to touch base with a few artists in the initial exploration of computer code as expressive medium in literature, music and the visual arts. As command-line interfaces gave way to graphical user interfaces, more artists entered the realm of computers. With Internet access in 1993, artists and programmers worked together to put some of the first virtual galleries online. Initiatives came from San Carlos University in Cebu City, and in Manila through the pioneering efforts of technology enthusiast Jim Ayson. Independently, young artist Dino Ignacio unveiled 'Bert is Evil,' winning in the Weird Category of the 1998 Webby Awards and earning a cult following on the Internet. Museums and galleries also began showing digital works, notably the inclusion of Al Manrique's laser prints in Limbag-Kamay (hand-printed) '400 Years of Philippine Printmaking' at the Luz Gallery in 1993. Young artist Ricky Aragon presented vector drawings in a solo exhibition at the Ayala Museum in 1995. Since then, a number of established painters began including digital works in their exhibitions, and younger generation experimentalists pushing code, form and genre. One of the earliest efforts to organize artists using computers in art and advertising were the IdN Club in 1996 and eArt Philippines in 2000. Annual expositions such as Graphic Expo in Manila, and others in Cebu and Baguio City, highlighted creative developments in the use of digital tools in film, animation, video and music. In 1995, the University of the Philippines, College of Fine Arts introduced the use of digital imaging software, artificial intelligence, and algorithms to produce music and images. Today, a number of educational institutions, like Lasalle-College of Saint Benilde, offer multimedia arts as fields of specialization. National art competitions such as those sponsored by Shell Philippines and the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP) also started accepting digital works. The Instituto Cervantez's 'Letras y Figuras' (letters and figures) would likewise begin considering digital works in the annual painting competition focused on a unique art form from the mid-nineteenth century. New media has also enlarged the audience and the disciplinary repertoire of the Filipino artist. In 2001, fineArt forum hosted 'Geocentricity', a web-based exhibition by seven Filipino digital artists working with scientists at the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology. 'Geocentricity' is now part of the Leonardo On-Line Gallery (MIT Press). The same year, 'Gimokud, the Melting Soul' was completed, a wholly Internet-based project that depicted the ancient Philippine myth of the interrupted existence of the soul. "Gimokud" comprised fifty-two digital works by thirty-two Filipino digital artists in collaboration with twenty-three artists and writers from ten different countries. In 2000, the UP College of Fine Arts launched Digital Media Festival (DMF), establishing links with international new media practitioners Takahiko Iimura and Nisar Keshvani, and events such as Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific (Australia), fineArt forum's Travelling Screening Programme, and 2 Mostra Interpoesia (Brazil). DMF2002 took new media further in an installation work that investigated archaeological studies with artists Noell El Farol and Roberto Feleo. DMF was initiated to promote a pluralist perspective towards the use of technologies in artistic work. New media as indispensible design and production tool has been well established in the country but remain marginalized in the literary and arts sector as expressive media. Nevertheless, a few artists continue to express themselves with the new technologies, journeying towards interdisciplinarity and meaningful interactivity to enable the participation of society at large in the genesis of new forms of expression worldwide. ..... Fatima Lasay <fats@up.edu.ph> obtained her BFA (Industrial Design) and MFA at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts where she currently serves as assistant professor. Lasay's new media projects include 'Manipulation' (2000, Galeri Situ, Manila), 'Geocentricity' and 'Gimokud the Melting Soul' (2001, on-line) and 'DMF2000-2002' (Corredor Gallery, Manila). Lasay's wesbite is at http://digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph/digiteer/ ******************** Net Culture in India By Nancy Adajania ******************** I will cast my discussion of Net culture in the context of Indian art in the form of a prognostication, rather than a description of current events. Although very few Indian artists have engaged meaningfully with the resources of cyberspace, there are incipient signs which suggest that virtual art practices will undoubtedly play an important role in future cultural production in India. I am convinced, also, that they will transform the way in which the Indian art world is structured, changing the profile of its constituency, and bringing it into relationship with seemingly unrelated fields such as those of quantum physics and political activism. Critically what this means is that art in India will no longer be only a consumerist aesthetic product of the gallery cocoon, but will extend itself through the Net as a radical political practice in the public sphere. The Net best serves as a site of political and cultural resistance, when allied to real-world bases of resistance. I would therefore draw attention to the subcultures and venues from which Net-based art practices may emerge: new online and offline communities of users, viewers and players, including computer nerds, animators, architects, designers, cultural theorists and political activists, groups outside the traditional community of academy-trained fine artists and art-gallery viewers. These telematic subcultures may well produce a new democratisation in the realm of art. It would also be of interest to speculate on how artists may deal with the aesthetic possibilities of virtual art while remaining conscious of the changes that the advent of the Net has triggered off in India's socio-cultural and economic hierarchies. Already we see how artists like Baiju Parthan and Shilpa Gupta and the Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) have variously used the protocols and the architecture of the Net as its medium. While Parthan and Gupta are both academically trained artists, Bagchi, Narula and Sengupta are new media practitioners primarily trained as documentary filmmakers. Raqs has initiated the Opus Project (An Open Platform for Unlimited Signification), an online space that allows for 'an extensible multiplicity of meanings and authorial agencies'. Opus questions the proprietorial intention of such arrangements as copyright and emphasises the creative role of collaboration. It is significant that many new media artists in India are able to connect themes and narrative devices from Indic culture with the fictive modes of global cyber culture: consider the epic principle of recension on which Opus is based and the morph as avatar and alias in the case of Parthan and Gupta. However, while we celebrate the radical possibilities of Net art, let us recall that the mere fact of cyber-access and a nascent cyber-community do not translate automatically as emancipation, or a guarantee of democracy. This is the interface at which artists and theorists can work with technological innovators, in the future, as ethical and political agents of change. Together, they can set up counter-republics in virtual space, dynamising the dispersed cyber-community of the present into a coherent public force. ...... Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist and film-maker, based in Bombay. She was Editor-in-Chief of the arts journal Art India from 2000 to 2002. Most recently, Adajania presented a series of lectures on new-media art in India and its social and political contexts, at the Lothringerstrasse 13 Laden, Munich (June 2002), the Transmediale Salon, Berlin (June 2002), the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medien/ZKM, Karlsruhe (July 2002) and Documenta 11, Kassel (July 2002). ********************************* The Challenge We All Have To Face By Young Hay ********************************* Due to low taxation and relatively high living standards, Hong Kong people enjoy easy access to electronic technology and services. According to statistics, in June 2002, the population of internet users had soared to 4.4 million of the 7 million residents. Audio-visual entertainment equipment are a necessary feature of most households. However this does not mean that people here are receptive to media art, since a vast majority are still using technology as functional tools or home/office utilities, instead of expressions of humanity. Against this tide, consistent efforts have been made by a number of Hong Kong independent artists, art groups and institutions, who taking advantage of the easy access of information and technology, have activated new artistic spaces. Video art, since its first appearance in early 80s, has evolved to become the major media art genre. Some video artists later turned to explore other genres of media art. Videotage, directed by Ellen Pau, transformed from a video group to an active promoter of media art. Since 1996, the group has organized annual 'Microwave International Media Art Festival', bringing a broadened review of international and local media art development. The shock of the 1989 Tiennanman Square Crackdown and the issue of 1997 transition of political power have prompted an exploration of political and cultural space in Hong Kong. Many artists used installation, very often multi- media, to define the relationship between the social space and the art space. Most of them later grouped together to set up alternative artist-run spaces. Among them, Parasite, Videotage, 1A Space, Z+, Artists Commune, and the short- lived Oil Street, offered favourable environments for artists to experiment multi-media. At the same time, performances such as the theatre of Zuni Icosahedron, the dance of City Contemporary Dance Company, and the musical events of the Box, have been bold to incorporate multi-media elements in their works. Yet despite the ever-growing interest in media art and the availability of media equipment, the discourse on media aesthetics and groundbreaking researches on merging art and technology remain discrete. In an investigation commissioned by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 2000, the development of electronic media art in Hong Kong was reported as 'an alarming underdevelopment'. Digital technology is rapidly evolving and media art and artists thus are constantly challenged with the issue of responding to the time and space revolutionized by these advances. Fortunately, in recent years, more local universities are injecting new energy into the development of media art. Besides training future talents in media art and technology, they have also participated actively in creating works with cutting-edge digital technology. Students and faculty members from the Design School of Hong Kong Polytechnic University have demonstrated a number of interactive works in recent graduate shows. Some technology researchers have also become more open to media art. Computer scientists from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have worked out a multi-perspective modelling technique that enables a 3D fly-through into traditional Chinese landscape painting. The Body-Brush project, a collaborative work between computer scientist Horace Ip, his colleagues and myself in the AIMtech Centre of the City University of Hong Kong, has successfully developed a body-driven interface, with the use of computer vision techniques, to enable humans to interact intuitively with the machine to create a rich variety of visual forms and space within a virtual 3-D canvas. The landscape of media art in Hong Kong is under vigorous reshaping. The Hong Kong Arts Development Council, the main arts funding body in Hong Kong, is evaluating its role in the development of media art. Debates among the artist community are heating up. But the hard job is not just about finding more money, equipment and artistic talent. When talking about showing Body-Brush in Hong Kong, a high level decision-maker said to me: 'I'm still not so sure whether such work should be shown in art museum or science museum.' It seems, the ultimate challenge of media art lies not on how to catch up with the advance of digital technology, but the turning-around of the rejection of technology as expressions of humanity. Obviously, this situation is not unique to Hong Kong. ...... Young Hay has pioneered a series of research projects ranging from body-driven man-machine interface, augmented reality, to visual neuroscience. Currently he works as a research artist in the Center for Media Technology, City University of Hong Kong. *********************** Cyberarts in Singapore By Gunalan Nadarajan *********************** In this report on new media art in Singapore, I would like to contextualise my own curatorial experiences in trying to develop such artistic practices here. As a highly technologized society, the everyday lives of people in Singapore are mediated by an immense variety of technological devices and services. However, despite (and maybe because of) this everyday intimacy with these technologies, artistic explorations of the possibilities of these technologies in Singapore have been relatively limited until very recently. In 2000, when preparing for an exhibition to present works that explore the artistic possibilities of the new technologies in Singapore I chose to employ the term 'cyberarts' so as to articulate a larger framework to understand and discuss such art works. While the term itself has been in currency for a while it had not been theoretically elaborated. The new technologies are basically 'cybertechnologies' insofar as they reflect a cybernetic desire that seeks to translate different physical entities and processes into information. and thereby achieve a certain amount of control and interoperability across platforms. Thus, by inference, the cyberarts refer to all those art forms, practices and processes that are produced and mediated by the continuing developments in cybertechnologies, specifically in information, communication, imaging, experiential, interface and bio-technologies (see my curatorial essay for the exhibition at http://cyberarts.scholars.nus.edu.sg/nsa01). The exhibition 'Cyberarts: Intersections of Art and Technology', which was shown at the Singapore Art Museum in 2001 as part of a larger biennial exhibition was the first exhibition in Singapore where artists featured works specifically created through collaborations with technologists. The works featured included a game patch by Charles Lim, an interactive VR installation by Margaret Tan, and a telepresence work integrating mobile devices, web navigations and performance by tsunami.net. The exhibition was extremely successful in generating a great amount of excitement and discussion about the creative possibilities of art involving new technologies in Singapore. The artists and their works featured there have been selected for several major international exhibitions including Documenta XI in Kassel, Mediacity in Seoul and ISEA in Nagoya. While there had been artists working with computer- generated images, most specifically in digital prints, animation and interactive narrative prior to this, the exhibition provided a coherent framework within which these works could be discussed while aligning local artistic practices with larger international discourses in new media arts. It is useful to note that several national and institutional initiatives in new media art practices have started around this term and the exhibition. For example, there was a major art symposium, 'Art and Life Sciences' organized by the LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts where the socio-cultural implications of biotechnologies was discussed; the National University of Singapore set up a Cyberarts Research Initiative in July 2001; the National Arts Council in Singapore established a New Media Fund in August 2001 to support the production of new media art works; in addition to that there have been several talks and symposia on art and technology organized by a variety of organizations involving speakers as varied as Faith Wilding, Steve Dietz, Gerfried Stocker, Jeffrey Shaw, Mark Amerika and Ken Rinaldo over the last two years. These dramatic developments of the new media in Singapore would also in the future be supported and enhanced by the resonance of some of these artistic investigations with the technological developments in information and communication and biotechnologies that are being emphasized by the government and the national economy. Though the new media art practices and discourses here are relatively recent there is so much ambition and enthusiasm around it, that Singapore is set to play a greater role in this area internationally. ....... Gunalan Nadarajan is an art theorist, curator and writer based in Singapore. He is Dean of the Faculty of Visual Arts at the LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts and Director of the Intermedia Lab, an interdisciplinary research laboratory in Singapore. ********************************************************************* In the attachment to this Newsletter: * Conferences/Symposia/Workshops/Festivals * Exhibitions * Jobs * Calls * Lists/URLs/Newsletters * ********************************************************************* Editor: Gunalan Nadarajan Contributors: Gunalan Nadarajan, Eunhye Chung, Fatima Lasay, Nancy Adajania, Young Hay, Cynthia Beth Rubin. ISEA Board Members: Nina Czegledy, Kathy Rae Huffman, Cynthia Beth Rubin, Peter Anders, Atau Tanaka, Wim van der Plas, Niranjan Rajah. ISEA-HQ: Angela Plohman ISEA LISTSERV: To subscribe, send a message to: Majordomo@pd.org - no subject heading, with this message in the body: subscribe isea-forum ISEA, Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts Pieter de Hoochstraat 38-2 1071 EG Amsterdam, Netherlands Phone ++31-20-6120297 Fax ++31-20-6182359 info@isea-web.org* http://www.isea-web.org ============================================end of newsletter, part 1