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SINGAPORE : For the next six days, a number of exhibition venues will be brimming with art works and performances. But don’t expect to see even a single drop of paint, let alone a dancer.
Instead, there’s going to be lots of tangled wires, laptops, headphones, LCD screens, keyboards and flashing lights. And the only “dancer” you’ll catch is a robot named Kubic.
SENSE OF HUMOUR
Close to 800 practitioners of all things artistically electronic or digital are busy rushing around for the ongoing 14th International Symposium on Electronic Art (Isea), which ends next Monday, and us technologically-challenged folk can plug into their world through the various public exhibits.
And guess what? Their world isn’t as complicated as the plot of The Matrix trilogy, but it’s infinitely funnier.
At the Experimenta Play ++ show at Sculpture Square, you can encounter ZiZi the Affectionate Couch, an actual settee that purrs. Or have a look at The Shy Picture, a black-and-white photograph in which the subjects literally run away and hide if you come too close.
Over at the National Museum, where the Isea2008’s Juried Exhibition is, you can “conduct” your own gamelan orchestra, play an interactive game that uses the sense of smell, or try your hand at a modified version of the strategy game Civilizations that takes its cue from Facebook or YouTube.
Artists can quibble and nitpick about the different labels that historically distinguish electronic arts’ many forms Digital, computer, Internet, multi-media. But, Isea artistic director Gunalan Nadarajan assured us they’re all one and the same. These days, you can call it “new media arts”.
Despite the futuristic jargon, the art form has been around for 60 years, with pioneering video and multi-media artists like the late Nam June Paik or the experimental group Fluxus.
NOT TECHNO-GEEKS
Just because a majority of these art works require electricity to exist doesn’t mean it makes them any different. In fact, you’ll be surprised by just how “normal” the art form is.
Many would assume that these new media artists are techno-geeks, but they actually come from different backgrounds: Graphic designers, 2D animators, photographers, traditional painters and even the occasional farm hand.
Neither are they always holed up at home soldering wires or taking gadgets apart. The Singapore-based media art duo Syntfarm spent months living in the Mongolian steppe before coming up with their piece Syntboutique at the National Museum. Think Tiffany’s showcase room but instead of diamonds, you’ve got polymer reproductions of combs, animal skulls, grass and other “artefacts” collected by the artists during their trip.
And, very importantly, these guys do not we repeat, do not worship technology.
Singaporean artist Jason Wee, 30, admitted: “It’s easy to get too fascinated, and technology becomes a fetish, a way of ‘geeking out’.”
His work So Close the Desert Isle comprises three screens that mix 3D and real images of the waters off Pedra Branca, not to mention a satellite mapping of his trip.
But Wee and the other artists we talked to were adamant that technology is simply a medium for what they want to say.
Malaysian artist Hasnul Jamal Saidon 43, said: “Every art form uses technology.”
Hasnul, who has been doing video art since 1991 but still paints pointed out that even the process of mixing the pigments used for painting uses science.
His video and multi-media works including one that projects faces of people onto a bucket of water are part of the Relocations exhibit at Singapore Management University.
NOT SO EASY
Technology, admittedly, has opened up the doors to new ways of approaching art. Artist Andrew Buchanan, 29, of the Melbourne-based Experimenta group, pointed out that five years ago, some new media works could only be done by students with grants. Now, you can do a lot with just a simple projector and a video camera.
But does this democratisation signal the end of quality? “There’s as much average media art as there are average paintings,” Buchanan shrugged.
Neither does technology mean an easy way out in terms of making art.
Because his work employed the use of a satellite, Wee had to get permits from the Maritime and Port Authority, the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defence and the police.
The late kinetic artist Len Lye, meanwhile, painstakingly scratched patterns onto every single film cell to create the eye-catching Free Radicals video in 1958, a precursor, perhaps, to the music videos of today. Lye’s work is part of the Cloudland exhibit at The Substation featuring digital art from New Zealand.
PUBLIC ACCEPTANCE
So we’ve made it clear that this new breed of artists isn’t made up of geeks at all.
But public acceptance for such non-traditional forms may not be as forthcoming, at least in Singapore. Kiwi artist Stella Brennan, 34, said that back home, digital art is already part of the “mainstream of contemporary art”.
Experimenta’s Matthew Gingold said there’s a move in Australia to make such art “touchable and sculptural. We’re not competing with the TV or PlayStation”.
Swiss curator Irene Hediger admited that for a lot of people, “it’s not attractive”.
“People associate it with work and things they see at work,” said Hediger, 45, who regularly curates contemporary art shows but is now doing Lucid Fields, an exhibit of media art by Swiss artists who did residencies lasting nine months each at various laboratories at LASALLE College of the Arts.
Incidentally, that’s the exhibit where our lovely robot Kubic will be dancing. And, to make her show more appealing, Hediger recreated the mysteries of what goes on inside laboratories by putting “peephole” windows through which the casual passerby can take a look.
Isea’s Nadarajan is confident that the art form is actually more significant in today’s world and much more approachable.
“Electronic art can appeal to anyone the way Botticelli appealed to someone from that era. Technology is a part of today’s lives,” said Nadarajan, 43, who is also vice-provost for research at the Maryland Institute College of Art in the United States.
The wary way with which the public treats such works will pass, he added, citing howabstract art had baffled people before it became a norm. Unlike the “snooty” or “snobbish” connotations of a painting exhibition, Nadarajan pointed out that for most new-media art, you can actually touch the exhibits.
Plus, he quipped: “The average person spends 15 seconds looking at a painting. With new media exhibits, they’ll spend more time than that just by putting on a helmet on or scratching their heads.”
That’s pretty clever for someone who’s not a geek. - TODAY/ar
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