The 2nd International Symposium for Media Art

Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments
Report [PDF ver.]Tengal (Composer / Founder, WSK: Festival of the Recently Possible)
Kiyoshi Suganuma (Educator, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM])
Jos Auzende (Artistic Advisor, La Gaîté Lyrique)
Julia Sarisetiati (Artist, Curator / ruangrupa)
Aria Dean (Assistant Curator of Net Art, Rhizome at the New Museum)
Yae Akaiwa (Artist / exonemo)

Organized by the Japan Foundation Asia Center, Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)
Supported by Digital Choc / Institut français du Japon – Tokyo

Preface to the Second International Symposium Report

Since 2016, the Japan Foundation Asia Center and Arts Council Tokyo have been jointly organizing an international “Art and Technology” symposium with the aim of providing a forum for thecreation, dissemination, and networking of art and culture, including new media art and digitalcreativity.
The first symposium, “Art & Technology: Changing Times, Contemporary Trends, Future
Platforms” (July 2016) addressed trends in this field from the 1970s to the present, proposing
new platforms for media art in Tokyo and, by extension, Asia as a whole. This second symposium, “Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and the Archive Environment,” introduced
various relations between the creation, education, and research and development of new media
art and society at large through activities at leading art centers and festivals in cities across Asia
and Europe.
New media art is now entering a new phase, transcending its framework as a new form of artistic expression using the latest technology to evolve into a social infrastructure that can harness
the particular qualities of networks. The various activities in the trends of expression in art andtechnology offer insights into the role and form that arts and culture may assume in society inthe future as it is transformed by informatization and globalization. This symposium presented
informative case studies making wide use of the characteristics of artistic expression in society
from the perspectives of participation in creative activities, involvement with regional communities, or storage and archiving in order to pass down the value of expression. In conjunction
with the symposium, a concurrent program of related events offering more practical experienceand understanding included educational workshops and a series of talks, bringing together
many people from different generations and fields.
The Japan Foundation Asia Center is an organization specializing in facilitating new cultural
movements together with Asian countries. Arts Council Tokyo, an intermediary organization
involved in implementing the cultural policies of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, strives
to build creative environments for the further development of arts and culture. We hope readers
will find the new platform jointly created by these two organizations helpful in your future
activities.
In closing, we would like to express our sincere thanks for the support and cooperation of the
speakers and everyone else involved in making this symposium a success.

The Japan Foundation Asia Center
Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)

December 2018［01］

The 2nd International Symposium for Media Art

Art & Technology:

Creativity, Education and Archive Environments

Future Cultural Movements Pioneered by Art and Technology
In recent years, festivals and cultural institutions specializing in new media art have developed
practical and accessible programs for people to experience creativity hands-on and learn about
various forms of artistic expression that use media technology. From this we can see the emergence of new cultural and arts platforms organically connecting digital media, the public, andsociety through transnational and transregional collaboration and collective creativity within
the network society.
What values and challenges are made possible today by digital media creativity? Thissymposium explored how infrastructures for new media art function within society through awide-ranging series of case studies from art centers and festivals around the world.
It also considered related issues of cultural heritage, preservation, and archiving for net
art and other examples of practice that employ digital technology. Bringing together leading
practitioners in media art creativity, education and archiving, the symposium was an opportunity to assess the future prospects for arts and culture that will grow out of crossovers between
art and technology.

Date: Sunday, February 11, 2018 / 10:30–16:00 (Doors open: 10:00)
Venue: Tokyo Women’s Plaza Hall (Shibuya-ku, Tokyo)
Free admission (pre-registration required), with simultaneous English-Japanese interpretation
Organizers: The Japan Foundation Asia Center,
Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)
Supported by Digital Choc / Institut français du Japon – Tokyo［02］

The 2nd International Symposium for Media Art

Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments
Report [PDF ver.]Contents

Preface to the Second International Symposium Report ……… 0 1[Session 1]

Platforms for Creativity and Learning
A Community-Run Media Art Festival Centered on Possibilities ……… 0 5
TengalDisseminating Original New Media Art and Educational Programs on the Global Stage ……… 1 1
Kiyoshi Suganuma

Imaginative (and Fantastical) Art and Technology for Young Audiences ……… 1 7
Jos Auzende

A Collaborative Festival Engaging with the Political Dimensions of Food ……… 2 1
Julia Sarisetiati[Session 2]

Restoration, Preservation, and Archiving Today
The Challenges of Internet Art ……… 2 8
Aria Dean

Creativity in Preservation: Processes of Reinterpretation and Updating ……… 3 3
Yae Akaiwa
Q&A and Discussion ……… 3 8[Report]Related Events ……… 4 1

Symposium Organizer Profiles ……… 4 6

Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［03］[Session 1]

Platforms for Creativity and Learning

Speaker Profiles
TengalComposer / Founder, WSK: Festival of the Recently Possible [Philippines]

Tengal is a composer, media artist, and cultural producer involved in research-based productions
bridging art, technology, and society. Since 2005, he has produced various media art events andinitiatives in Manila and the Southeast Asian region. He founded the art organization SABAW MediaArt Kitchen in Manila as a curatorial platform specializing in digital and media art from Southeast
Asia. In 2008, he launched the Philippines’ first international media art festival and symposium,
WSK: Festival of the Recently Possible. In 2017, he curated the exhibition “INTERSTICES: Manifolds ofthe In-between” with the Japan Foundation Asia Center.

http://wsk.io

Kiyoshi Suganuma

Educator, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] [ Japan]

Born in 1982, Kiyoshi Suganuma entered the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences(IAMAS) after completing his degree at Kyoto University of Art and Design. While conducting research into media facades that incorporate video and interactivity into building exteriors, he worked
at an architectural firm, where he was involved in designing office interiors and exhibition sites. In
2009, he joined YCAM, where he organizes education programs and plans research and development projects aimed at making practical use of regional resources. His work at YCAM encompasses
planning and facilitating workshops as well as producing the “Korogaru Koen” (Korogaru Garden)
series. He continues to explore his interests in building bottom-up communities.
http://www.ycam.jp

Jos Auzende

Artistic Advisor, La Gaîté Lyrique [France]

After graduating with a degree in architecture and urbanism, Jos Auzende took part in the launchand programming of Batofar, a one-of-a-kind venue dedicated to early electronic music in Paris. She
also joined La Gaîté Lyrique team as artistic advisor early on in the development of this multifaceted
cultural center dedicated to music and media art. With a profound interest in untouched territories,
storytelling, and minor practices, she traverses media, minds, emotions, and memories by setting
frames for programming with a curatorial style that questions the expanding status of work andviewer in the digital age. She is also the creator of the media art guide for children Capitaine futur.
https://gaite-lyrique.net

Julia Sarisetiati

Artist, Curator / ruangrupa [Indonesia]

Born in 1981, Julia Sarisetiati is a member of the artist collective ruangrupa, which was founded in
Jakarta in 2000. She currently runs the community space Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem and has previously participated in the Singapore Biennale 2011 and Gwangju Biennale 2016 as an artist andphotographer. In 2017, she became a curator for the media art festival OK. Video, exhibiting works
on the theme of food, which she has further developed into laboratory-based research projects todemonstrate and explore economic and social sustainability.
http:// www.ruangrupa.org

A Community-Run Media Art Festival
Centered on Possibilities
Tengal Composer / Founder, WSK: Festival of the Recently Possible

Tengal is a media artist based in the Philippines and the Artistic Director of WSK: Festival of the
Recently Possible. His practice encompasses music, performance, film, audio-visual language, andmore. His presentation focused on his efforts to organize community-based, collaborative festival
events.

# Collaborative Music Jamming through Technology
From early on in my career, I wasvery curious about the idea thatmusic was, before music-capturing
devices were invented, an activity
that required a location. Music was
performed on location, on site. You
would have to go to an actual space
to hear music as an activity.
One of my first works that
explored this idea was made in collaboration with the composer
Chris Brown (Fig. 1). In “Transmis­
sions Gangan,” we took advantage
of an almost obsolete technology—
FM radio. We assigned one FM
channel for each person performing live to a
total of four FM transmissions. The idea was that
it would be a “radio jam,” so people could only
hear it through the radio within a small vicinity.
It was also located in an area where there
are many traffic jams. Manila is a very chaotic
city. The radio was broadcast to all the cars thatwere passing and to the people who were parked
near the performance. People had the opportunity and the chance to interact with the work bychoosing a particular channel, enabling the audience to become the performers. This meant
Fig. 1 Flyer for Chris Brown and The Gangan Ensemble,
Transmissions Gangan (2009)that the audience could choose only one FM
channel, so you have the freedom to determine
the volume but you’d have to listen to the other people’s radio broadcasts to complete the performance—thus creating “sound clouds.” This was an early example of my work where I wanted to
combine location—a place where you have to go—and use of an old medium (Fig. 2).
As we move toward a more technologically integrated society, music is now consumed ina variety of ways, particularly through streaming. Music today is evidently mediated throughmachinery. I want to show how I have explored this through two examples of my work.
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［05］

The first was an installationthat would react to the room acoustically in a kind of feedback loop or
closed system. Using custom software to automatically retune theroom, people moving around or
moving objects changed the soundfrequency and tone. The effect was
like a room “listening” to itself.
The second was 30 Sounds in
a Filing Cabinet, an installation commissioned by the UP Center for
Ethnomusicology of the University
Fig. 2 Outdoor performance of Transmissions Ganganof the Philippines for Dr. José
Maceda’s retrospective exhibition(Fig. 3). The centerpiece was an actual filing system that the composer and ethnomusicologist
José Maceda was using to categorize his field recordings of various ethnic groups in thePhilippines and in Asia. My approach was: why
not just get rid of all the index cards and let people “open the drawers” and have different sounds
come out and “jam”? The cabinet was actually 40
years old and this led to problems installing thework, because we could not drill any holes. A lotof the sounds were raw recordings, which I edFig. 3 Tengal, 30 Sounds in a Filing Cabinet (2013), commissioned by the UP Center for Ethnomusicology
ited into a loop, so no matter what you open it
will work in unison with other sounds in theother drawers. Dr. Maceda’s archive is not readily
available to the public, meaning you have to ask permission from the Maceda estate and theEthnomusicology Department to browse, copy, or research the archive. The work, thus, enabled
people to “DJ” the archive.

# Improvisation and Interaction in Music
Tengal also discussed the Gangan Series, an ongoing investigation since 2007 into the collaboration
between varying languages for audio-visual performers. The Gangan Series is an open-ended systemthat combines the interplay of sound and moving images, and emphasizes the situational potential of
live improvisatory performance of video and sound artists, by putting the focus on direct experience,risk-taking and personal interaction in a collective sense. It is an ambitious attempt to combine various
forms of improvisation and interaction techniques between video performance artists, creative coders, and musicians, and among themselves, into one integrated system.
This project is very complex, so I will just share a few examples. In essence, we are using graphic
scores and making a kind of “network performance,” where each of the performers is networked
in various open nodes and can freely connect and interact with each other. The corresponding
projected images react to how each person is performing—a kind of real-time visualization ofwhat steps each player has done, is doing, and is thinking of doing. A lot of my work lives between composition and improvisation.
Someone was once asked to describe, in 15 seconds, the difference between composition
and improvisation. “In 15 seconds, the difference between composition and improvisation isthat in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, while in
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［06］improvisation you have 15 seconds.” This is aninteresting description of the interplay between
composition and improvisation.
In one of the iterations of the Gangan
Series, “ROYGBIV” ver. 2016, we had seven players. In order to perform, somebody has toeliminate an existing performer. Players would
be given certain “lives” or turns at the beginningof the performance. These lives are based on how
many times players can play throughout a performance. The score is made visible to each player
and the audience by typing in a certain addresson their mobile phones or laptops. In addition,
each player would be given a couple of digitalsliders for interacting with others even when it’s
not his or her turn to perform. The sliders areconnected to the network and are arbitrarily connected to each individual player’s parameters. In
Fig. 4 Performance of “ROYGBIV” ver. 2016 (Gangan Series)
other words, one slider can be remotely conat WSK: Festival of the Recently Possible 2016nected to another player’s effect parameter. Thissystem makes the performance more interesting
and chaotic, as other player can “hack” other people’s performances remotely (Fig. 4).
The primary idea here was how to develop a system that doesn’t need any conductors or
any inter-player communication. The resulting performances have no beginning or ending.
People were dictating among themselves how they would perform and how their performance
would end. For the audience, they could type an IP address into their browsers, allowing themto catch up with real-time updates on who’s doing what, how many lives each player has, or who
is “dead.” This method would in turn become the score of each performance. In order to visualize which player was playing, we assigned each player a color in the rainbow (ROYGBIV) andprojected it onto him or her.

# The Festival as a Lab for Collaboration
Tengal introduced his work with WSK: Festival of the Recently Possible, a pioneering experimental andinterdisciplinary festival and platform. Founded in 2008, it aims to advance artistic positions reflecting
on the sociocultural impact of new technologies.
WSK (pronounced “wasak”) provides a platform where advances in emerging art forms and innovative applications of new technologies can respond to the cutting edge of cultural and social
thought. In terms of artistic practice, we not only respond to scientific or technological developments but also those that shape the way in which we think about and experience thesetechnologies.
We are focused on new and old technologies. After all, code acts as a technical system andlanguage for programming society that has become the primary construction material of ourcivilization. Code mutates our creative capacities; it affects our languages, tastes, and ethics.
Our fundamental approach to the festival is that the festival acts as a lab where we discover different sorts of connections and build new arbitrary communities. Since 2013, WSK has
adapted the physical, social, infrastructural, conceptual space of its festival in order to allow it
to function as a living lab. Living labs are a model of open ecosystems for user co-creation that
integrates research and innovation processes. We think of citizens as interactive. The democratization of technology has decentralized information: consumers now become producers. WSK
takes inspiration from the spirit of DIWO (Doing It With Others) and aims to engage critical
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［07］thinking and spark creativity with today’s smart citizens.
I’d like just to map out briefly some of the history of our festival, which has been constantly evolving and changing according to the needs or situation in Manila and the rest of thePhilippines.
In 2005, when I was 19 years old, I started SABAW Media Art Kitchen. From 2005 to 2008,
we started out as a DIY record label and music production outfit producing monthly concerts. In
2006, we produced the first anthology of experimental noise in electronic music in thePhilippines. In 2008, we organized a kind of prototype festival, Fete dela Wasaque. The initial
run of the festival came out of a joke among friends. We didn’t think it would develop into a real
festival. We wanted to make fun of a French event, Fête de la Musique, which was a very popular
music festival in the Philippines. The response to what we did was good, though, so we decided
to develop and expand it as we go, beginning from its roots as an experimental music and soundart festival to expanded cinema, net art, and media art.
In 2009, we adopted an educational approach, based on that idea that, if we are building
a new scene, an almost nonexistent community, we should start from the ground up. We invited
various speakers from Europe and Asia to give talks at various art universities in the Philippines,
accompanied by evening symposiums and concerts in alternative art spaces. The art community was engaged and a lot of topics were discussed in terms of the potential of new technologies
and art practices to shape and affect the then-current art scene amid a burgeoning art market.
We basically didn’t know what we were doing at the beginning but out of this experimental approach as well as our tenacity and eagerness to do things without following any rules, wehave built our own little community from the ground up. The gap between art and science wasslowly closing. In 2010, we rebranded as Fete dela Wasaque and made it like a real festival withexhibitions, workshops, concerts, talks, salons, and so on. That same year, we also initiated theTerminal Garden, an artist residency and a DIYbio garden art studio. The space was my family’s
old house and it had a huge garden, so naturally we focused on tactical approaches to agriculture and food production. This meant we would have pop-up restaurants for people to gather
and exchange ideas through food and wine. We would hold screenings, talks, and workshops,
providing a space for artists, researchers, and other related professionals to coexist and hangout. This would eventually become a space where a future community of smart citizens would
gather. Hundreds of people from all over Asia and the world stayed and frequented this spaceover its five-year existence.
We also started a monthly artist talk called BEDROOMLAB, which ran from 2010 to 2013.
The basic idea was to host artist talks for people who were passing by or traveling in the country.
During this time, TED talks and the like were gaining popularity globally. This program would
eventually be integrated into the festival. And then in 2011, we launched an exhibition program,
mostly net art, audiovisual works, and interactive installation works. In 2013, we grew up andmatured in the sense that by then we knew what we were doing, and so decided to remove the“media art” term because it was very confusing for most people, not least ourselves. The festival
became WSK: Festival of the Recently Possible, allowing it to occupy multiple things and havethe openness to allow various art forms, ideas, and technologies to coexist alongside different
art communities coming together for the first time.
In the Philippines, we have a very big divide between art and science. Engineers don’t go
to exhibitions; artists never bother with math. Our goal was really to become that bridge between the two. As such, a lot of the efforts that we’ve been doing for the past ten years havefocused on building the community from the ground up. To show the potentiality of having
these intersections come together and enable people from different backgrounds to do coolthings together.
In 2013, we also started our first community radio, directly inspired by the previous workthat I have introduced. In 2014, we changed the format of WSK yet again. We created Kampung
Lab. Kampung is a Malay term meaning “village.” We would invite artists, researchers, and otherpeople from around the world to stay together for one or two weeks, exchanging ideas, getting
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［08］to know each other, and building new relationships with each other, which would lead tocollaborative art projects—be it an exhibition,
performance, or just an idea. The Robot Relay
Orchestra, for example, came out the Kampung
Lab (Fig. 5). In it, we invited various people fromthe United States and Asia to collaborate for the
first time on a performance and building a network of musical robots (or automatons) toperform alongside human players. Each participant had different expertise and the process ofinteraction was like a relay. A lot of the interaction and rules were built upon the aforementioned
Gangan System. This was just one example of thekind of transnational collaborative events andprojects we organize.
In 2013, however, we realized that runninga media art exhibition is very difficult and costs a
lot of money. Pretty much all our efforts are community-run, so we’re very DIY. Most of thefunding actually comes from our pockets and thegenerosity of friends, but since 2013 we have received support from the Japan Foundation. In
2017, in collaboration with the Japan Foundation
Asia Center, we could reintroduce the exhibition
program (Fig. 6).

Fig. 5 Performance by the Robot Relay Orchestra at WSK:
Festival of the Recently Possible 2015

Fig. 6 “INTERSTICES: Manifolds of the In-between” exhibition at WSK: Festival of the Recently Possible 2017, inpartnership with the Japan Foundation Asia Center

Tengal also introduced some further examples of exhibitions and projects he has organized.
An old IBM commercial once said:“Machines should work! People
should think!” All Watched Over by
Machines of Loving Grace was a politically engaged and interactive
exhibit at Art Fair Philippines 2017
(Fig. 7). The art fair is a very big
commercial marketplace and people like us are never usually foundthere. That being said, they commissioned us to put on a special
exhibition and we came up with aconcept based on a mythical tape.
There was an audiotape from thelate 1960s, a result of an affair between the former dictator, FerdinandFig. 7 All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace at Art Fair Philippines 2017
Marcos, and an American actress,
Dovie Beams. She would secretly
record their sessions in bed. We spent three or four months searching for it and finally managed
to find one of the old journalists, who loaned us the tape.
Our exhibit at the fair was enclosed by the Wall of Sound. These metal sheets were electronically conductive to touch, while speakers in the corner produced the sound. People would holdhands while touching the wall and “playing” the wall of sounds. Inside the exhibition space were
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［09］two 3D wireframe floating heads onscreens, which would roboticallysay words from the recording transcript using text-to-speech software.
There was also a cassette tape controller that played a snippet of a
postcoital Marcos singing a folksong. Visitors were able to chop andscrew the audio.
Until now, we have produced over 80 projects at morethan 35 venues, from institutionalart centers to galleries, alternative
Fig. 8 Events at SABAW Media Art Kitchen and WSK: Festival of the Recently
Possibleart spaces, and abandoned locations, involving over 120 foreign
artist collaborators and 180-plus local collaborators and communities. Our work has reached an
audience of more than 15,000 so far. Our practice encompasses pop-up laboratories, forums,
workshops, exhibitions, concerts, artist talks, screening, parties, FM discussions, radio programs, and more. In order to build something, we also create spaces, an activity that relates backto the importance of location (Fig. 8). We always like to think of it as community-based.
Communities gather at artists’ “drinking wells,” spaces where people can drink together andhang out. It is from this kind of interaction that a community can emerge.

Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［10］Disseminating Original New Media Art and
Educational Programs on the Global Stage
Kiyoshi Suganuma Educator, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]

The Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM], where Kiyoshi Suganuma has been serving as educator since 2009, is a public cultural complex in Yamaguchi City. Since its opening in 2003, YCAM hascontinued to demonstrate its unique regional city features and strengths.

# A Place for Viewing, Open to ManyYCAM is an art center establishedby Yamaguchi City and opened in
2003. This facility aims to explore
the possibilities of artistic expression by utilizing media technology
in a modern information society.
Yamaguchi City is a regional city,
located west of Tokyo, two hours
by air or about four hours by bullet
train, and with a population of
190,000.
I want to talk about YCAM’s
three main features. The first is
creation and education. In termsof both works of art and educational programs, YCAM’s most important mission is discovering
new values through creating and then disseminating these from its base in Yamaguchi on theinternational stage. The second is research and development (R&D). YCAM has its own internallab, called YCAM InterLab, where it undertakes R&D projects related to new media art. Comprisinga team of people, location, and environment (that is, the equipment), this lab is a rich store oftechnology and know-how. The third is accessibility and collaboration. Our approaches andmethodologies are designed to connect with future collaborators and explore ways to open up
our accumulated insights. In order to implement our next creativity and dissemination projects, we engage with making frameworks that can produce a dynamic creative cycle.
Let me present one example of the kind of
new media art works that YCAM produces. Thiswas gravicells—Gravity and Resistance, produced
by Seiko Mikami and Souta Ichikawa in 2004
(Fig. 1). The “gravi” means “gravity,” here combined with “cells” to coin a new word. When aviewer gets on the panels spread on the floor, theimage projected from above changes according
to the pressure placed on the sensors. This is exactly what we call “creation” at YCAM, the first
feature from my earlier explanation, and it wasFig. 1 Seiko Mikami + Souta Ichikawa, gravicells—Gravity
and Resistance, 2004 Photo by Hiroki Obara Courtesy:
made in the studio at YCAM. The artists engaged
Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]
in this process while staying in Yamaguchi, comArt & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［11］pleting it together with YCAM InterLab through trial and error.
Following its exhibition at YCAM, gravicells—Gravity and Resistance toured many places,
including Tokyo, Canada, Australia, China, and South Korea, and particularly countries in
Europe such as the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. And during all this travel, the fact that thepiece was credited to both YCAM and Yamaguchi City helped to raise the international brandingof both the center and city.
Other than the production studio, YCAM has a cinema with 100 seats and a theater with
500 seats. The theater is designed so that the seats can be stored in the basement and it becomesa large studio equivalent to the size of a gymnasium, meaning the space can also be utilized as atheater or a studio for large-scale art installations. In addition, Yamaguchi City Central Library,which has 300,000 books, is housed in the same building.
Another feature is that we employ the large foyer and park in front of YCAM to exhibit
artworks in the public space. When originally designing the building, it was conceived as a placein which the whole facility can be used for experimentation and expression.
The annual number of visitors is officially 700,000 people. You might be surprised that
despite Yamaguchi having a population of only 190,000, so many people visit YCAM each year.
One reason for this is that the library users account for a big percentage of all visitors. Since admission to YCAM’s exhibitions is in principle free of charge, they function in such a way so as tosupplement the daily lives of local residents. Rather than attracting a clique of only art-lovers,
YCAM aspires to be a place for viewing and experiencing art that is open to all, from the very
young to the elderly, as befits its identity as a regional city.
YCAM’s main activity is exploring the application possibilities for media technology, but
this actually encompasses many things. Roughly speaking, these are education, the arts, and thecommunity. Today, I will focus on arts and education.

# Educational Programs for Acquiring Media Literacy
The core of YCAM activities is producing new media art projects. More than 100 works have beencreated at YCAM over the past 14 years. As mentioned earlier, these travel to many cities andcountries around the world. The greatest factor in what we produce is YCAM InterLab. This is aninternal R&D organization, where about around 20 or 30 specialists work. Some are educators or
curators responsible for art, performing arts, and film projects, while others are stage, lighting,screen, sound, and computer programming specialists, or archivists.
Let me present some examples of the work we produce. The opening exhibition of YCAM
was an installation of Amodal Suspension by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, a large-scale piece held
outside. This was a participatory project, incorporating communication and interaction withthe general public.
My next example is FOREST SYMPHONY, ajoint production between YCAM InterLab andRyuichi Sakamoto (Fig. 2). There are various ways
to collaborate. This particular work was created
together with Sakamoto from scratch and thenimplemented while he provided the technicaladvice. This is the forte of YCAM InterLab: having
the interdisciplinary insights for implementing
the ideas that artists have in their heads. Other
than Sakamoto, we have created works together
Fig. 2 Ryuichi Sakamoto, FOREST SYMPHONY, 2013 Photo:
Ryuichi Maruo Courtesy: Yamaguchi Center for Arts andwith many artists, including Ryoji Ikeda andMedia [YCAM]
Otomo Yoshihide.
We have been also engaged in developing
physical forms of artistic expression. As an example of R&D, the project Reactor for Awarenessin Motion was a collaboration developed with dancer Yoko Ando and others. For this work,
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［12］

YCAM produced an original motion capture system and application, starting from the viewpoint of how to create a production environment for dance. We have also made open-source
project deliverables in terms of software, hardware, and know-how publicly available online. In
recent years, we have continued to develop initiatives exploring the potential for applicableprojects through open-source deliverables and this project derives from the contexts of rehabilitation and sport.
YCAM Film Factory is a series of collaborations with film directors to produce new films
and explore the possibilities of cinema. We also hold experimental music concerts as well asstage plays in the theater.
The second part of YCAM’s activities I want to introduce relates to the educational programs. We take the same stance here as for how we produce artworks. We develop originalcontent that boasts world-class quality and can be then taken off-site and evolved further
elsewhere.
We have developed over ten original workshops and experiential learning systems, which
are run in-house or at external sites. The themes include “body and interface” and introducing
legal issues to children. Our education programs have the main aim of increasing media
literacy.
For example, we have a musical workshop called “walking around surround.” This system
is very simple and easy to carry, and its sound comes from eight wireless speakers. Participating
children put the systems wherever they like and check sounds like “blip, blip.” For instance,
when children arrange the systems in a circle, the sound they can hear is different depending onwhether they are inside or outside the circle. This is very fundamental and it will encouragethem to think about sound, body, and space.
YCAM has a variety of programs focusing on sound in terms of our exhibitions, projects,
and live music concerts. Therefore, workshops like this are very important for honing how we
can appreciate works of art. I think it is vital that you can look at things from the same point ofview as artists by sensing with the whole body.
The workshop “Eye2Eye” makes the lines of vision of eight participants visible to all ofthem on a big screen, using sightline-analysis technology (see p. 41). Dealing with the line of vision in this way leads to some fascinating insights. For example, most participants will look atwhere their hometowns are when a map is suddenly shown in front of them. This means we caneasily know where they come from. The workshop examines themes related to the body andcommunication, based on the properties or possibilities that a line of vision has.
The background for this workshop derives from our knowledge of an awareness gap, suchas when sightline-analysis systems are used for security cameras or when the displays at supermarkets are based on eye information. There is increasing disparity between the informationthat corporations and researchers have and the information that us consumers have. What is themedia literacy that can fill this gap? This is certainly not something that can only be conveyed
through text or language alone, but requires physical or experiential approaches. As such, wewant to improve media literacy by learning how our bodies experience media.
The workshop “Kotoba Shintai” (Language and Body) was jointly developed with the choreographer Zan Yamashita and allows participants to experience the differences in association
between body movements and textual words (see p. 42). For instance, if participants are asked toimitate the movement of an elephant, the movements vary depending on the cultures and personalities of individual participants. To visualize the differences in imagery that words andphysical movements can evoke, we record participants’ body movements using a motion-capture device. Afterwards, by looking at those movements, the words that were conceived witheach movement can be registered in a database using an original YCAM application for tagging
the movements. If someone’s arm swings in front of the body, for instance, one may imagine theword “elephant” but others may think of “traffic guard.” By registering such words and graduallybuilding up the database, a kind of search engine resource develops and we can create dancesfrom the combinations of words. I believe that this workshop has proven fascinating and
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［13］popular overseas because body movements areused in our daily lives by everyone like a form ofcommon sense regardless of language.
We also partner with corporations. For example, we produced a workshop called “Paralleleyes” co-developed with Sony’s CSL researchers(Fig. 3). Four participants put on head-mounted
displays (HMD) and cameras, and then sharewhat each other can see. All the participants play
tag while watching the fields of view on HMD
Fig. 3 The “Parallel eyes” workshop, co-developed by YCAMInterLab and Sony CSL Photo: Takayuki Miyatake Courtesy:
screens divided into four.
Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]
It might well seem that “Parallel eyes” israther neo-futuristic. I think that this future isactually not so distant. Sharing what I see with 100 people might be possible even in anotherfive years. In this way, we are thinking of opportunities for the public to consider and discusscertain ideas about the future from the perspective of media literacy.

# Cultivating the Creativity of Children
Recently, a lot of our efforts have focused on the YCAM Bio Research project. YCAM establisheda BioLab in 2015 in order to explore our relationship with biotechnology, whose development
has been striking of late. Based on our identity as a center rooted in the region and community,
we aim to be a platform that can further research alongside the perspectives of local residents.
As such, we start with the basics, based on familiar themes such as food, clothing, and shelter,or education.
For example, we have created an educational program called “DNA of Forests.” In theworkshop, around 15 participants go into forests and collect leaves from trees whose names they
don’t know. They later conduct analysis and experiments extracting the DNA in which the living
creatures’ genetic information is stored. They study the leaves until they can identify the plants’species names using a DNA database. They finally create a picture dictionary on a website bythemselves. Until now, we have always read picture books by specialists, but here non-specialists gather and work out how they see their surroundings. This is what we might call the
democratization of technology.
We also run a workshop called “Sports
Hackathon” (Fig. 4). The workshop is based on theconcept that sports are not received as a given
but should be created by ourselves. With this inmind, we create new sports with participants
over a period of three days. On the last day, weplay these sports with local children and theirparents, forming a sports festival Yamaguchi
Future Sports Day with over 200 participants.
YCAM is emphasizing collaboration within
Fig. 4 One of the events from the “Sports Hackathon” workshop Photo: Kosuke Shiomi Courtesy: Yamaguchi Centerschool education, so we are endeavoring to makefor Arts and Media [YCAM]“Sports Hackathon” available to the general public in the community or schools.
In this way, children in Yamaguchi might create new sports festivals with new sports
produced by themselves. In terms of the meta level, I think this can be an adequate resource fora regional city. There is no doubt that this kind of progressive educational environment is oneof the attractions of a city. YCAM is a facility established by Yamaguchi City, so it naturally reflects municipal policies. How does Yamaguchi City attract people by utilizing YCAM in the fieldof education? This leads to discussion of such issues as migration or settlement.
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［14］

Let me show another example. It is a series
called “Korogaru Koen,” which started in 2012and has so far been implemented at five locations (Fig. 5). Unlike the three-hour workshops,
Korogaru Koen is a park-like place for learningover a period of three months.
Media technologies like light, moving
image, and sound as well as sensors are installedin the “park,” but there are basically no rules, justlike in regular parks. The main feature here isFig. 5 Children playing in the Korogoaru Koen park Photo:
Ryuichi Maruo Courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts andthat it forms a park that updates, the media enviMedia [YCAM]
ronment and rules changing based on children’s
own ideas.
We believe that Korogaru Koen is a collaboration between YCAM InterLab and children.
We accept the ideas children have and implement them. In this way, we gradually foster a certain degree of confidence in the children that they have the power to change society. In
comparison, it is claimed that there are too many rules in Japanese parks: “Don’t be noisy,” “Noskateboarding,” “No ball games,” and so on. This can result in public space that nobody uses.
Eventually, rules become unconscious and we stop even thinking about them.
Korogaru Koen is a kind of simulation of society, though on a very small scale. It is fine to
fail and there is no “right” answer. What is important here is that it is an environment that retains a sense of the human touch in society, whereby you will get a response if you try something.
More broadly, this is the same as the future vision of regional society to which YCAM aspires.
The flexibility and experimentation that the smaller scale of a regional city can offer have immense potential for enhancing the relationship of each individual with society.
To create a future for the community based on the concept of openness and collaborationis the responsibility of public cultural facilities like YCAM. The target of our accessibility andcollaboration efforts is not simply artists and creatives around the world. It is the creative cyclethat interacts with the regional society in which YCAM is based. What our educational programs
are adding to the community are things schools cannot achieve. As technology advances and theworld becomes more global, students must learn new things like computer programming. On
the other hand, the recent system of school education remains inflexible and unable to respondto problems. I believe that it is experimental public cultural facilities like YCAM that can undertake this kind of role as part of regional education.
In the future, computer programming will be incorporated into school curricula even in
Japan, but doing this within the structure of school education inevitably means that it becomesa model of learning in which there is a “correct” way of doing things. As we all know now, justlearning by memorizing does not allow us to respond to our society today that is constantly
changing. For example, with people who have been learning the piano for a long time, they are
no doubt good at playing the right musical notes as per the score, but I suspect there are also
many who are not good at playing freely. At YCAM, I how we can make up for that creative learning that is lost in school education through the experiences of viewing and expressing.
Let me conclude with an example I often share in presentations. It is gonzocam, which
was created in collaboration with the artist unit contact Gonzo and the artist yang02. This toolkit is designed for one-time-use cameras with lenses that are improved by being equipped with
an automatic shutter and winding. It is a very silly and amateurish use of technology. I would be
at a loss if I were asked what it could be used for, but if this camera were set up in the mountains,for instance, we could perhaps take many photos of wild animals. We have released open-source
information online about how to make this toolkit. One day, I was surprised to hear that a fifth
grader living in Yamaguchi City wanted us to teach him about how to do board mounting andetching for the gonzocam. His purpose in installing the camera was to drive away wild boars thatruin his grandmother’s fields. In other words, he intended to use it for social innovation. I felt a
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［15］

little put to shame. Here, a piece of rather silly technology used for an artwork had been diverted
by a completely unrelated third party and employed for a wholly new idea. Moreover, the person
who did was a child. This kind of networking is one of YCAM’s strengths. That is to say, in addition to sharing physical or space facilities, our attitudes towards accessibility such as byopen-sourcing our software or hardware give us opportunities to link up with others.
The chain of creativity occurs across discipline, generation, location, and time. Since thespread of the Internet, this tendency has accelerated even further. Today, YCAM is searching
through its wide-ranging projects for new lab approaches as a platform for encouraging thatchain of creativity. We want to be the future vision of a cultural facility that can respond organically to our changing society.

Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［16］

Imaginative (and Fantastical) Art
and Technology for Young Audiences
Jos Auzende Artistic Advisor, La Gaîté Lyrique

Jos Auzende is Artistic Advisor andCurator at La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris.
Her presentation introduced herwork with the project Capitaine futur(Captain Future), which approaches
society from three different angles: it
considers children as an audience intheir own right, digital technology asa cultural discipline that merits study,
and art as a laboratory for the future.
A testing ground for artistic and educational content, the project calls on
artists and researchers’ abilities to
weave tales, invent original forms,
and prepare for what is to come.

# La Gaîté Lyrique: An Old Venue Reborn as Something New
I have been part of the artistic team at La Gaîté
Lyrique in Paris since the opening in 2011. Amongother things, I’m responsible for running a creative project called Capitaine futur, which I want
to share with you today. It is an experimental,
child-oriented art program.
I will begin with a few words about LaGaîté Lyrique (Fig. 1). La Gaîté Lyrique is a young
cultural facility in Paris. It is an institution,
straddling both the private and public sectors,
and is located in the center of the city of Paris. It
specializes in emerging forms of digital culture
and the dialogue between art, technology, research, and society.
It is housed in a building that used to be
an old theater. It is a strange name, yes? That iswhere the name comes from: “La Gaîté” means“the joy” and “Lyrique” means “the art of voice.”
As you can tell, it was dedicated to operettas. It
Fig. 1 Upper: Lobby at La Gaîté Lyrique Lower: La Gaîté
was built in the 19th century and destroyed alLyrique ©Vinciane Lebrun
most entirely around the 1990s to make anindoor amusement park called Planète magique.
Instead of being a “magical planet,” however, it
was a big fiasco. It was only open for 15 days and then it was closed for 15 years.
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［17］

Around 2000, a new project emerged and everything was destroyed once again, andtransformed into a hybrid cultural venue dedicated to music and pop culture for the digital age,which opened in March 2011, reconnecting with the past and the former name, La Gaîté Lyrique.
Today, La Gaîté Lyrique is part of a new generation of venues in France and in Europe thatdemystify culture, technology and knowledge for adults and children alike in a fun and friendly
atmosphere, a venue where children are more than welcome.
We organize exhibitions, shows, talks, screenings, residencies, workshops, and events
that chart a path through the complex flow of information and figure that make up our world,that investigate the impact of technology and the development decisions of our ever-changing
society and in the learning environments. La Gaîté Lyrique views education in digital technology as a vital means of empowering citizens of tomorrow and art as a laboratory for the future,
exploring thoughtful approaches to living, doing things together and confronting the changes
attempted proactively.

# Treating Art and Technology for Children Seriously
The main reason that Capitaine futur was created when the institution opened in 2011 was todemonstrate that art and technology are not just for grownups. Digital culture is not only a question about tools and technology, but also related to issues of emotion, storytelling, and newopportunities of learning by doing. Children are knowledgeable in their own right. Children
pass on practices and resources as essential to coping with our fast-paced digitalization and theconstant barrage of new innovations that define the digital age.
Capitaine futur can be several things at once, which makes it not always easy to summarize. It is a child-oriented art program experimenting with new forms of narration and formats.
So, how can we use digital arts to discover the world we’re building? The Capitaine futur approach is to take a fresh look at children’s cultural programming in the Internet age, addressing
the adults of tomorrow on equal terms as active participants, rather than passive consumers,
encouraging critical and reflective thinking about technology and participation with their fivesenses, curiosity, and differences, and opening new ways of learning.
In this way, Capitaine futur was born amid the language of our era of digital transformation, blurring the distinction between the real and the virtual, between the natural, the human,
and the artificial. It started off as an experimental base on a strong narrative and sensory approach. It became a laboratory for creating performances rooted in experimentation and ourability to act, see, and feel in our connected world.
Capitaine futur is a kaleidoscopic programof shows. For example, The Best Way to Count
from 2015 was an “easytronic,” longhaired performance by Jon the dog and Yuichi Kishino(Fig. 2). It was produced with help from the JapanFoundation and was recognized by the JapanMedia Arts Festival the same year with the Grand
Prize in the Entertainment Division. We also create performances, workshops, talks, sciencetalks, and events for children, interactive instalFig. 2 Yuichi Kishino, The Best Way to Count (2015, Capitaine
lations, and exhibitions.
futur) ©Vinciane Verguethen
At the heart of the Capitaine futur projectis the titular imaginary character with storytelling superpowers, somewhere between imagination, science, and poetic visions. Capitaine futuris an elusive globetrotter. He is children’s invisible alter ego with whom they are sometimescaught deep in conversation, truly driving the experience further and further away from any
reductionism or entertainment. He travels aboard the Capsulo, a bouncing and waterproof vessel. He shares discoveries that originate from the depths of computers, which draw power from
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［18］

our touch and strength from the stimulation of
our senses.
Capitaine futur has a worldview based onsomething other than decline, decay, and apocalypse. He is open-minded to all views. Capitaine
futur is also a medium for telling the stories of
our interconnected, technological world. We
need new metaphors that help us to tackle newsituations. We need other ways of imagining andarticulating relations between individuals, tools,
and society. We need to build a technologicalculture.
Capitaine futur is a narrative device in the
tradition of extraordinary voyages and philosophical tales of the Renaissance, a comparable
time in Europe marked by an acceleration oftechnical progress. Capitaine futur is a medium
for telling the metaphorical stories of our digitalera by taking imaginary detours, taking children
Fig. 3 Upper: Artificial Nature, Archipelago (2014, Capitaine
and the novices inside all of us on a journey into
futur) Lower: Cyril Diagne, Starfield (2014, Capitaine futur)
the depths of the abstract era of machines for a©Vinciane Lebrun
moment of thought. It is a tool using pop culture
and media art to provide insight into disruptive
developments in our world, inspiring critical approaches to the omnipresence of these machines in our daily lives, and stimulating ideas about how to harness their power and build acommon technical culture in meaningful ways.
In 2014, Capitaine futur went on an extraordinary voyage. Within his computer screen,
he plunged into the depths of the computer: his super machine of the everyday that comes without any instructions. It was an exploration of the dizzying distortion of scale, perceptions, andpoint of views in the metaphorical fluid world and time when we surf, navigate in open source,
and think and work privately (Fig. 3).

# International Partnerships
The concerns of the Capitaine futur project are also increasingly shared by other internationalart practitioners, who are conducting experiments at the cutting edge of digital technology forchildren. That’s why we applied for a two-year European cooperation project led by Cinekid, afilm festival and media lab based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in partnership with KIKKFestival, a digital and creative culture festival in Namur, Belgium, and WoeLab, a center for technological democracy in Lomé in Togo, West Africa. La Gaîté Lyrique is the lead partner of thiscooperation project.
We have joined together to develop Les Voyages de Capitaine futur (The Voyages ofCaptain Future), a project based on the imaginary character Capitaine futur, whose travels introduce children to art and creative use of technologies, and which serve as tools for emancipationand learning. In June 2017, we launched an international open call for proposals. We received
about 170 projects and we selected three and the artworks are right now in development. Afterthey are produced, there will be a touring exhibition in 2018 through to the start of 2019, which
will be paired with creative workshops and online and open-source tutorials.
The theme for the open call was “Super-Natural: Stories of worlds yet to come.” This deals
with high-risk forms of ecology in which our technological environments have become naturalelements. The theme invited artists to offer their perspectives on the technological, dematerialized, complex environments, and ubiquitous machines that have become natural elements in
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［19］our lives. A host of singular species coexist in this new world: virtual animals, mutant plants,
electronic viruses, insatiable computers, memory rocks, tentacular networks, autodidact algorithms, domestic robots, cybernetic forests, and more. This organic, composite, living world
requires us to rethink how we live, communicate, and use our senses. To explore the transformations of our era, we need a plethora of new skills, freshly attuned senses, emotions, andforms of thought outside the bounds of rationality. Is this an intermediate stage of natural evolution or a “big bang” of singularities? What new configurations are in store? What tools must
we craft to survive, experience, adjust to, and negotiate these new types of coexistence? The
project aims to elicit poetic visions, narrative approaches, and fictional tales that recount a land
where humans are no longer central and undergo a metamorphosis upon contact with heterogeneous beings. We are entering an era of hybrid ecology: artificial intelligence as a landscape,
networks as biotopes, data as organisms, and media as humus. Where do we go from here?

# Exploring Technology through the Supernatural
Directly related to these results and theme, thefinal thing I would like to introduce is Capitaine
futur’s next voyage. This is the exhibition we are
opening at La Gaîté Lyrique in April, a fourmonth group show, “Capitaine futur and theSupernatural,” combined with a series of otherevents, workshops, screenings, and talks (Fig. 4).
Now Capitaine futur has made the plunge behindthe screen and he never comes back. He is crisscrossing a supernatural land where machines,
Fig. 4 Upper: Studio Bruyant,Cairns (2018, Capitaine futur)
living beings and cities coordinate, clash, andLower: Florian Dussopt, Sonic
commingle.
Jungle (2018, Capitaine futur)©Vinciane Lebrun
In addition to the three artworks developed in the framework of the European project,
Capitaine futur has collected treasures made up
of responsive environments, living systems, andobjects whose behavior has to be tamed, like ajellyfish and robot communicating together. He
handles these treasures with the utmost care,because Capitaine futur is a curator and a curator
is a person who cares about something. He confronts these objects and situations. He pinpoints areas of convergence and temporarily gives
them a new meaning and life while the exhibition is open, so that the works are able to interact
with each other.
For Capitaine futur, media art is a supernatural art, an exhibition providing the groundfor experimentation that truly comes to life at each opening. Capitaine futur is also questioning
the expanding status of media artworks and viewers in the digital age, and how major art practices still in their infancy are taking their place among other art forms.

Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［20］

A Collaborative Festival Engaging
with the Political Dimensions of Food
Julia Sarisetiati Artist, Curator / ruangrupa

Julia Sarisetiati is an artist, photographer, curator, and member of the collective ruangrupa. Her presentation introduced the group’s work with the Indonesian media art festival OK. Video and its
investigation of food, media, politics, and ways to share knowledge.

# Emerging from the Need for New Kinds of Spaces
Today I want to share with you
some insights about OK. Video, a
media art festival that we have beenrunning in Indonesia since 2003.
When talking about OK.
Video, we also have to talk about
ruangrupa, because OK. Video isthe product of the thoughts of peersin the group. Founded in 2000 by agroup of artists in Jakarta, ruangrupa emerged from the need ofspace for young artists. Previously,
the spaces we ran were always inthe form of a house. We then used
the space according to our needs. A
space is constantly changing function: it can be an office, a place todiscuss, a classroom, a gallery, or aspace for musical performances(Fig. 1).
At that time, the art scene inIndonesia was dominated by private galleries showing painting
and sculpture, which did not accommodate the various discourses
related to other new media, suchas video. This is not simply a mistake on the part of the art scene;
Fig. 1 Previous music events, exhibitions, and lectures by ruangrupa
the repressive atmosphere of
Suharto’s New Order regime hadmuch to do with this.
After the reforms of 1998, there was a need to respond to the situation. As such, ruangrupa launched OK. Video as a division of our group to run as a biennial media art festival from2003. Since it first began, the festival has aspired to observe, record, and study media technology
developments, which have transformed people’s perspectives and behavior towards surrounding phenomena.
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［21］

Along with organizing this biennial media art festival, OK. Video runs other programs,
including workshops, research projects, documentation, and producing and distributing
Indonesian media art. In addition to the exhibition, through this festival we have tried various
approaches and presentation methods that can engage with “video” as a medium. For example,
in 2007, we tried several workshops with ten communities all around Indonesia. We also created an open platform for popular culture, MuviParty. This is a music video festival, so theapproach is more focused on popular culture. We also set up an open lab as a way to express theartistic process of media art. And since the beginning of the festival in 2003, the idea of engaging
and being engaged with the public is what makes us constantly pursue ways to change andadapt.

# Evolving the Festival Toward a Focus on Politicized Food
In 2015, OK. Video shifted its identity by revising the subtitle from “Jakarta International Video
Festival” to “Indonesia Media Arts Festival.” The growth of media technology in society has
prompted us to extend and expand the range of artistic media used beyond not only video but
also the scope of the discussions about media art itself. With the discussions of video as an art
media complete, there then followed an urgent need to develop the event as an open contemporary discourse on various aesthetic approaches and various forms of medium exploration as
well as modes of production.
The theme of the festival in 2015 was inspired by Suharto’s New Order military regime,
which lasted for 32 years. The New Order began in 1966 to differentiate itself from the Old Orderregime, which was led by the first president of Indonesia, Sukarno. At that time, the festival coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide that took place due to the power struggle
during the coup d’état in 1965.
Departing from this theme, the festival tried to discuss the issue of historical and political media archives that were controlled by the government in the analog era. In this digital era,
however, we know the situation is very different. Now it is the corporations that control everything and this has somehow influenced the development of society, especially in Indonesia,
and, for example, other post-authoritarian countries.
To better share experiences and discussion of the issues, the festival has been divided
into many programs, including exhibitions, screenings, multimedia performances, symposia,
discussions, and workshops.
The eighth and most recent edition of the festival was in 2017, with food as the main
theme. This theme was still connected with the previous exploration of the legacy of the New
Order, as discussed in 2015. Over its 32 years, the New Order regime influenced many policies
concerning basic human needs, including food. During the regime, food became one of the fundamental focuses to support development and realize Indonesia as an industrial country.
Food is political, in the sense of having a history that is intertwined with the geography
and politics of both Southeast Asia and the world. The Green Revolution agricultural policy of
the New Order changed many things in relation to food supply, availability, and fulfillment, in
addition to the technology used, social impact, and wider economic, cultural, and politicalstructures. The Green Revolution was a massive paradigm shift in terms of food, from the soil
up to the dinner table. The policy was also a milestone in relation to the control of knowledge
and power by the regime in that it could tell people that this is the “true” system, this is the“true” technology, and anything else is “wrong” or bound to fail. The Green Revolution was thedictum of truth through food management policy. What had been regarded as knowledge in the
traditional farming system was suddenly considered inefficient, as there was no surplus and so
we were “unable” to solve the growing need for food.
The regime then created a phrase—“Food Crisis”—to justify the system that they applied
to a global environment. In the Indonesian context, the Green Revolution affected the rhythm oflife, especially those who lived in a village, who had to become “the barn” and take on the
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［22］responsibility of making this revolution succeed. These conditions then had serious consequences, of course, ranging from the destruction of the socio-ecological conditions to land
grabbing and the industrialization of food from upstream to downstream.
From that perspective, positioning food as our main framing device and focus was important in terms of analyzing how the perspective of the New Order or the New World Orderaffected and continues to affect people’s ways of life on the ground. Looking again at how foodissues arrive at relationships with media and technology, we tried to reflect on the narratives
produced by the New Order regime and encourage discussion related to the possibility of alternate, sustainable narratives. We considered: how are the various food technologies, which havebeen supported by a regime that ruled for 32 years, delivered through the use of media?
At the same time, we are also very interested in re-examining the traditional knowledge
that farmers have long possessed. These old sciences are rarely documented and often underestimated, when in fact such wisdom should form the basis for modern technology. We wanted toinvestigate the potential in the current context for media technology and all possible modes of
production and distribution to have a role in re-promoting this traditional knowledge.
Farmers and the government have differing perceptions of “food sovereignty.” For the
farmers, food sovereignty means that they could have the freedom to select planting and soil
cultivation methods on their own accord, and also more freedom in controlling food distribution. For the government, however, “food sovereignty” means that the nation is capable ofmeeting the population’s food demand. Adequate domestic food supply—and, therefore, theabsence of a need to import food—was the government’s indicator of success for food sovereignty, but the government remained heedless of the policy’s negative impacts on both theenvironment and farmers. As such, the problem of food security goes beyond maintaining thechain of “production, distribution, and consumption,” because there are strong political aspects
attached to it.

# Historical Approach to the Topic of Food
The 2017 festival took place from July to August.
With Renan Laru-an from Manila and myself as
co-curators, the festival featured a variety of activities, including art exhibitions, performances,site-specific interventions, art projects, and research that mainly took place in our self-run
community space, Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem, inJakarta (Fig. 2). We just moved to this space. Before,
we operated out of a small house and then joined
together with other collectives to run the newspace. It has become a “collective of collectives”
that run the space and share resources.
Stemming from the festival’s curatorial arc
on food, especially in the context of Indonesia,
we researched artists whose work centers on foodand use media arts and technology as a strategy
and language in discussing as well as disseminating their ideas. The main exhibition involved 36
artists and also 13 organizations and community
partners from Indonesia and abroad (Fig. 3).
Through our festival, we want to reintroduce food as a medium, technology, and context.
During our research period, a timeline was created in response to a question: to what extent has
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments

Fig. 2 Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem, the venue for OK. Video2017 and where ruangrupa was based

Fig. 3 OK. Video 2017［23］

the subject of food and environment been unfolding or discussed within the history of art inIndonesia? This search also seeks to contextualize the interrelation between social and art
histories. This allows ideas to develop and becomes a new way of looking at history.
In this process, we invited a group of researchers to conduct cooperative research taking
a historical approach to artists exploring the
topic of food in Indonesia, and they set up atimeline as a result of their research to reflect on
the concerns of each artist and how it relates tothe regime in power at the time, and also how it
relates to the development of media technology
and the artists’ choice of medium for exploring
their concerns around this topic.
Discussion of these food topics is not limited only to individual artists or interdisciplinary
Fig. 4 Examples of a workshop (top) and talk (bottom, withpractitioners concerned with the issue of foodTadasu Takamine) at OK. Video 2017
politics. The most challenging part, though, is
how to gather practitioners and organizations or
institutions from very different sectors that can collaborate with or develop discussions withartists, individuals, or initiatives that are mostly related to art (Fig. 4).

# An Interdisciplinary Open Lab Residency
Alongside the festival, we also formed the OpenLab Residency Program. This is a collaborativelaboratory for artistic production conducted byartists, scientists, and practitioners from diverse
backgrounds to collectively perform various
forms of speculation in terms of producing art
and developing knowledge. So far we have realized a total of ten Open Lab Residencies (Fig. 5).
Syaiful Garibaldi’s residency addressed
the body as a biological entity. The biologicalFig. 5 Mark Sanchez & Minerva Co-Lab, Sanity Mapping
context certainly brings us to the meaning of the(mapping of the mental state), which is one of the results of
the Open Lab Residency Program
body not only as a living thing, but also how the
body proceeds and transforms after its life isover. We want to understand the cycles of eating and being eaten from an alternative point ofview. Instead of always positioning the human as the main subject, we are invited to see theactivities of the decomposer creatures that eat the human body after it dies. As humans live, we
perform various acts of consumption. But after we die, the human body also becomes something consumed by such creatures. In the Open Lab, Syaiful Garibaldi worked with a researcher
and some forensic medical specialists to identify this process.
Bakudapan is a food studies collective from Yogyakarta. It works with researchers, designers, and illustrators to collect recipes from women survivors of the political detainment in
1965, by telling the story on how they could survive and organize their lives together. The kitchen
and food becomes the filter for examining broader political issues from that time. This project
also aimed to share the stories with the younger generation as an alternative learning resource,covering history, politics, the feminist movement, and female solidarity. The open lab processconcluded by creating a dinner that serves a variety of the recipes told by the survivors. It was
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［24］

also attended by writers from various background, who then played a role in sharing thestories further through other media (Fig. 6).
In addition, our lab continues to learn
how to sort out the many wild plants that growaround our space and process them into a variety
of dishes (Fig. 7). We invite a variety of wild foodexperts to share their knowledge about the benefits and nutrients of wild plants that are
overlooked. Knowledge about these wild plants
is under-developed or has not been accepted into
the ruling discourse. Luinambi Vesiano’s work
invites us to identify the benefits of the wild
plants around us and explore the possibilities ofprocessing some recipes. His practice works tospotlight these plants and give them better repFig. 6 Dinner hosted by Bakudapan to mark the closing ofresentation in our culture.
the Open Lab Residncy Program
The Legume Research Project is run by therestaurant Warung Ramah and Lintang Panglipuran,a community organization involved
with plant diversification andconservation based in Sleman,
Yogyakarta, and particularly centered on research about beans orlegumes. In this project, the members gathered information on how
traditional farmers manage soil fertility by growing legume plants after
harvesting rice to improve the fertility of the soil. The project offers acritique of the New Order regime,
which encouraged farmers to use
Fig. 7 A project about wild plants held in the shared garden spacechemical substances on a large scale
during the Green Revolution.
During the Open Lab program, participants made a co-garden space so that anyone could
follow their process. They also opened a small kiosk as a melting pot and lab for experimentation. They did several workshops. One was about distillation from alternative resources andthen creating your own fermented drinks. Participants were provided with a manual book andtaught how to make their own beverages. Through this experience, participants became moreaware of food discourse, such as food security, politics, and systems.
By building this Open Lab platform, we are also trying to foster interaction with the wider
community so that they can be involved in following the ongoing laboratory process. That’s why
the name is Open Lab. It is as simple as that to indicate that it is open to intervention, interaction, exchanges, and access to resources.
The symposium program has also been organized as a forum for discussion and sharingof perspectives on the theme of the festival. The symposium sessions were held in multiple locations, with a focus on more interactive and informal formats. We are principally interested in
exploring other possible formats of symposia that go beyond the conventional.
We also visited actual historical sites, interacting with the urban farmers and inviting
various citizen food-related initiatives to share knowledge.

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# Developing an Online-Based Lab for Collaboration
We also initiated the Virtual Open Lab Residency as one of the festival’s programs, but were unable to implement it. Needless to say, material limitations and infrastructural conditions remaina constant concern for realizing this kind of project. Nonetheless, I would like to share a little bit
about the idea behind the program.
With its history in Jakarta and as the longest-running festival of its kind in the region, theaudience and the participants tend to consider the organization and management of the project ina similar way to structurally funded institutions. Actually, though, it was initiated by artists andremains a self-organized, artist-run festival. This means that as curators, of course, we have more
complicated positions and decisions to make in order to maintain this and realize our plans.
The Open Lab’s next vision is to facilitate short- and long-term collaboration between
artists with various parties. What is unique about this new residency is that it will be done remotely and only online. The Indonesian arts scene already enjoys a dynamic and collaborative
community. With the virtual residency, we want to test if this can translated without physicalcontact or the usual privileges of initiating collaboration. The project invites people’s participation through virtual conversations with mentors as an experiment in modes of production andas a means to transfer knowledge. In order to facilitate discussion and share information tolesser-known contexts, OK. Video partners with other institutions, including the Indonesian
Visual Art Archive and Pad.ma. The latter is a public access digital media archive initiated byvarious groups from Mumbai, Bangalore, and Berlin, as well as artists and researchers.
We developed this festival into a research-based laboratory because we are interested in
the idea of the festival as a space, and space as an enabler, where people with different kinds ofknowledge, experience, and skills can use the space to exchange and cooperate. Many initiatives
and programs that cannot be articulated in other spaces could acquire a space or laboratory here
for experimentation.
There are many people with different skills and knowledge sharing the same concerns
about food. But they work alone and are not connected to each other. Our festival wants to playa role in providing them with a space so that their knowledge and expertise—that is, the collective intelligence—can be brought together.

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[Session 2]

Restoration, Preservation,
and Archiving Today

Speaker Profiles
Aria Dean

Assistant Curator of Net Art, Rhizome at the New Museum [USA]

Aria Dean is an artist, writer, and curator based in Los Angeles, California. She is the assistant curatorof net art and digital culture at Rhizome, an art organization based on the Internet and at the New
Museum in New York City. Her writing has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, The New Inquiry,
Real Life Magazine, Topical Cream Magazine, Mousse Magazine, CURA Magazine, and X-TRA
Contemporary Art Quarterly. She has spoken at art institutions, colleges, and universities around theUnited States, including the New Museum, UCLA (Los Angeles), Reed College (Portland, Oregon),
The New School (New York City), and the Canadian Center for Architecture (Montreal).
http://rhizome.org

Yae Akaiwa

Artist / exonemo [USA / Japan]

Yae Akaiwa develops her artistic practice as part of exonemo, a group formed with Kensuke Sembo
in 1996. Blurring the boundaries between digital, analog, computer networks, and the real world, thepair’s experimental projects develop humorous and innovative explorations that reveal the relationship between technology and its users. In 2006, exonemo received the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica
and, in 2015, participated in NEW INC, the first museum-led incubator, at the New Museum, New
York. In 2017, she is a grantee on the Program of Overseas Study for Upcoming Artists, organized by
the Agency for Cultural Affairs. She also launched the event Internet Yami-Ichi (Internet Black
Market), which has been held in some 20 cities around the world.
http://exonemo.com

The Challenges of Internet Art
Aria Dean Assistant Curator of Net Art, Rhizome at the New Museum

Aria Dean is Assistant Curator of Net Art and Digital Culture at Rhizome, which is housed at the New
Museum in New York City. Her presentation introduced the dilemmas faced in archiving net art (artworks that are experienced online) as well as the approaches her organization takes.

# An Online Organization for Online PracticeThough we are housed at the New
Museum, Rhizome is not technically affiliated with them. In fact,
we are an art organization that’s
based over the Internet. We were
founded in 1996 by a group of artists who were interested in what
was then primarily known as net
art. Now we’ve expanded the definition of what we do to include
what we call “art that acts on the
network or is acted upon by it.”This is fundamentally art that isabout or on the Internet. Rhizome
is concerned with an expansive set of practices from formal browser-based artworks to ongoingpractices that are based on social media, such as Twitter poetry or YouTube performance work.
When we first started, we were more community-oriented, serving a purpose as a gathering place for artists who were interested in these sorts of practices. But as we’ve grown andmatured, we’ve taken on a more institutional life, being based at the New Museum where wehost public programs and have our offices. We have a few main verticals in our program: ourpublishing platform, online exhibitions, commissions, public programs, and software.
We publish both long-form and short-form writing. On rhizome.org, you can find interviews as well as longer critical texts about net art, longer texts about digital culture at large aswell as short blog posts reporting on symposia in various countries from contributors aroundthe world.
Our public programs are generally held at the New Museum and they include screenings,
followed by a conversation, and other events that bring artists together to discuss artworks thatare related to an ongoing line of inquiry. One major program we have every year is called Sevenon Seven, which brings together seven artists and seven technologists, who work to assemble
pretty much anything they want. We just pair them up for 24 hours and they are set free to create
an artwork or an app or a performance, and then we present them at the museum. It always
happens in the spring and it’s kind of our “big” program of the year that draws a lot of people.
Our software program is concerned primarily with digital preservation and archiving. I
will first make an important distinction between those two terms. For us, “archiving” is a more
active stance towards digital objects, where you would archive something as you go along inorder to save it for later. The preservation program is more about restoring and repairing, or
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kind of going back and trying to fix things that
weren’t necessarily archived where they shouldhave been at the time.
A software tool that we have is called
Oldweb.today (http://oldweb.today). It allows
you to browse a web page in a legacy browser. If
you type in facebook.com, for instance, rather
than showing you what Facebook looks like
today, you can look at it on a given date. You cando this with pretty much any website that is stillavailable. If it’s on archive.org, which saves copFig. 1 Top page of Webrecorder (http://webrecorder.io)
ies of webpages, you should be able to use
Oldweb.today to see it. It is a fun tool and also
completely accessible to the public.
Our major software initiative is Webrecorder (http://webrecorder.io), a web archiving
tool that allows anyone to archive a given web page (Fig. 1). Just making a screenshot of a page is
not an active copy of the page. With Webrecorder, you can go back and continue to browse thepage. You hit “record” and then it quickly makes a copy of it, and you can always go back andrevisit it as a fully interactive copy of the site.
In terms of our online commissions and exhibitions program, throughout the year wecommission new artworks from artists, mostly in New York but also from around the world. The
amounts of money that we offer to artists range depending on the need and the project, but partof our program specifically funds new works from digital artists. Commissions will lead to an
exhibition and often we’ll also exhibit existing works. Those exhibitions are frequently thematicgroup or solo shows, and they all take place online.

# Archiving the History of Net Art
Today, I want to talk about one exhibition thatwe’ve been working on for the last year: “Net Art
Anthology” (Fig. 2). This sits at the intersection of
our software and artistic programs in that it provides a series of very interesting case studies for
digital archiving and preservation.
The gist of the exhibition is that “Net Art
Anthology” presents 100 works of net art history,
one per week over the course of two years. Everyweek on http://anthology.rhizome.org we publish a new work. We started with works from 1985
and we’re working our way towards the present.
Fig. 2 “Net Art Anthology” exhibition website
The exhibition is divided into four chapters andan epilogue.
The first chapter is 1985 to 1998 and so, thematically, those works are the early Web, thevanguard of the Internet. Chapter two is 1998 to 2005, which is mostly characterized by Flash
artworks and blogs. Chapter three is 2006 to 2011, which includes things like Surf Clubs andearly social media—the first hints of post-Internet as a concept. Chapter four is 2011 to the present, which is characterized by mobile apps and social media, and everything that forms theInternet as we know it right now.
The epilogue will be a physical exhibition in a gallery space that will fill in the blanks,
because we’re choosing the works as we go to make it a dynamically shifting project. We’re notinterested in trying to set up the canon of net art. Rather, we’re interested in the dynamism of
the discipline itself. As such, the epilogue will go back and retrace our steps and see what we
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missed, what maybe came up as we were going along.
In terms of how we’ve chosen the works for the exhibition, we have a set of criteria. The
works must: use the Internet to give voice to emerging subjectivities; model new forms of collective culture and practice; exemplify aesthetic, subjective, political, or conceptual positions
that have taken on a singular resonance within certain networks of artists; and finally, be able tobe meaningfully restaged, reconstructed, and re-performed.
What I’m interested in talking about today is this last criterion: “meaningfully restaged,
reconstructed, and re-performed.” What does that really mean to us as curators and to the artists? I want to dive into this question of how we can effectively preserve, restage, or re-perform
an online work of art.

# The Problem of Preservation
Preservation and conservation is a huge questionin all artistic media and for every institution. But
for digital art, it presents a very particular set ofproblems that are sort of unprecedented in manyways.
For instance, what are the objects that weare archiving or preserving in the first place?
These objects of digital works are incredibly precarious. Often, they are easy to lose. They may beerased just by someone losing the domain wherea work exists. One of the first works in our anthology, Reabracadabra (1985) by Eduardo Kac,
uses Minitel technology, an early Brazilian personal communications service (Fig. 3). It doesn’t
exist anymore; you can’t find the hardware andthe software is messed up. How do you show awork like that when you don’t even have accessto the initial object that it existed on?
There is also the problem that digital
Fig. 3 Eduardo Kac, Reabracadabra, 1985
works are easy to manipulate. Someone can copy
or overwrite something. And there is the question of what is the object exactly? Is the object the code of a website? Is it the way the website
appears in the browser? Or is it the downloaded web pages and a file on your desktop? What do
we classify as the actual work that needs to be preserved? After all, preserving the code is one
thing, but preserving the way that it looks in a browser is an entirely different matter.
These questions are all grounded in this question of how to maintain or produce an object’s
authenticity. But it also leads to other philosophical questions about what actually is the work.
And there are also questions about privileging the will of a given artist or whether curators shouldtake the lead. Is the goal to get the work to look as close to its original present as possible?
Can you use new materials to restore an artwork? In restorations, people have put an iPadin place of the screen in order to simulate the effect of the original object. Some conservators
might say that’s not acceptable, because it’s using a new technology to update this work that’s
very much about the technology of the moment.

# Examples from “Net Art Anthology”
I would like to go through some of the works in “Net Art Anthology” and talk about the problems
that they pose in terms of preservation.
One work is Brandon (1998) by Shu Lea Cheang. It’s a Flash-based, interactive narrative piece
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that’s about real events, in this case a news story about the murder of a transgender American teenager named Brandon. Cheang
has created an expansive multi-linear narrative environment,but, being Flash, we can’t really view it in a modern browser.
Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996)
is another interactive, multi-linear narrative piece (Fig. 4). It’sthese multi-framed, poetic text pieces and images almost likediary entries. Works like this sort of pose questions. The interactivity of this work is core to its meaning, so if there wassomething wrong with it, how do we recreate that without just
simulating it, which then robs it of its actual conceptual interests? We can show a video of someone navigating it, but thatchanges the experience of the work completely.
Fig. 4 Olia Lialina, My Boyfriend Came
Another kind of work that we encounter more and more
Back from the War, 1996
as we get closer and closer to the present is one that is entirely
dispersed into a network or a community. FloodNet byElectronic Disturbance Theater from 1997 is an example of art as activism and activism as art.
The collective created a Java applet that would automatically reload a website enough times tocrash it. It then staged protest actions in support of the Mexican Zapatista movement andcrashed the Mexican government’s website as an act of solidarity. The artwork itself is this Javaappellate but at the same time it’s also a mass performance, where hundreds and thousands ofpeople got the app and reloaded this page over and over and over. Considering heightenedInternet security, we couldn’t restage this and crash the Mexican government’s website for thesake of the exhibition. We had to figure out a way to approximate the effect of this.
A similar work is Ann Hirsch’s
Scandalishious, from 2008–2010 (Fig. 5). This is a
YouTube performance that lasted 18 months.
Hirsch created a character named Caroline, andshe uploaded over 100 videos on to her YouTube
channel of herself dancing or making a video
diary, or answering questions from her commenters. The YouTube channel went viral. She
had a lot of followers and people would send
her response videos, both publicly and someFig. 5 Ann Hirsch, Scandalishious, 2008–10
times privately. Similarly, we have the questionof boundaries, because each of these videos
counts as an art object. But at the same time, Hirsch thinks of the comments, response videos,
and all the interactions as part of the work as well. When it comes to restaging this, not only iseverything scattered but also some of the elements are lost altogether. It brings up ethical andlegal questions of who gets to say if a comment or private video should be made public.

# Approaches and Solutions
The Guggenheim has an approach whereby they go in and rewrite the code to update it so that it
could be viewable on a modern browser. For us, the problem with that is that in ten years thebrowsers are different and then you again have this obsolete artwork.
Our philosophy, when it comes to restoring, preserving, and restaging works of net art, allstems from the idea of emulation. Instead of conserving individual objects, we’re interested inconserving legacy environments in which these objects and practices initially appeared. For
instance, an approach like Oldweb.today, where we can create this framing that looks like it’s
1997 in order to view a work that is from that time, versus just looking at it in a 2018 browser.
What we often do is to use browsers that are contained within the existing browser,
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setting the work aside from the contemporary
context and placing it historically. I guess the big
question is: why? There are many people who
don’t take this approach. But our basic philosophy is that we believe digital culture is a series ofpractices, not individual artifacts.
For us, digital art is inherently performative. Rather than the art happening at one or two
Fig. 6 MTAA, Simple Net Art Diagram, 1997 CC BY 2.5of these computers, the art happens between thetwo, the art happens between the creator and theaudience (Fig. 6). It’s that relationship that makes
something on the Internet “art.” For us, keeping our work authentic then means that we have torecreate the conditions in which it was intended to be experienced. This means that every workrequires something different, which becomes very labor-intensive for an institution, but it’s ascalable solution because we also believe that digital art is a mass medium.
We’re interested in making the largest possible amount of work accessible to the largest
possible number of people. Rather than creating a solution that allows a work to be shown in
one exhibition, we’re trying to create solutions that will allow works to be viewed for the foreseeable future from anyone’s monitor in any country, outside of a gallery, and keeping the kernelof what makes net art, which is its accessibility and its embedded-ness in the Internet itself.
When it comes to the works in “Net Art Anthology,” we have come up against these issues
throughout. With Ann Hirsch, we had to create a manual reconstruction where we remade apage for her that approximated the way YouTube functioned, but wasn’t a real reconstruction.
For some works, a containerized browser approach may not work because sometimes
certain pages have been lost on the website. Then we have to patch in pages and tape things up
a little bit or stitch it together. Other times we have to make do with simulation, such as was thecase with FloodNet.
At Rhizome, we’re lucky enough to have a team of programmers and curators who arepaid to and would like to spend their time working on this. But at the same time, there is a bigquestion of what now, because the field is so scattered and institutions have so many different
ideas of what needs to be done. In addition to that, though, it’s a nice thing to just stay lost.
Sometimes artists don’t know where a website went or a certain page, and many net artists also
weren’t working with institutional support when they were making the work. There are various
external factors that stop us from being able to completely reconstruct something.
In terms of the future and where we are going, a big question in terms of all of this archiving stuff is sustainability and what’s scalable, because institutions can’t be cleanup crews
forever. The Webrecorder tool is a preventative measure and we’re trying to make this moreavailable for free to artists and artistic communities. If artists want to archive all of their work
online, they can make a Webrecorder archive of it and automatically then have a decent archive,
removing some of the need for later preservation efforts.
Since we are a community organization at our core, we encourage our community tomake archives and then, in addition to that, we’re holding conversations and conferences thatdeal with these questions of ethics and archiving the web. Rather than just starting at the practical points, we’re getting archivists, librarians, lawyers, technologists, and artists together in
New York to talk about the ethics of archiving, problems of privacy, and longevity in terms ofarchiving networks and such things as social media platforms. When it comes to artworks online, there ultimately needs to be a whole cultural shift in order to move from preservation
to archiving.

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Creativity in Preservation:
Processes of Reinterpretation and Updating
Yae Akaiwa Artist / exonemo

Yae Akaiwa co-founded the artist duo exonemo in 1996. During the 1990s, the group started making
net art. Since 2000, the duo has expanded its area of activities to the non-virtual world, creating installations and organizing art events.

# Approaches to Preservation That Pass on the Spirit, Not the Original
The theme of this symposium is“creativity, education, and archive
environments,” so I am going totalk about artwork archiving andcreativity that is inspired by the actof archiving.
During the 1990s, when exonemo was mainly creating works
online, we often experienced
screen freezes due to OS and webbrowser version upgrades, orchanges in Internet service specifications. We were not that concernedat the time, just thinking that ourworks were like a kind of elongated performance art. Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of our group, though, and we found that it had become increasingly difficult to view manyof the works that had been put online in the past, including our own. Sometimes, we can’t
cross-reference a new work that looks similar to an existing work with past examples. If things
go on like this, I thought, creating art over the Internet would eventually stop evolving and wewould be reduced to just unconsciously reproducing works from the past.
When I started to realize that problem, I
came across the ritual of Shikinen Sengu at Ise
Jingu (Ise Grand Shrine). Simply put, the shrinebuildings are rebuilt periodically and the enshrined deity ceremonially transferred from theold structure to the new version. The ritual is observed in other shrines as well, but Ise Jingu’s isthe oldest, having continued for over 1,300 years.
To be more precise, a shrine building withthe exact same dimensions as the current one isconstructed every 20 years at an alternate site
called the Miyadokoro (Fig. 1). This process ofFig. 1 The 59th Shikinen Sengu at Ise Jingu (upper buildings
are the new shrine, lower ones are the older version), 1953
building a new structure and tearing down the
Source: Asahi Camera (Ed.), Asahi shimbun hodo shashin
old one is repeated every twentieth year. At the
kessakushu 1954, The Asahi Shimbun Company, Tokyo,
1954
same time, all the materials used for rituals arealso remade and many ceremonies and other
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events are held. The purpose of doing this is to refresh and rejuvenate the deity to ensure its
eternal bond with the people. The idea of renewing everything to preserve the original divinity
instead of maintaining the physical structure representing it intrigued me and changed the way
I thought about preservation. I started to think about the viability of preserving the spirit behindsomething, rather than just conserving with a focus on originality.

# New Creativity from Reinterpretation
If we want to pass our artworks on to the next generation, the key is not to preserve them as they are,but to update them constantly. An artwork created at a certain point in time cannot be preserved
precisely as is, because nothing surrounding it can stay in its original state, even for a second, in anenvironment in which everything is constantly changing. If we want to “freeze” our creations, wemust also fix the natural and social environments in the state in which they were made, which is
impossible. A small change may not affect the way people interpret them, but as time passes andenvironmental shifts continue, people’s interpretations will become very different.
For instance, the way aristocrats viewed Renaissance paintings in their palaces at the time
would have been totally different from the way we appreciate them today in art museums, restored
several times since and with both the social and exhibiting conditions so drastically different. I
know that today’s art museums play a vital role in furthering rich culture through historical insights and contextualization, by preserving artworks as closely as possible to their original state,
displaying them, and explaining their contexts. Having said that, I believe that the driving force
behind cultural evolution is in the process of “updating” existing artworks in line with changes inenvironment rather than this kind of preservation. Through the process of “updating,” creativity
and versatility develop and vividly communicate the spirit of artworks and artists.
One of the characteristics of media art is, broadly speaking, that it involves data as well as
physical objects. Even a born-digital artwork that doesn’t use any tangible materials requires aninterface—hardware, which is a concrete object—with which to access data. That shows how
media art is inseparable from the physical.
The surrounding environment is also a vital component. An artwork is created through aperfect balance of various environments—the natural, the social, the exhibiting, and the computer. The rapidly and dramatically changing computer environment, including both softwareand hardware, is comparable to the constant movement of the earth’s crust or volcanic eruptions within the natural environment, and it is extremely difficult to preserve a media art piecein a way that corresponds to those changes. This is the major difference between the fine artsand net art or media art.
Cultural facilities, including art museums, are now looking for ways to preserve media
art pieces before they quickly vanish. Art museums and other facilities are said to keep and restore digital arts in four ways.
Let me briefly explain. The first method is storage. Tangible works are stored in a warehouse and data are stored on recording media such as a magnet tape.
The second method is emulation. In order to restore original data, a virtual environment
emulating the old OS is created in a new OS environment. For example, gamers create emulatorswith which old games can be played on new hardware.
The third method is migration. Original data are converted or reconfigured for migration
into a new environment. It means that the original data are replaced by new ones. Shikinen
Sengu is a kind of migration because it is all about moving to a new environment.
The fourth and the last one is reinterpretation. It is difficult to define exactly but I think
it includes reenactment or reproduction by someone other than the creators as well as updatingby the creators themselves. In fact, when we try to restore old works, we reinterpret them mostly
by retuning and updating them in line with environment, place, and time.
These are the methods to preserve and restore artworks mainly employed by art museums.
One thing to note is that the fourth method—reinterpretation—is considered a last resort by the
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people engaged in preservation, since it could
completely change the creators’ purposes, how
works are conceptualized, and how they appear.
As an artist, I intentionally use reinterpretation as a method to enrich and update mywork. To me, reinterpretation is an exciting andbold technique for passing on the core idea andoriginal spirit. I believe that this is the most creative preservation method artists and viewers
can freely use on their own.
Fig. 2 Left: Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1500 Right: exonLet me now introduce some of exonemo’s
emo, Selfie-Portrait (“#ArtUpdate” series), 2016
work created through this approach of
reinterpretation.
“#ArtUpdate” is a series of experimental
artworks in which masterpieces of the past are
viewed through the filter of contemporary artists
and updated to fit into today’s media environment. We have tried to highlight the gaps
between the concepts and ideas of the original
works and today’s technology, as well as the awkFig. 3 Left: Robert Indiana, LOVE, 1970 Right: exonemo,
wardness of their being combined.
CAPTCHA-ed LOVE (“#ArtUpdate” series), 2016
The first example is an updated version of
Self-Portrait by Albrecht Dürer, which we have
now titled Selfie-Portrait (Fig. 2). The original work
was painted in 1500. We happened to find that
Dürer’s right hand in front of his chest is drawn
almost like it could hold a smartphone, so wegave him one. We thought that his empty handmight impart an awkward feeling to the smartFig. 4 Left: Nam June Paik, TV Buddha, 1974 Right: exonphone generation.
emo, VR Buddha (“#ArtUpdate” series), 2016
The next example is the reinterpretation ofLOVE, a famous sculpture by Robert Indiana (Fig. 3).
We showed the four letters “LOVE” as if they have been deformed through CAPTCHA (Completely
Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart—certain types of form arerecognizable only to humans and not to computers or robots). We wanted to emphasize that eventhough surveillance cameras are constantly monitoring us wherever we go, “love,” the most important message for mankind, is understood only by us and not by computers or robots.
The final example is VR Buddha, an updated version of TV Buddha by Nam June Paik (Fig. 4).
The original work combines the central idea of Zen—deep reflection on one’s inner self—with thelatest technologies of the 1970s and 1980s. What we did was to replace the TV with virtual reality,
the latest advance in technology. It seems as if the statue is looking at a big vacuum created by theremoval of the TV and camera, which depicts the hollowness of virtual reality.
There are actually many versions of TV Buddha and each of them is modified to suit theexhibition themes and venues. The artist used different Buddha statues and equipment. In one
case, the TV is embedded in a mound; in another, the statue’s body is buried underground; and inyet another, the artist added decoration directly onto the TV. They all look different, but we canobserve common elements among them. As this case shows, by looking at various versions of apiece of art, we are able to identify the central value and message an artist wishes to convey.
Exonemo also often remakes original works from the past to suit new exhibition environments. Sometimes we make only slight adjustments for a version upgrade and other times we doa complete makeover using a new computer program. In either case, we reinterpret our past works,
leaving the parts that must stay and retune the rest to suit a different environment.
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When we remake art, though, the actual works are not always available. Sometimes wehave to rely on archives or even our own memories. I believe the key to reinterpretation andreproduction is these guiding archives or the original works’ contexts. For artwork preservation
at art museums, documentation is always indispensable along with the actual work of art. It isalso very important for reinterpretation.

# Diversity of Open Platform Events
Jason Scott, an archivist at the renowned Internet Archive, once made a thought-provoking
comment about preserving computer games. To summarize his point, the preservation of games
involves not only the storage of data and the archiving of recording media but also the documentation of gaming experiences, knowledge, and happenings—the entire life of a gamer. Thatis comparable to an artist’s experience and memories about his works, which is so essential.
Suppose there are two dice on a table. Many unbelievable events may have happened aroundthem. If only the dice are left, however, all the brilliant stories are lost forever.
In other words, archives are the only means we have for passing on experiences of artworks. Viewers can reconstruct the ideas and stories by retrieving the artwork’s context from thearchives.
Next, I would like to introduce anotherexample of our work, Natural Process (Fig. 5). This
embodies the circumstances, stories, and changing processes of a “thing.” If only this “thing” isleft behind, viewers will not be able to reconstruct the story, just like in the case of the dice.
The “thing” we used here was the home
page for Google Search. We started production on
the work in 2003 and the first exhibit was at Mori
Art Museum in 2004, the year Google went public. At the time, Google’s search engine had
Fig. 5exonemo, Natural Process, 2004 and going.
already become indispensable to our Internet
Installation view at Roppongi Crossing: New Visions inContemporary Japanese Art 2004 (2004, Mori Art Museum)life and its top page was so familiar to us. It was
Photo: Keizo Kioku
just like looking at the scenery of the Internet
through the window of a browser.
What we did was copy Google Search’s top page to create a painting, a landscape paintingof the world we live in today. We webcast the painting at the exhibition, and then uploaded theexhibition itself online. Many interesting things ensued. One of the viewers, knowing they wereon camera at the exhibition, took a selfie on their smartphone through the Internet. Anotherviewer hacked the installation space, bringing in the icon of a broken image and starting toperform in front of the camera.
Google’s headquarters in the United States gave us formal permission to use their search
page during the exhibition after viewing our work through the webcast and later even bought
the painting. In 2012, when we asked Google to lend the painting out for an exhibition at NTT
InterCommunication Center [ICC], they declined on the grounds that the browser on the painting to be used was not Google’s Chrome. Eventually, we drew a new painting that shows the error
page “403 Forbidden” and presented that at the exhibition. The next year, we made a replica of
the original painting to showcase. In another related incident, we were nearly sued by a Frenchartist who claimed that he was the first to create a Google painting. He later used our work without permission in his declaration of the history of web painting. Our work was also widely
covered on TV and in magazines.
As I explained, Natural Process is an example of a single web page generating many different
circumstances and stories (Fig. 6). The archiving of the stories that develop from a single artwork
is very important for artists, because it helps us understand the work’s core idea and context,
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［36］

and leads to new creativity.
Lastly, I would like to introduce an example from after ouractivities shifted from online environments to the offline, physicalworld, which led to new interpretation and creativity. It is an event
called the Internet Yami-Ichi(Internet Black Market), produced
by IDPW, an artist collective
formed in 2012.
Fig. 6 Development process for Natural ProcessThis is a flea market where
people trade “Internet-like” things,
face to face, in actual space. It is an experiment in reflecting on what the Internet is—but in an
offline, physical environment. Anyone can join in, and participants freely interpret the concept
and implement their ideas in the actual world.
Let me introduce a few examples. Spam
Mail is a real-world expression of what is happening in cyberspace by sending Spam meat bypost. Brow-zara (Browser Plate) is a plate printed
with the design of an Internet browser frame,
intended for people to put physical content on a
web browser. Free Safari Tours! is a real-world experience of an Internet service (Fig. 7). YouCube isa performance replicating YouTube (Fig. 8). In addition to these, there were such works as Internet
Dude, a man mimicking the Internet itself, andFig. 7 Free Safari Tours!, Internet Yami-ichi at De Brakke
Grond, Amsterdam (2015) Photo: Sebastiaan ter Burg / CC
Amazon Boy, a physical person enacting online
BY 2.0services in the actual world.
The Internet Yami-Ichi event has been
held in 17 cities around the world, including two
events in Japan. We have seen a range of ideas
coming out of many different interpretations,with the event itself being staged in different formats. I believe diversity has been achieved
because we created an open platform that could
make it cross-cultural. After hearing people say
they want to hold the event in their own cities,
we constructed an open platform so that anyone
can freely organize events of their own. As a reFig. 8 YouCube, Internet Yami-ichi at De Brakke Grond,sult, Internet Yami-Ichi popped up in many cities
Amsterdam (2015) Photo: Sebastiaan ter Burg / CC BY 2.0
with various local reinterpretations. By allowing
the free interpretation of ideas and by spreading
across different cultures, its spirit has been passed on and the event has become enriched.
Today, I discussed the importance of archiving, centering around my own activities. Afterall, what is most important to me is to pass on the spirit of an artwork or project, and the key toachieving this is not to freeze a work in its original state but to let it flow within a changing environment in varying formats.
At the end of the day, an artwork cannot be completely frozen. As such, let’s interpret
artworks freely and hand them on to the next generation. This is one way to archive, I believe,
and the very process of updating inspires creativity in artists.

Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［37］

Q&A and Discussion—Now let’s start the Q&A session. Today’s guest speakers will take your questions.

Q 1 I’m in charge of collecting and archiving artworks at an art center in Poland. I think media art isdifferent from other forms of art and has more potential because it can combine various artistic elements through different media. Media artists can exploit archives in numerous ways, such as developing
a new art piece based on an archived work or using them in many distinct ways for their artistic activities. If we take advantage of the merits of time-based media, we can store and display not only physicalartworks but also their artistic expressions that have changed over time as well as their contexts thathave stood the test of time. In reality, however, I’ve found it difficult to preserve media art’s originalcontexts as is and pass concepts on to the next generation. What can we do to help create a better environment for archiving and educate people to ensure that archives are properly passed on?

Yae Akaiwa: I believe it is essential to archive the context and background of artwork, because it
will lead to new creativity. I talked about the Internet Yami-Ichi earlier and the main reason it
has spread so widely is that we built an open platform. Preservation is important, but how tomake things open is equally important. It depends on the legal situation in each country.
The situation in the United States is very generous. For example, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art recently released many of its digital archives into the public domain, and I personally think it is important to investigate their secondary use.
Aria Dean: At Rhizome, we use the Webrecorder platform for research and curation. It can capture not only original content, but also any additional content triggered by interactions. It helps
a great deal in contextualizing both the actual artwork and critique of it.

Q 2 I have a question for Yae Akaiwa. You introduced reinterpretation as a means of preservation,
passing on the idea and “spirit” of an artwork while allowing expression of it to change. Don’t you think
reinterpretation can differ from person to person and you can no longer preserve an original work if
altered versions of it are allowed to prevail? Another question is, isn’t your reinterpretation of Dürer’s
Self-Portrait actually just a parody?

Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［38］

Akaiwa: I am intrigued to see how an artwork changes through people’s reinterpretations into
many different versions. Preservation of the original is important, but if it is preserved as is for
too long, it gradually loses its original spirit. Even if there are many different versions, as long as
they deliver the spirit of the creator, reinterpretation is as important as straight preservation.
The “#ArtUpdate” series experiments in asking what would a work of art from the past be
like if it was made now, and can also be regarded as parodic in nature. Rather than preserving,
the experiment is “refreshing” an artwork by connecting its original period with the present.

Q 3 The absence of documentation or the other contexts of a work may inspire our imagination about
the past or allow us to make up whatever interpretation we want to. Do we really need to leave documentation and the contexts behind for the next generation?

Akaiwa: I agree with that sentiment. For instance, nobody knows for sure who made the moaistatues and for what purpose, which is what makes them so intriguing. But if we do know thecontext, it’s easier for us to understand the idea behind their creation. It then allows us to reinterpret it and pass it on to the next generation, and this continual process of searching for ideas
and passing on the original spirit is the most exciting aspect of reinterpretation.
The moai statues will remain mysterious. If we want to preserve ideas and the original
spirit of an artwork, however, we need its context and documentation.

Q4

Tell us about any difficulties with artistic or educational activities in your country.

Julia Sarisetiati: In Indonesia, art is regarded as a hobby or a leisure activity and not given serious consideration. It is very difficult to make people realize that there is a strong relationshipbetween art and life.
Kiyoshi Suganuma: In Japan, too, art is largely expected to satisfy recreational demands. In
Europe and the US, however, art museums are strategically involved in urban policies. For example, some museums are actively engaged in raising awareness of social problems, including
economic disparity and migrants.
I call them solution-oriented cultural institutions, but YCAM is, I think, a little different
to that—it’s a laboratory-centric institution. We aim to present new values and identify issues,
as opposed to solving already existing problems, and exploring possibilities as a new kind ofcultural institution.
Jos Auzende: In France, art museums and art centers are regarded as places that encourage children to use their senses to nurture creativity, though their main function is as exhibition halls
displaying artwork based on academic research. There is some resistance to exposing children
directly to serious social problems. We consider the relationship between children and art to bevery special, because art can be a strong driving force that promotes creativity and stimulates anunderstanding of different worlds.
Tengal: The situation in the Philippines is similar to that of Indonesia. Our problem is that socalled fine art is regarded as a kind of entertainment among the elites, because there is such a
big divide between them and the general population. There is also a division between art andscience, because artists and scientists do not recognize the value of each other’s work. I thought
I needed to do something to solve these problems and started a movement using media art,
which is more accessible for children and young people. This initial goal was to make the linethat separates art and science visible through creative and fun ways so that it doesn’t intimidate
people too much. We are using it to draw their attention to science and mathematics, but it has
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［39］

proven difficult.
—Now our guests, do you have any questions?
Suganuma: I have a question for the speakers who gave their presentations in the first part. Eachof you is involved in community activities. I want to know whether the size of your community
matters, and what your community is aiming for.
In the case of YCAM, most visitors come for the library. We are offering art classes andvarious educational programs for visitors to keep our community open and diverse.
Sarisetiati: It’s been 18 years since we opened our community space. In Jakarta, there are many
commercial facilities but less space for people who want to do things on their own. We neededa place where people can meet, exchange views and opinions, and work together, and this motivation eventually led to the creation of our community. It is important that people share andaccumulate their knowledge. It is also important to continue running the community space ina way that people can come and share their ideas.
Tengal: A small community is easy to manage but difficult to grow. Likewise, there is a lot ofpressure in running a bigger community because it has bigger problems. This issue is nevergoes away.
In our case, we created our community, or collective, because we knew there are artists
who are determined to survive in a difficult environment. We didn’t even have a place to exhibit artworks, let alone an actual gallery, and nobody paid attention to these types of artists.
Then we started searching for people with like-minded interests from mailing lists and asked
them to get together.
We did not feel pressured to have a physical space. More important was how to survive inthe existing social environment by borrowing spaces to host activities and making the most of
it. That’s how we started WSK. Today we have several spaces, or labs, for creatives. They are notnecessarily physical spaces, because rent is a big burden. We failed to pay rent three times.
Nonetheless, I am now thinking of opening a new space, since we lost our residency space,
Terminal Garden, five years ago.
I am still wondering, though, whether it is better to maintain a physical space or rather
virtual space, which is easier to manage. But the only way to find out is to start one again, I
guess.
Auzende: It is tough to answer the question because I am not involved in a community activity.
Our organization is much larger than a community project. In our organization, the management took a risk and provided an activity space for us. They also took financial risks, whichenabled us to offer many programs to children who will grow up to become adults.
We have an open-source community with La Gaîté Lyrique at the center. We are working
together with artists in a small group to offer various international programs for children. But
we don’t run a community that connects the facility and citizens.
Sarisetiati: I would like to talk a bit more about why it is good for us to have our own space. Itmeans we can make decisions on our own and decide what to create. We can choose our audience and share our work within the community. This is why we can deliver a story that is a little
different from the mainstream. That is, we have an advantage because we can deliver a specificmessage to a specific community. At the same time, we always need to be the ones taking theinitiative in order to keep things going, which is not easy.
—That brings us to the end of today’s symposium. Thank you.

Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［40］[Report]

Related Events

A program of related events comprising educational workshops and a series of talks offered participants opportunities to experience firsthand the contents of the second International Symposium forMedia Art, “Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments,” and to learn widely
about contemporary trends in each field.
A program of four educational workshops was implemented by the Yamaguchi Center for Arts
and Media [YCAM], which is a leading media art organization in Japan, WSK: Festival of the Recently
Possible, a festival in the Philippines, and Lifepatch–citizen initiative in art, science and technology,
which featured in the first International Symposium for Media Art and is based in Yogyakarta,
Indonesia. Through the themes of society, body, and media technology, these workshops investigating creativity in our media-centric society demonstrated methods to apply or understand technology,
based on the specialty and regionality of each center or collective.
“Art & Technology in Spectrum: From Music Culture, Media Art, to Cosmology in Asia” was aseries of talks about music, media art, and science, featuring a wide variety of guest speakers andintroducing contemporary cultural trends across a range of topics. It attracted much interest fromdifferent generations and fields.

Educational Workshops
Venue: Shibuya Cultural Center Owada

Workshop #1“Eye2Eye”
Date & Time: February 10, 2018 / 10:30–12:30 & 14:00–16:00“Eye2Eye” is an original workshop developed by the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM], an
institution exploring new modalities of expression through media technology. The experimental educational workshop explores the possibilities for information and communication offered by lines ofsight and the act of looking, using the development environment EyeWriter that applies eyesight input
technology, thus allowing the device to be operated by the viewer’s eyesight. We are rarely consciousof our own line of vision. In this workshop, what participants were looking at was made visible on ascreen by operating the EyeWriter. Playing games with this technology encouraged participants tothink about the correlation between line of sight and psychology as well as the difficulties of controlling machines. As they engaged in these games, participants shared questions about how vision or
the way we see functions, or what a neighboring person is looking at. What information does one’s“gaze” include? Is it possible to communicate only by the line of vision, by moving the eyes? Theseexperiments provided an opportunity to re-acknowledge the meaning of “line of vision” or “looking”
in everyday life.

Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［41］

Workshop Leaders: Kiyoshi Suganuma (Educator, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]) [ Japan],
Daichi Yamaoka (Educator, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]) [ Japan]

Workshop #2“Kotoba Shintai” (Language and Body)
Date & Time: February 12, 2018 / 10:30–12:30 & 14:00–16:00

Like the first workshop “Eye2Eye,” “Kotoba Shintai” is an original workshop developed by YCAM andis intended as a way for participants to discover the relationships between language (kotoba) andbody (shintai), of which we are not normally aware in daily life. Participants first wrote down words on
sticky notes pertaining to what they were looking at and created new words by combining the words
they had written. They then moved their bodies based on the new words or, conversely, created newwords based on their body movements. These repeated processes were stored and registered in a
database. Next, by referring to the “Kotoba Shintai” database, which registered body movements andthe new words databased by motion capture, new movements were created based on the word combinations. Finally, the participants practiced and then performed new body movements in groups,
created through the words and data. In addition to the pleasure of devising new choreography or
dance, the participants discovered what emerges from associating language with the movements ofthe body, including points where interpretations diverged and where they were overlapped, mysteries, amusements, and the meanings that lie hidden behind physical movements.
Workshop Leaders: Kiyoshi Suganuma (Educator, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]) [ Japan],
Daichi Yamaoka (Educator, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]) [ Japan]

Workshop #3“Genki Groove: Make a DIY Record Player”
Date & Time: February 17, 2018 / 10:30–12:30 & 14:00–16:00

This workshop was led by the co-director of WSK: Festival of the Recently Possible, which was introduced in the symposium and was the first such international festival in the Philippines to showcase
digital creatives. By playing back records using familiar items, the workshop explored the principles ofsound as well as devices for recording and reproduction. Since Thomas Edison’s invention of the
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［42］phonograph through to the present day, various technologies for recording and reproducing soundhave emerged, and there are now increasing opportunities to enjoy music through such digital devices
as smartphones. In this workshop, following a lecture on the principles of sound and sound technology, groups of participants tried playing back records by using cardboard, chopsticks, bamboo skewers,
needles, and paper cups. Experiencing playing back records manually in this way, participants deepened their understanding of the current state of technology, which digitization is making less and lessvisible, as well as the structure and nature of sound and the principles of playback technology.
Workshop Leader: Franchesca Casauay (Co-director, WSK: Festival of the Recently Possible) [Philippines]

Workshop #4“Glitchtape (v. 0.3): Glitch DIY Video Synthesizer”
Date & Time: February 18, 2018 / 13:00–16:00

In this workshop, led by members of the art, science, and technology collective Lifepatch, participants
used monitors and original devices to make synthesizers syncing sound and images. This development
environment and device, which enables a monitor to be refashioned as a single musical instrument
through a small device, is open source, meaning that it is available for anyone to use or revise it. In
order to actually experience producing something based on this DIY approach, participants practicedbuilding electronic devices from the basics to application, such as soldering, assembling small computers, and programming. Connecting the resulting devices to monitors, they then attempted tocreate various colors by making music signals visible through the three primary colors of light (red,green, and blue) and by operating the device in time to music. This workshop provided an opportunity
for reflecting on the possibilities of technology and the creativity of media art as well as understanding
the fun of manufacturing through DIY and hardware hacking methods.
Workshop Leaders: Andreas Siagian (Artist, Engineer / Lifepatch) [Indonesia], Nur Akbar Arofatullah(Scientific Researcher / Lifepatch) [Indonesia/Japan]

Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［43］

Talks Series“Art & Technology in Spectrum:
From Musical Culture, Media Art, to Cosmology in Asia”
Venue: Red Bull Studios Tokyo

Talk #1“The Real of Liquid Asia: Locating the Asian Music Scene”
Date & Time: February 11, 2018 / 17:00–19:00

This talk examined contemporary trends in artistic expression in Asia since the spread of the Internet.
In addition to the changes affecting the environments for production ushered in by digitization, theenvironments for how we view or listen to content is also shifting today through the diversification ofdevices and the expansion of streaming services, leading to a culture of increasingly reciprocal influence across national and regional borders. With a focus on the field of music, which is rapidly reflecting
the creation of works or changes in distribution due to the diffusion of the Internet, this talk gave an
overview of trends in artistic expression emerging in Asia and the current conditions of networks thatare now proliferating worldwide. As technology standardizes and platforms for sharing online expand,
where can we locate the diverse originality of musical compositions or artists, and how can regional
identity be created through those creative activities? In this talk, speakers shared perspectives on individuality, regionality, and their respective communities, which are topics particularly important forthe present, where networks have become the infrastructure of our lives. The lineup of speakers
comprised musicians and label presidents based in Tokyo, Jakarta, Manila, and Taiwan, all active on
the global stage while hailing from various backgrounds and employing a range of approaches in theirwork. Together they discussed the possibilities for collaboration through individual locations and networks in the Internet age.
Speakers: tomad (Organizer, DJ / President, Maltine Records) [ Japan], KimoKal (Musician) [Indonesia],
similarobjects (Sound Artist, DJ / President, Buwan Buwan Collective) [Philippines], Meuko! Meuko! (Music
Producer, Singer, DJ) [Taiwan]
Moderator: Jun Yokoyama (Photographer, Editor) [ Japan]

Talk #2“The Media Art Scene in Europe and Japan:
With Researchers and Artists”
Date & Time: February 14, 2018 / 19:00–21:00

This talk featured presentations about two cultural facilities in Poland, providing a multifaceted introduction to the cultural situation in Europe in which new media art and various forms of artistic
Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［44］

expression using digital technology are penetrating every field, including visual art, the performing
arts, and entertainment. A curator from WRO Art Center, which frequently exhibits and develops new
projects by Japanese artists, introduced its transition from being an alternative organization to a public cultural facility in Wrocław, and also showcased the facility’s survey of a broad spectrum of works
and artists from Europe to Asia as a network of festivals around the world. Hitoshi Taguchi, who leads
the performance group Grinder-Man and has presented his work at WRO Art Center, talked about how
areas of activities are currently expanding from Europe to Japan. Connecting to crossover trends in art
and technology, the two field’s respective markets and values have developed mainly in Europe andNorth America. In Wrocław, Poland, media art is increasing its presence as a distinct kind of regional
culture. Within this context, the talk examined the possibilities for artistic expression that harnesses
technology to form original cultures in various cities.
Speakers: Olga Drygas (International Projects Producer, Nowy Teatr), Agnieszka Kubicka-Dzieduszycka(Curator & Project Manager, WRO Art Center), Hitoshi Taguchi (Artistic Director, GRINDER-MAN)

Talk #3“On a New Cosmology:
Conversations on the Multiverse Theory and datum”
Date & Time: February 17, 2018 / 19:00–21:00

Introducing current trends in which crossovers between art and technology are evolving into forms ofexpression informed by both art and science, this talk featured an artist, researcher, and curator discussing views of the universe. Norimichi Hirakawa is the artist behind the art installation datum (2017),
a new kind of video expression that deals with colors, space, and time equally. He explained the process behind producing his work in which the pixels of image data were captured as points insix-dimensional Euclidean space. This work pursues beauty in terms not of four-dimensional expression like the flat surface or solid of, respectively, paintings or sculptures, but of higher-dimensional
space, evoking a more complex kind of space-time beyond the general theory of relativity. To understand or interpret scientifically this generally little-understood idea of higher-dimensional space,
Yasunori Nomura, who specializes in theoretical physics, explained the theory of multiverses. In addition, Reiko Tsubaki, who was responsible for curating the exhibition “The Universe and Art” (Mori Art
Museum, 2016–17), discussed the potential for artistic expression whose approaches employ current
technology to engage with the universe, which is something that has been expressed by mankind andportrayed in narratives since ancient times, as well as the new visions of the cosmos that emerge fromthese.
Speakers: Norimichi Hirakawa (Artist) [Japan], Yasunori Nomura (Professor, University of California,
Berkeley / Chief Researcher, Kavli IPMU) [USA/Japan], Reiko Tsubaki (Curator, Mori Art Museum)

Art & Technology: Creativity, Education and Archive Environments［45］

Symposium Organizer Profiles
The Japan Foundation Asia Center
The Japan Foundation is Japan's principal independent administrative institution dedicated to carrying out cultural exchange initiatives throughout the world. The Asia Center, established in April 2014,is a division within the Foundation that conducts and supports collaborative initiatives with its
Asian—primarily ASEAN—counterparts. Through interacting and working together in Japaneselanguage education, arts and culture, sports, and grassroots and intellectual exchange, the Asia
Center aspires to develop a sense of kinship and coexistence as neighboring inhabitants of Asia.
http://jfac.jp/en/

Arts Council Tokyo
Arts Council Tokyo develops a variety of programs to encourage the creation and dissemination ofarts and culture and to promote Tokyo as an international city of artistic and cultural attractions. In
order to improve the infrastructure and environment for new artistic and cultural creation, Arts
Council Tokyo plays a key role in Tokyo’s cultural policies by implementing programs that explore
Tokyo’s originality and diversity, promoting international cultural exchange, and providing opportunities for promising young people who engage in a variety of artistic and cultural pursuits.
https://www.artscouncil-tokyo.jp/en/

The 2nd International Symposium for Media Art

Art & Technology:
Creativity, Education and Archive Environments
Report [PDF ver.]Published: December 17, 2018
Publisher

The Japan Foundation Asia Center
4-16-3 Yotsuya, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Email: acinfo@jpf.go.jp

Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)
Kudan First Place 8F, 4-1-28 Kudankita, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Email: info@artscouncil-tokyo.jp
Editors

Fumi Hirota (The Japan Foundation Asia Center)
Kaoru Chiba (Arts Council Tokyo)
Editing & Writing

Kenichi Abe
English Editing & Writing

William Andrews
Translation

LinkTrans Simul, Inc. (pp. 01, 11–16, 33–45)
Proofreading

William Andrews
Photography

Ryohei Tomita
DesignIuko Matsukawa
Cover Image

Takuma Hayashi (Hayashi Takuma Design Office)© The Japan Foundation Asia Center / Arts Council Tokyo
All rights reserved.