The 3rd International Symposium for Media Art

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era:
Creation, Production, and Network
Report [PDF ver.]Ei Wada (Artist, Musician)Lu Yang (Artist)
Eyedropper Fill
(Wattanapume Laisuwanchai, Nuntawat Jarusruangnil / Multimedia design team)Keisuke Toyoda (Architect / Co-founder of noiz)
tomad (Organizer, DJ / Head of Maltine Records)
dj sniff (Turntablist, DJ, Curator)
Riar Rizaldi (Artist, Researcher)
Yohei Kawada (Editor)
Marvin Conanan (Founder, Editor in Chief of PURVEYR)
Tetsuro Wada (Editor in Chief of FNMNL)
Choi Jang-min + Kwon Hyuk-in(Founders, Editors in Chief of VISLA Magazine)

Minoru Hatanaka(Chief Curator of NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC])

Kodama Kanazawa (Independent curator /Senior Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, Towada Art Center)

Kei Wakabayashi (Editor)

Organized by the Japan Foundation Asia Center, Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)
Special support from NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC] (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corporation)Preface to the Third International Symposium Report

Since 2016, the Japan Foundation Asia Center and Arts Council Tokyo have jointly organized aninternational “Art and Technology” symposium series with the aim of providing a forum for thecreation, dissemination, and networking of art and culture in such fields as new media art anddigital creativity. Each year the symposium theme changes in order to engage widely with artistic expression that uses media or digital technology, providing a dynamic introduction to trends
and case studies across different nations and regions.
The first symposium in 2016 outlined 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. The second
symposium in 2018 discussed the relations between society and the creation, education, and research and development of new media art through activities at leading art centers and festivals incities across Asia and Europe. The third symposium examined the process of shaping culture in
the post-Internet society through the three key notions of creation, production, and network.
Artistic activities today using media technology are forming new kinds of cultural scenesthat connect places within Asia through the synthesis of various specialisms and disciplines aswell as through exchange and partnerships made possible by social media. In order to showcase
these latest situations and conditions, the two-day symposium brought together 16 guest speakers from six nations who are working in a range of fields, from art to design, architecture, andmusic. From the perspectives of the creativity of artists, the practices of curators and directors
who disseminate this, and the editors who are developing new media platforms, the speakers
presented the energetic activities as well as future visions of the next generation of talent set tobecome leading figures in society, industry, and culture in Asia. The symposium attracted significant advance interest and proved an opportunity to share the potential and current changing
state of creativity with the many attendees.
In closing, we would like to express our sincere gratitude for the generous support andcooperation of the guest speakers and NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC] that helped madethis symposium possible.

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

February 2020

［01］

The 3rd International Symposium for Media Art

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era:
Creation, Production, and Network

Creativity in the Age of Internet: Exploring New Processes in the Formation of Culture
Since the Internet has become an everyday part of our lives, creative practices have prompted
the formation of alternative scenes and joint creative processes through the fusing of varying
expertise and fields by individuals connecting with each other through social media, namely
among the next generation of artist who use media technology. Here we can glimpse of culturaldevelopment through new ideas and creative methods that utilize digital technology and influences that transcend borders.
This symposium examined these processes of forming culture through three sequential
themes: creation, production, and network. How are creative practices changing in the present-day Internet society, and what needs arise in the cultural environment that supports thesepractices? Introducing artists who use the medium of the Internet in their work, as well as thework of directors and curators who help produce these new creative formats, and of editors who
advance media development in Asia, the symposium considered how culture will be shaped
from now on.

Date & Time: Saturday, February 2, 2019, 13:00–17:00; Sunday, February 3, 2019, 13:00–18:00
Venue: NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC] (Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo)(Tokyo 2020 Official Programme)
Free admission (pre-registration required), with English-Japanese simultaneous interpretation
Organized by the Japan Foundation Asia Center, Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan
Foundation for History and Culture)
Special support from NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC] (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone
East Corporation)［02］

The 3rd International Symposium for Media Art

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network
Report [PDF ver.]Contents

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

Defining “Creation” in the Internet Society
Turning Old Home Appliances into Borderless Electromagnetic Native Instruments ……… 0 5
Ei WadaMedia Art at a Bold Intersection of Ancient Religion and Cutting-Edge Science ……… 1 1
Lu Yang

Redefining Media, Educating the Next Generation, and Stimulating Interactions ……… 1 6
Eyedropper Fill (Wattanapume Laisuwanchai, Nuntawat Jarusruangnil)

The Evolution of Computers, and the Future of Architecture and Design ……… 2 1
Keisuke Toyoda

Arranging Nodes: Forming a Virtual Community ……… 2 7
tomad

Discussion and Q&A ……… 3 2
Ei Wada + Lu Yang + Eyedropper Fill + Keisuke Toyoda + tomad | Minoru Hatanaka[Session 2]

Producing New Forms of Expression
Resisting the Mainstream: The Internet, Experience, and Reproduction ……… 3 7
Kodama Kanazawa

How Can We Play Together?: Improvising as a Way to Establish a Relationship Between Artists ……… 4 1
dj sniff

Liberating the Internet from Universality and Globalization ……… 4 7
Riar Rizaldi[Session 3]

Creating a Cultural Scene in Asia
The Importance of Building Sustainable Relationships: Publishing a Special Issue on Asian Music ……… 5 4
Yohei Kawada

Reaching Young Asian Cultural Creatives Across Multiple Platforms ……… 5 9
Marvin Conanan

An Online Media Collaboration Sharing Local Culture Across National Borders ……… 6 4
Testuro Wada, Choi Jang-min + Kwon Hyuk-in[Wrap-up Session]

Post-Internet and Simultaneity in Asia
Moderator Discussion and Q&A ……… 6 9
Minoru Hatanaka + Kodama Kanazawa + Kei Wakabayashi
Symposium Organizer Profiles ……… 7 5

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［03］

[Session 1]

Defining “Creation”
in the Internet Society
Session 1 examined how the Internet and other technologies are deployed as tools or sitesof creation for cutting-edge practices in new media art, contemporary art, design, architecture,and music. At a time when the Internet has become a daily presence in our lives, various forms
of interdisciplinary artistic expression were introduced.

Moderator

Speakers

Ei WadaArtist, Musician [Japan]

Minoru Hatanaka

Lu Yang

Chief Curator of NTT
InterCommunication Center [ICC][ Japan]

Artist [China]

Eyedropper Fill
(Wattanapume Laisuwanchai, Nuntawat Jarusruangnil)

Born in 1968, Minoru Hatanaka graduated from Tama Art University.
He joined NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC] in 1996, prior to its
opening. He has curated such exhibitions at ICC as the group shows“Sound Art – Sound as Media” (2000), “Silent Dialogue” (2007), and“[Internet Art Future]—Reality in Post Internet Era” (2012), and solo
shows featuring the work of Dumb Type, Maywa Denki, Laurie
Anderson, Kazuhiko Hachiya, Rhizomatiks, Arata Isozaki, Otomo
Yoshihide, and John Wood and Paul Harrison.
http://www.ntticc.or.jp

Multimedia design team [Thailand]

Keisuke Toyoda
Architect / Co-founder of noiz [ Japan]

tomad
Organizer, DJ / Head of Maltine Records [Japan]

Turning Old Home Appliances into Borderless
Electromagnetic Native Instruments
Ei Wada Artist, Musician

Active in the fields of music and art,
Ei Wada remodels old, worn-out
household appliances and turns theminto musical instruments, staging live
performances and exhibiting installations. In recent years, he has also
been producing instruments with the
involvement of various experts intheir fields and local residents, developing a series of projects that involve
musical ensembles and organizing
festivals. Wada’s “delusions,” whichbegan by paying renewed attention
to various elements that make up
technology, such as electricity, radio
Ei Wada (right) and Minoru Hatanaka (left)
waves, electrons, and electromagnetic forces, create original instruments that can be shared or co-created, evolving into events thattranscend even national borders.

# Salvaging the Voices of Discarded Electrical Appliances
I am an artist and musician who works in the fields of music and art. My practice mainly consists of transforming electrical appliances into instruments, and performing music with them.
Today, I would like to single out a project from these activities that I have been tackling in
the past few years: Electronicos Fantasticos! Launched in 2015, this project takes electrical appliances that have reached the end of their lifespans and breathes new life into them as musicalinstruments, having them perform in ensembles at festivals and events while seeking to involve
people from all walks of life. The slogan for the project is: “Turn these expired electrical appliances into electrical instruments (yokai)!”
The Japanese word yokai (supernatural
creature) is often associated with Edo-period
tales of discarded objects like buckets and umbrellas that turn into monsters. One day, I foundmyself fantasizing about how modern-day yokai
might in fact be discarded electrical appliances.
When I saw photos of mountains of trash electrical appliances that I found searching for images
on Google, they crackled into life and overlappedwith paintings of the famous folklore motif
known as the Night Parade of 100 Demons. An
Fig. 1 A trash pile of electrical appliances
Source: Ralph Mirebs Livejournal (https://ralphmirebs.liveelectrical shock coursed through my brain: Wasn’t
journal.com/165985.html)
this basically the same thing? (Figs. 1, 2) When I
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［05］

discovered that outdated or obsolete technologies could function as musical instruments andmedia that give us a glimpse of the charm of
these electric currents, electronic waves, electrons, and electromagnetic forces, I thought tomyself: Wouldn’t it be possible to salvage their
voices by picking up on their electric signals?
There’s life in them yet!
These instruments represented a new
type of vernacular music festival born out of
urban detritus, and I started to nurse a growing
Fig. 2 Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Minamoto no Yorimitsu-ko noyakata tsuchigumo yokai o nasu no zu (The Earth Spider
hallucination in which a curious celebration of
Conjures up Demons at the Mansion of Minamoto noelectricity, electronic waves, electrons, and elecYorimitsu) (1843, colored woodblock print) (detail), Waseda
University Library Collection
tromagnetic forces awaited. And so I made somesketches before I began (Fig. 3) Electric towers
sprout from the ground in the
middle of the night, and start togenerate a strange current. People
with radios prowl the surroundings in order to catch the signals.
A different rhythm starts to resound from each electric tower:
the electrical appliances that havebeen discarded there turn into aphalanx of musical instruments,
coming together like an orchestra.
This is the scene that is depicted in
my sketches. Everything beganfrom here.
Fig. 3 Concept drawing for Electronicos Fantasticos! by Ei Wada (2015)
First, I set up a studio in the
Sumida area of Tokyo, and began collecting disused items by going around and picking up
objects that people no longer wanted. When I
stayed up overnight working on my art, local residents who had heard about what I was doingbrought me electrical appliances that they nolonger had a use for. I opened them up to observe
the mechanisms by which these machines operated, and conducted repeated experiments into
how I could transform them into instruments. I
Fig. 4 Performance at Wada’s studio in Sumida ward, Tokyoalso held events at my studio explaining what myproject hoped to accomplish (Fig. 4).
Over the three and a half years that I carried on with these activities, my crew gradually
grew: the studio attracted engineers with day
jobs at appliance manufacturers, designers, musicians, or people who just liked festivals andmusic. As the headcount went up, there was agreater sense of community. And so we made allthese instruments while exchanging knowledge,
techniques, and the visions of madmen.
Fig. 5 A/C Harp
When someone donated an air conditioner
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［06］

that had been used for 17 years, for example, we shared ideas about how we might be able to extract sounds from it. A participant in the project made a sketch that showed how the act ofcleaning an air conditioner looked like playing the koto (Japanese zither), and the engineering
team suggested that we pick up on the magnetic field so that we could play it like a koto. Then we
proceeded to actually modify it, and the “A/C Harp” was born (Fig. 5).

# Holding a Concert with Cathode-Ray Tubes and Striped Shirts
Today, our bases of operation have grown to include Hitachi City, Tokyo, and Kyoto. Each baseholds its own workshops to make instruments.
We have around 70 people who participate,amoeba-like, in our activities.
Allow me to explain in detail what kindsof musical instruments were created, including
the process by which they took shape. First,
there was the “CRT-TV Gamelan,” which originally evolved out of a solo project that I started inFig. 6 CRT-TV Gamelan
which I play a cathode-ray tube TV as an instrument (Fig. 6). In the old days, whenever you touched the screen of a cathode-ray tube TV, you
would get a prickly sensation from the static electricity. The performer coils the wire connected
to a guitar amp around his or her leg, and makes sounds by picking up the static from thescreen—in other words, your body becomes the antenna, and sound is produced wheneverstatic is picked up. Different striped patterns are projected onto several cathode-ray tubes: thefrequency changes depending on the number of tubes, as does the sound pitch. When it makesa sandstorm-like sound, we call it the “Staticymbal.” The cathode-ray tubes are played like apercussion instrument.
With the shift to digital broadcasting in 2011, a large number of cathode-ray tube TVs
came to the end of their useful lifespans. I knew that these tubes were capable of producing
sounds, so when I discovered images of heaps of discarded television sets on the Internet, I envisioned them having turned into Indonesian gamelan ensembles. Another electrical shockcoursed through my brain as I fantasized about the prospect: Wasn’t this basically the samething? The idea for the CRT-TV Gamelan ensemble orchestra started to take root in my mind, so
we decided to take on the challenge of realizing this delusion when we participated in the
KENPOKU ART festival in Ibaraki Prefecture in 2016.
The first step was to set up a workshop on a corner of a shopping arcade in Hitachi City,
Ibaraki. Day after day, I struck those cathode-ray tubes and kept playing them. Hitachi is the citywhere the eponymous electrical appliance company has its manufacturing facilities. Local
grannies started dancing to the electromagnetic sounds, and boys danced frantically as if possessed by some sort of primal urge. Rumors beget rumors, and soon we became known as a placethat hoarded cathode-ray tubes and turned all of them into instruments. After that, local residents who had soaked up too many electromagnetic waves started to donate tubes to me. Even
people who didn’t get what I meant when I said “I want to have a gamelan performance” understood what I was doing when I performed for them. We accumulated a really incredible numberof cathode-ray tubes.
More and more band members also came to us. Whenever we made noises in the studio,
DJs who lived nearby and music instructors who taught at universities in Ibaraki would comeover and join the band as performers. The music also gradually took shape as we had more andmore sessions. In the end, we were able to hold a concert with 22 cathode-ray tubes performedby six members in an underground space beneath the central square in Hitachi.
We also performed this CRT-TV Gamelan at Ars Electronica, the international media arts
festival, last year (2018). Electricity is produced whenever you join hands with one of theFormation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［07］

performers, so basically anyone who joins theband can make those sounds. By turning mybody into an instrument, I can have a session
with visitors at any time. In the end, we held aconcert at night called the Electromagnetic
Ceremony. Three hundred viewers joined hands
at the same time, creating a primitive sort ofelectromagnetic music by performing with acoursing electric current. Although the timing
was fairly tricky, eventually we managed to get it
Fig. 7 Performance at the Electromagnetic Ceremony
right, and the ensuing chaos of this festive space
was considerable (Fig. 7).
These activities subsequently connected
us to the next instrument. I mentioned just now
how the sound changes by projecting striped patterns onto a television. So I had this idea for new
music instrument: If I could produce sound by
converting these stripes into electrical signals,
then wouldn’t the striped shirt I was wearing also
be able to do the same thing? This was the start of
Fig. 8 Striped Shirtsizer
the “Striped Shirtsizer” (Fig. 8). By shooting thestriped shirt with a video camera and connecting
the video terminal of the camera to the soundterminal of a TV, the electrical signal and pitch
would change according to the number of stripes
projected onto the camera.
We also performed on the stage of theaward ceremony at last year’s Ars Electronica. We
approached locals who were wearing striped
shirts, and held improvised jam sessions with
Fig. 9 Performance at the award ceremony at Ars Electronica
them right off the bat. We even invited artists
2018
Sputniko! and Yasuhiro Suzuki to appear at one
street corner, and discovered people in the audience wearing striped shirts and had them join the band (Fig. 9). By making use of how the pitchvaried by moving the camera back and forth while scanning a striped shirt—the world’s only
mode of performing with a video camera—I played Beethoven’s Ninth in the strangest way on
the whole planet, which was a real hit with the audience.
Incidentally, apropos of today’s international symposium, it occurred to me that we areborderless precisely because we are wearing what we call in Japanese “border” shirts. But shirtswith horizontal stripes are called “striped shirts” outside of Japan—so this is something thatgets lost in translation.

# A Memorial Service for Technology, and a Festival of Rebirth
Allow me to introduce you to one more instrument.
The “Electric Fan Harp” was born while I was thinking about what sort of instrument I
could make out of an electric fan that had been donated to us. I started to daydream about what
would happen if the god of the electric guitar, Jimi Hendrix, performed with this. I made a collage by cutting out images of electric fans and Hendrix that I found searching on Google,
discovering that they were a perfect fit. From that point on, it was an archeology of fantasy anddaydreaming. I started to work out how Hendrix would have played it by fantasizing about theprospect: Would he have played around with the number of rotations? Or the fan blades? It took
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［08］

me two years of thinking about such questions tobuild this Electric Fan Harp (Fig. 10). The basic
principle works like this: You put discs withholes in the blade part of an electric fan as well as
lightbulbs from the back of the fan, and the lightgoes on and off when they rotate. When you convert that into electrical waves, the pitch changes
according to the number of holes. This instrument was also the result of the knowledge ofvarious people, including engineers in Hitachi—
something that we definitely could not have
Fig. 10 Electric Fan Harp, made with an electric fan
produced without exchanging online information and data.
The discussion grew further, and we decided to form an orchestra. We gave a band
performance consisting solely of Electric Fan
Harps, including engineers who had transformed
the fans in their homes into instruments. Thisorchestra has performed several times, in andoutside Japan.
After that, we participated in an event
called Iron Island Fes, in the Keihinjima area ofFig. 11 Performance of bon dance event “Electro-Magnetic
Tokyo where many steel mills are located. I spent
Bon Dance” at Electronicos Fantasticos! (2017, Star Rise
one month in a studio next to an ironworks, creTower STUDIO EARTH)
ating new instruments together with ourcollaborators and iron artisans.
Various miracles happen at Electronicos Fantasticos!: musical instruments and music
are born out of encounters. And it was the same thing here. As I was in my studio doing a soundcheck, someone from the ironworks came out to take a cigarette break and see what I was up to,and started dancing. Thus began a process of communication with an octogenarian lathe craftsman, who told me that he had some electric fans in his factory that had been in use for a longtime. “If you think they’ll make a good sound I can lend them to you,” he said, and let me havethese large electric fans. Using them, we made the “Factory Fan Bass” together with the local
steel and iron craftsmen. They were older National models of the kind that you rarely see anymore, but they made some really nice sounds. Eventually, the 80-year-old owner himself evenmade an appearance as a performer. And so it was that we found ourselves witnessing a momentthat gave birth to the “industrial blues.”
All of this culminated in an event called the “Electro-Magnetic Bon Dance,” in which all ofthese instruments appeared together. The concept behind it was “a memorial service for technology, and a festival of rebirth,” where electrical appliances perform the music that traditionallyaccompanies a Japanese matsuri festival, while participants join the bon dance (to welcome thespirits of the dead during the Obon festival in August). Some 70 members from our three basesin Hitachi, Tokyo, and Kyoto as well as many other visitors gathered at the foot of Tokyo Tower,
resulting in a bon dance event with around 500 people (Fig. 11).
At the venue where a giant raised platform had been erected, a monk chanted sutras for amemorial service in honor of the electrical appliances, and then the live performance by theappliances began. Meanwhile, a Japanese folk singer started to sing about shifts in technology,
and a curious celebration of people in a frenzied dance took shape. Our original song, “Den Den
Ondo,” was littered with obsolete technological terms like “Morse code,” “telegraph,” “A-side/Bside,” and “X3 play,” while the performance ultimately drew to a close with a part called “AI
Bushi.” Everyone shouted out while dancing freestyle: “Artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence, even if we lose in terms of intelligence, we won’t in terms of idiocy. The idiot who dances
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［09］and the idiot who watches, if we’re all idiots then it’s your loss if you don’t dance.”# Openly Sharing How to Make instruments
At Electronicos Fantasticos!, people from all walks of life produced musical instruments frommultiple perspectives. We used private group pages on Facebook to communicate with eachother on a daily basis. Currently, we have 87 members.
When I upload a video of myself doing an experimental performance, for example, I receive lots of comments. Some of them are ideas or suggestions related to technical aspects,
which leads to various other discussions. Participants in the project are sharing videos and photos on a daily basis, followed by a flurry of comments. Once in a while, there will be an incredibly
talented elementary school boy who has taken apart some speakers and turned them into an
instrument, or an engineer involved in the design of a circuit board for a vacuum cleaner who
has started remodeling one into an instrument. So we get people who participate that I haven’t
yet met myself.
We consider electrical appliances to be Electromagnetic Native Instruments. I labor daily
under the delusion that there is some kind of what I call “Electromagnetic Native Music” thatmight emerge from these everyday appliances. In this project, I openly share how I make these
instruments and what I think of them online, encouraging people to make copies or improvements as they see fit. I am trying to create a situation whereby each person can make his or her
own instruments and music. The community that thus emerges is like an orchestra without afixed lineup: an orchestra by a kind of new “Electromagnetic Tribe” that reconfigures itself bothonline and offline. These are just some of the thoughts in my mind as people from all walks oflife encounter our instruments wherever we may go, as we start to spread the movement.
As the next step, we are thinking of forming the Electromagnetic Orchestra without
Borders. This fantasy of an orchestra from a parallel world that transforms all kinds of disused
electrical appliances into musical instruments and nurtures communication through the universal language of electrical signals, sine waves, and music is now coursing through my brain.

Ei Wada｜Born in 1987, Ei Wada launched his interdisciplinary music and art practice while still
attending university. He founded Open Reel Ensemble and Braun Tube Jazz Band in 2009. He has
supervised music for Paris collection shows by the fashion house ISSEY MIYAKE on eleven occasions
to date. In 2015, he launched Electronicos Fantasticos!, a project dedicated to reviving disused
electrical appliances by turning them into musical instruments that are then played in concerts atfestivals involving various kinds of people. For this project, he was awarded the 68th New Face
Award at the Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts. In 2018, he won the Prix Ars Electronica anda STARTS Prize Honorary Mention.
https://eiwada.com

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［10］Media Art at a Bold Intersection ofAncient Religion and Cutting-Edge Science
Lu Yang Artist

Chinese artist Lu Yang introduced
her extraordinary output of media
art that encompasses science, technology, religion, and the body. Whileoften thematically provocative, her
practice is always expertly realized
and strikingly colorful. Running
throughout is a series of ideas deeply
rooted in Asian contexts, vividly andfreely explored across different
media in a way that also feels distinctly Asian and contemporary.
Lu Yang# Early Experiments with Scientific Approaches
Some of the tenets of my practice these past ten years havebeen the control of electricity, magnetism, and scientific approaches borrowed from fields like neuroscience. Back in
2008, I was still in school but I really wanted to make some big
installations. Naturally my budget at the time did not stretch
that far, so I made detailed diagrams and plans, and applied toopen calls by corporations or to residency programs.
One of my early works, Reanimation! Underwater
Zombie Frog Ballet! (2012), involved dead frogs (Fig. 1). In thispiece, I used electricity to stimulate the nerve systems andmake a “zombie music box.” I applied to residencies withthis plan and was eventually accepted to one in Fukuoka
Asian Art Museum in 2011. I spent three months preparing
the work but still didn’t know how it would actually work
until it came to making the “frog ballet.” We went to a local
Fig. 1 Reanimation! Underwater Zombie frog
school and recycled the frogs that students had already usedballet! (2012) Single-channel HD video
for an anatomy class. We then set it up but had only one
chance to shoot the video. What this work is really about isthe boundary between life and death. If something moves, it is animated; it is alive. But what
about a zombie frog that is reanimated with electricity?
Another piece in this early series is about brain control. I had this idea for a brain-computer interface back in 2008 and made a detailed diagram as a work Reverse Monitoring—The
Ultimate Learning Terminal in 2010, but now I think the Chinese government has already realized
it (Fig. 2)! In some classrooms, they can monitor students’ attention. It’s surprisingly easy to use
brainwaves to monitor people’s brain activities reversely. Once you have that system in place,Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［11］

you can then punish students andforce them to study. The combined
human-machine study method is,
I propose, the ultimate learningterminal.
I started to become interested in deep brain stimulation(DBS), a neurological procedurethat is used to treat brain disease
like Parkinson’s. In 2010, I started
to work on a new project called
Krafttremor (the name is inspired by
Fig. 2 Diagram of Reverse Monitoring—The Ultimate Learning Terminal (2010)
the band Kraftwerk). I found someelderly people who have Parkinson’s
disease and I started to shoot them (Fig. 3). Talking
with doctors about Parkinson’s disease, they told
me the tremors affect the limbs, jaw, lips, andtongue. You can use an electroencephalogram toscan their brain and find out if their brainwaves
are the same frequency as their tremors. People
have different tremor frequencies, it seems. As
such, we can use a computer to calculate their behavior. I then wondered if we could connect
brainwaves to an instrument. As I developed theFig. 3 Krafttremor (2010)
HD music video
project, I spoke to actual doctors and researchers.
Deep brain stimulation surgery puts a
device called a neurostimulator into your brain.
A line comes out to connect it with a battery
and they hide this battery in your chest. The
battery powers the device to send pulses into
the brain through implanted electrodes. In thisproject, I investigated whether we can use different technology to catch the frequencies, likeelectroencephalography on their brains or eye
Fig. 4Krafttremor—Parkinson's
tracking to monitor eyeball tremors, by connectdisease orchestra (2010)
ing a measuring device to monitor muscle
tremors on the limbs. In Krafttremor—Parkinson's
disease orchestra (2010), I take on the role of a DJ or VJ (Fig. 4). The idea is that you can go to someone to receive the different frequencies he or she plays on the “deep brain stimulation controller”
and then the people gathered there at the place form a kind of orchestra.

# Intersections of Neurology and Religion
Wrathful King Kong Core (2012) is another work related to brain science but also religion, a subject
I frequently return to in my practice, especially Tibetan Buddhism (Fig. 5). Yamantaka is a very
important deity in Tibetan Buddhism. This deity has 34 arms, 16 legs, and nine heads. I was
thinking about this “wrathful” god in terms of his brain. The brain is the organ that causes all ouremotions and movements through signals. It fascinates me because it is so complex and we don’tknow yet how emotions connect with each other through the brain. Located inside the brain, theamygdala is the most important part in our limbic system and key to producing our emotions.
I decided to focus on the emotion of anger because anger is significant in Tibetan
Buddhism as the emotion that can take you to hell. In Buddhism, they say that when people
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［12］

cross over to death in a bad emotional state,anger can mean you end up in hell. But because
all of our emotions are ultimately caused by ourbrains, it got me wondering about the truth of
this. Initially I just tried to show off the different
weapons Yamantaka might hold with his 34
arms. Then I developed things further and attempted to make an image of his brain. As
Yamantaka is a very angry deity, I imagined how
Fig. 5 Wrathful King Kong Core (2012)
Single-channel HD video
his anger would come out. I worked with a psychologist, who helped me draw the emotion
Fig. 6
Lu Yang Delusional
pathway of anger.
Mandala (2015)
For Lu Yang Delusional Mandala (2015), I
Single-channel HD
video
again continued my exploration of the brain but
also went back to a religious theme (Fig. 6). I conceived this special wearable machine, a kind of
DBS crown, to track the different parts in yourbrain, correcting abnormal brain electrical circuits and relieve neural symptoms. By enhancing
the brain in this way, we would become a god ofsorts. I started thinking about images of gods,
whether it is Asuras in Hinduism or Buddhism,
Jesus in Christianity, or a Buddhist deity in athangka painting
I scanned myself and created an asexual
avatar from 3D digital models based on the scan.
I drew on the principles of the stereotactic system, deep brain stimulation, and repetitivetranscranial magnetic stimulation. In the video
made for the project, the avatar is shown receivFig. 7 Delusional Crime and Punishment (2016)
ing treatment and operations in this way,Single-channel HD video
stimulating emotional states like delusion, paranoia, or obsession. The avatar is also shown invarious states like seizures and sensory disorders. When the avatar wears the DBS crown, it looks
like an Asura. I am very interested in Buddhist ideas of the “rotten body” and the video eventually reduces the avatar down to its internal organs. Finally it ends with me, the avatar, dying andgoing into a coffin, and then a colorful, high-tech hearse with the avatar’s face displayed onscreens on the side of the vehicle. This is what we might call a new media art funeral.
After creating my mandala, I continued the same series with Delusional Crime andPunishment (2016) (Fig. 7). In this work, I wanted to think about hell. In Asian cultures and religions, hell is a very rich idea. There are many kinds of hells. In China, they say there are 18 levelsof hell. In hell, people suffer lots of pain. Perhaps you are fried in oil or enter a mountain full ofknives. Humans envision hell like the human world as a punishment for sin. But we feel pain
because of the receptors on our skin, temperature receptors, pressure receptor, and so on. We
receive those pain signals into our nerve system, which then goes into our brains and we identify the sensation as pain. But in a real afterlife, would we still have a brain like that? I created myown hell: “Lu Yang Hell.” In terms of methodology, I used a 3D printer this time, unlike the 3D
scanner I used for the mandala version. I imagined what it would be like to travel through 18
levels of hell. The sensation of pain in hell is a reflection of the mechanics of the human brain,suggesting hell is based on the systems of human society.
I’ve actually even fantasized about becoming a practitioner of Gong Tau, a type of Chinese
witchcraft, and I think you can see that in my work. I once made Gong Tau Kite, featuring a large
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［13］

3D-scanned version of my face flying in the sky.
A related example is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Exorcism, a kind of modern-day
exorcist who employs a TMS machine. I wanted to use the machine to cure Tourette syndrome.
If you have ever watched horror movies about exorcism or looked into demonic possession of
the human body in a European context, the “victims” will always say dirty words or can’t control
themselves. The idea is that you use this TMS machine to stop someone from saying anything.
Rather than the crucifix as a weapon against the demon, the exorcist now has a TMS machine.
With all these projects, what I am trying to do is explore notions of death, the body, religion, and science. That being said, they have a specifically Asian quality. It should be quite clear
by now that I work across Asia and with very Asian themes. For example, for God of the Brain, I
went to India to make my own altar for my own religion. I worked with a traditional Indian
dancer, who did a special dance with a transcranial magnetic stimulation “magic stick.”# Japanese Collaborations and Influences
I have also worked with various Japanese collaborators in my practice. My relationship withJapanese partners goes back to my work at
Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in the early 2010s. It
was the first museum in the world to accept mycrazy idea about a zombie frog ballet, somethingthat no one else seemed willing to take on. For
that, I have a lot to be grateful for to the museum.
It also continued to support me, such as with finishing my Uterus Man project.
Fig. 8 Electromagnetic Brainology (2017) Five-channel HDvideo. Installation view of “Encephalon Heaven” (2017, M
In 2013, I did a residency at 3331 ArtsWOODS museum) Courtesy of Lu Yang
Chiyoda and got to know S-VA-HA, very cool contemporary Buddhist art group. I ended up inviting
the group to Shanghai for a solo show at theMuseum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, where
we also did a collaborative performance.
My relationship with Spiral here in Tokyo
started in 2016 and resulted first in a show at Zouno-Hana Terrace in Yokohama. For Electromagnetic
Brainology (Fig. 8), which I exhibited at Spiral fromlate 2017 to early 2018, I transformed the venue
Fig. 9Brain Control Messenger
into a temple. I created four different gods with(2018) Single-channel
HD video
the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air. I
integrated certain motifs and details from myprevious output, such as the TMS machine and
DBS crown. The idea is that these gods use these kinds of weapons to stop the pain when people
cross over to the world of death. This comes from a belief in Buddhism that the material world ismade up of those four primary elements, which are the sources of pain.
Also at the Spiral show, I exhibited a large face hanging from the ceiling. Like Gong Tau
Kite, it was actually my own face that I first scanned with a 3D scanner. I partnered with
Chanmomo, a music idol, for another installation in the exhibition. She is a “Brain Control
Messenger” who wears a “Super DBS Crown” and wields a “Super TMS Wand” to fight an alien
enemy (Fig. 9). She is depicted like a giant character in the city. The purported technology was
inspired by genuine research by Japanese scientists: a galvanic vestibular stimulation interface
that provided an externalized sense of balance.
I think you can see the influence of Japanese tokusatsu (special effects) films and TV series here and in my new piece, Material World Knight, which was shown at the 12th Shanghai
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［14］

Fig. 10
Biennale from 2018 to 2019 (Fig. 10). For this projMaterial World Knightect, I partnered with a Japanese exoskeleton(2018) Three-channel
HD video
company called Skeletonics and a robot idolgroup from Osaka called nyoROBOtics to make a
tokusatsu-style video installation with two giant
figures engaged in combat in a destroyed city. I
shot the video at a tokusatsu exhibition at theContemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, whichfeatured a 1/20-scale replica of Kumamoto Castle,
but the theme of my piece is again touching on
religion, as the title suggests, because it’s reallydealing with the notion of sin. It’s like a container of our consciousness.
For the film, the Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto’s curator Gentaro Sasaki served
as the overall producer. The performers in the video are members of nyoROBOtics, along with a
Skeletonics exoskeleton suit designed by Hiroto Ikeuchi. The Shanghai Biennale installation
itself, featuring a miniature version of Kumamoto, was created by Marbling Fine Arts, which
specializes in making models and miniature sets like those used in tokusatsu. Finally, the musicfor Material World Knight was by a Tokyo-based group called Satellite Young. My relationshipwith these Japanese collaborators and partners is reciprocal, so I also invited Satellite Young to
Shanghai, where it did a performance at a club called ALL and shot a new music video.

Lu Yang｜Born in 1984 and based in Shanghai, Lu Yang uses a variety of media from video toinstallation, animation, digital painting, and games. Unflinchingly exploring existential issues about
the nature of life and where it resides, she is armed with an overlapping mix of strategies taken fromscience, religion, psychology, neuroscience, medicine, games, pop culture, and music. Her work has
been featured in major solo and group exhibitions at the International Digital Art Biennial 2016 inMontreal, Liverpool Biennial 2016, 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial in 2016, China Pavilion at the 56th
Venice Biennale in 2015, 5th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in 2014, Shanghai Biennale 2012, UCCA
(Beijing), M WOODS Museum (Beijing), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Musée d’art contemporain de
Lyon, MOMENTUM Berlin, Tampa Museum of Art, and more.
http://luyang.asia

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［15］

Redefining Media,
Educating the Next Generation,and Stimulating Interactions
Eyedropper Fill (Wattanapume Laisuwanchai, Nuntawat Jarusruangnil)
Multimedia design team

Eyedropper Fill is an award-winning
multimedia design team based in
Bangkok that specializes in moving
image production and installation.
Two members from Eyedropper Fillshowcased case studies of the team’stransdisciplinary and experimental
approach. The results are playful andfun, yet they also reveal a sincerecommitment to collaboration andeducation for the next generation.

Eyedropper Fill: Nuntawat Jarusruangnil (left),
Wattanapume Laisuwanchai (right)# Transforming Thailand’s Resources into Multimedia Design
We are Nuntawat Jarusruangnil, Managing Director of Eyedropper Fill, and Wattanapume
Laisuwanchai, Creative Director of Eyedropper Fill. Eyedropper Fill is a multimedia and creative
design company based in Bangkok, Thailand. We frame ourselves in terms of multidisciplinary
design because a lot of our work is film production, music videos, art installations, and interactive design in the field of media art. But the core of our work deals with experimental design forcommercial brands.
Today we’re going to talk about how we create our work but it would be good for you firstto understand the art and design situation in Thailand. Let’s start with an overview of the situation in our country. There was a military coup in 2014 and a junta has ruled the country eversince. The economy is in decline. People are not able to create socially critical art or protest
peacefully in public. Art schools also teach in very traditional ways. For example, there aren’t
specific programs for media art, meaning students teach themselves by going online to read
websites or watch video tutorials. The art and design community is actually pretty small.
Moreover, it is endangered. Even one of the most important museums in Bangkok has not received any funding now for two years and no one is sure about its future.
As such, we are thinking globally, looking to peers in Japan and elsewhere and seeing
what they are doing in terms of media art. That being said, we are surrounded by all kinds ofnovel “art pieces” in Thailand. For example, we spotted a kind of DIY insect killer machine madewith a wooden stick and broken electric fan. We came across a humanoid kinetic dancer that
could multiply a dancer three or four times onstage. This was shown at a festival at a temple that
also featured a kinetic lighting installation. Or there are more spectacular examples, like a rocket-drone contraption made from wood and gunpowder. I don’t know how to describe this even
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［16］

in Thai, let alone English! But despite its novelty,
it is easy and cheap to build. These kinds of DIY
design efforts emerge from a feeling of impatience that we can also see in the Thai art scene.
Is there a piece of software that we can use
to combine our resources in Thailand with theglobal art scene? We decoded this question down
to the conceptual level and arrived at the idea ofFig. 1 A laser show using reflective fabric“redefining.” This then became a keyword for us,
inspiring us to start making experimental videos
from around five years ago when we still didn’t know much about coding. We also created physical work, such as one using just a blank CD, electric fan, and laser pointer. The result was a kindof laser show (Fig. 1). Of course, it was simple and didn’t really work, but we have continued to
explore the main concept of redefinition in this way. Other examples of the output from thisapproach were a hologram-like project that formed a smokescreen from incense or a laser show
using cheap reflective materials that you can find in a fabric market in Thailand.
Today, we want to share three illustrative case studies of our subsequent work.

# Ghostly Experiments in Media and Education
Krasue 4.0 is ultimately an education project(Fig. 2). Krasue is a well-known ghost in Thailandthat supposedly roams at night. We started it because Thailand lacks an education platform formedia art, meaning we don’t have a way to share
our know-how with other people. Our mission is,
firstly, to educate everyone; and secondly, toshare our knowledge. What was important forthis project was that it be understandable to an
audience of ordinary Thai people. We also used
our own money for the project, so the budget was
low. This naturally limited what we could achieve.
The initial ideas for the project were related to coding and ghosts. Why coding andghosts? Because when you start coding something, it’s quite complicated and the knowledge
Fig. 2 Still from a video introducing Krasue 4.0
is hard to find. Sometimes coding is a mysterious
process and even a little scary, like ghosts. We
started to develop these ideas by researching
ghosts in Thailand (Fig. 3).
In Thailand, we have a very spiritual
culture that has many types of apparitions.
Sometimes this results in curious things, like wefound this village that used an image of theJapanese manga character Doraemon. When it’s
the farming season, the villagers normally use a
Fig. 3 The inspiration for the project was a comparison between ghosts and the mystical process of coding.
cat, putting it in a cage as part of a ritual whereby
the cat will hopefully bring rainfall. But one time,the villagers didn’t have a real cat, so they used a model of Doraemon (a fictional cat) instead. Thisis a creative solution that nonetheless still carries on the original function. Also, when peoplebuild a new house in Thailand, they have to build a small house for the spirit so that it brings theowner of the house good luck. There are actually so many ghosts in Thailand and many of them
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［17］

appear in mainstream entertainment. A figure
like Mae Nak is a well-known female ghost in
Thailand who has featured in movies.
We wanted to take this context of ghosts
and combine it with our media art. We chose thefamous Thai ghost story of Krasue. Here is thestory. In the daytime, Krasue is a pretty girl, but
at night her head detaches from her body andflies away to find something to eat. We wanted torecreate this ghost in real life using media art.
But how to do this? Well, we used a giant dronethat we rented. We struggled with the problem
of how to make Krasue for a whole month until
we stumbled upon a kind of flexible water tube
that you can find in a household sink in
Thailand. We combined this with an LED strip
light to create an illuminating beam (Fig. 4).
We heard different things about the alleged sightings of Krasue. Some people who
claimed to have seen her in real life said there
were red lights but others said that the lights
were green. So maybe she has the ability tochange her color, we wondered. In order to reflect this, we created a mobile app to change hercolors remotely by a Bluetooth connection.
We made a video about this project andpublished it online, along with the code that tells
people how to make Krasue and the app (Fig. 5). It
was important that this was an open-source project. Afterward, we were contacted by universities
and schools asking us to teach students about art
and programming. In this way, it linked to ouraims to educate people.

Fig. 4 To make the flying Krasue, Eyedropper Fill used an
LED light and tube.

# Cross-cultural Collaborations
Through Music and Cockroaches
The second project we want to introduce is called
Game Over, which we made in collaboration with
Stamp Apiwat, a famous Thai singer, and YMCK,a Japanese 8bit or chiptune music band (Fig. 6).
The brief for the project was, firstly, to make a
Fig. 5 To make project open source, Eyedropper Fill sharedmusic video for Stamp Apiwat and YMCK; seconline information about making the Krasue drone andapp.
ondly, to retain the different cultures of Thai andJapan; and thirdly, to do it within the constraintsof a tight budget.
The idea came from the lyrics of the song, which is about a guy who is fighting against
everything for the sake of his lover. If we compare his story to a game, it’s about a character who
is hard to kill and hard to beat. But from this, we went further and thought of something smaller,
like cockroaches. Because, as we know, when you hit a cockroach at night, sometimes it pretends to die but in the morning, it has disappeared and apparently did not die after all!
Anyone who starts doing research about cockroaches in Japan and Thailand will
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［18］

Fig. 6
probably soon enough find this funny story from
Publicity image for thethe Japanese news. It’s about some people inmusic video Game Over
Hokkaido, in northern Japan, who had never seena cockroach before and thought it was somethingcute to be kept as a pet. But in Thailand, the situation is very different and cockroaches are a
massive problem. They are everywhere, even on
the table of a restaurant. Sometimes if it rains
hard, cockroaches might come in from the street
and fly around in places where there are people.
In this way, the two contexts of Japan andThai make for an intriguing contrast, so we
wanted the audience to experience this from thepoint of view of a cockroach. How do you make a
cockroach music video that feels like a video
game? Initially, our imaginations soared and wecontemplated having a fancy camera on a cartlike mount. But then we remembered the budget
or lack thereof. This prompted us to seek out analternative. We arrived at a mop and action camera. It is so simple that pretty much anyone can
combine these two items to make the device.
We started shooting on the streets because
we wanted to make some kind of contrast between
the Thai street and Japanese street. But it’s no longer just a film production now; it’s an interactive
3D installation. We were collaborating with thelocals and one of them even broke the mop-camera. We ended up using three cameras for the
project because people kept breaking them!
Fig. 7 Interactive screen from Game OverThe final music video demonstrates that
local people can relate to an art project, not just
one that is displayed in a gallery but also one that takes place with them on the streets. You cansee in the music video that they really understood the concept. When we asked them to hurt theimaginary cockroach, they could totally get into it and the resulting music video integrates theircontributions into the visual experience.
In addition to being a regular music video on YouTube, we also published it on a separate
website so viewers could choose their own storylines and get different endings (Fig. 7). They can“play” the game many times and share it with their friends.

# Researching and Sharing the State of Youth in Thailand Today
Our final case study today is Voice of Youth. This project was part of the Tiger Jams global music
platform by Tiger Beer, who wanted us to make an interactive installation in a bar that shared
the behavior of people gathered there for a party. Their target group was the younger generation—that is, people in their twenties and thirties (Fig. 8).
We conducted research about the target, which revealed some interesting things about
the behavior of people in Thailand. After four years of junta rule since the military coup, people
have become more and more addicted to social media. Young people told us about their feelings
through posts on social networks like Facebook or Twitter. They explained their own feelings ofdepression and sadness; their feelings that they want to share about the state of democracy inthe country. Politics and loneliness—these were the recurring topics we encountered as we
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［19］

trawled social media. We looked at a group likeRap Against Dictatorship, which comprises
young people who rap and protest about politics
in Thailand.
It wasn’t only online research, either. We
also did research at actual locations in Khaosan
Road in central Bangkok, which is famous for its
nightlife. This also makes it a great place to observe people. For example, local shops and bars
have various kinds of signs and messages thattell us a lot about people and how they present
themselves or interact with others. And wewould see people texting each other a lot throughtheir phones.
When it came to making the client installation, we wanted to share this pool ofobservations and information we had accumulated. We were inspired to build a space for freeFig. 8 Young attendees at the Voice of Youth event
speech. We came up with a kind of colorful
ten-meter message screen that displays questions for attendees to answer, either through amobile app or by speaking directly into a microphone. These are the voices of the youth. This
was also not just a one-off installation, but a roaming installation that can now be experienced
at many places around Thailand.

Eyedropper Fill｜Bangkok-based Eyedropper Fill is a multimedia design company, specializing in
moving image production and installation. It employs a transdisciplinary approach to experimentand collaborate across skills and media such as moving images, interactive design, exhibition
design, and installation art. It aims to transform information into experiences that expand from thescreen into tangible reality, and to immerse people in the moment. Along with its vision to pushforward the realms of new media, it is also committed to educating, motivating, and inspiring young
people by sharing the company’s experiences and processes through workshops and talks atuniversities in Thailand.
http://www.eyedropperfill.com

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［20］

The Evolution of Computers,
and the Future of Architecture and Design
Keisuke Toyoda Architect / Co-founder of noiz

As an architect, Keisuke Toyoda actively incorporates elements ofcomputational design into his design
and production, in addition to pursuing research and consulting. The
scope of his work traverses many
disciplines, straddling not only architecture, but also product design,urbanism, sport, fashion, and art.
Thanks to advances in digital technology, architecture has not only
allowed us to access new techniques:
the very dimensions that it deals
with have shifted. Based on this,Toyoda discussed the new role andfunction of architects, who continue
to propose integrated perspectives on the future of our information environments.

Keisuke Toyoda# Information, Object Attributes, and the Relationship Between the Two
My architecture firm, noiz, uses a process in its practice called computational design in order toexplore the question of how the design of buildings, construction, and planning shifts when
digital technologies enter the equation, as well as how our lifestyles also change in response.
When we use computers to design buildings, however, it is not just a matter of manipulating form: it involves dealing with various objects and relationships. And I feel that it is
becoming less and less necessary for the output to take the form of so-called “architecture.” As aresult, we have had an increasing number of opportunities to pursue collaborations with people
in the fields of art, sound, fashion, and sports. Today, in addition to introducing our activities, I
would like to talk about the current and future state of architecture in the context of information environments.
First, I would like to show you what we did for a presentation of new works by the fashion
brand ANREALAGE in their 2017 A/W Collection at Paris Fashion Week. The designer proposedusing robotic arms for this event, so we were responsible for figuring out how to control theserobotic arms, and ideas for how to realize this. As the shape of cloth can be deformed and stretched,
you could say that it is incompatible with a robotic arm. Cloth is also a rolled-up mass, however—atrait that led us to the idea of using resin to fix it in place, and then having the robotic arm shave it
off. This allowed us to carve out something that resembles a layered map of polar coordinates(Figs. 1, 2). The sculptor Kohei Nawa participated in this project by helping us to create the form.
Although what is cut off has the form of a garment, it is heavy and stiff. The resultant object has
zero functionality as an article of clothing. In spite of this, is it made of cloth? Absolutely. The
form of this piece raises fundamental questions about what fashion is, and what the act of wearing something means. For me, this project allowed us to take a renewed approach to fashion from
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［21］

Hypotheticala perspective that exists outside ofRoll of cloth
item of clothing
Roll of cloth
Robot arm
conventional wisdom (Fig. 3).
We were also commissioned
by BAO BAO ISSEY MIYAKE to produce their shop windows. One of
the client’s proposals involved theuse of a soft LED screen that could
A hypothetical item of
The robotic arm shaves fabric
The clothing item emerges
clothing is predicted from afrom the roll of cloth.
from the roll of cloth with aexpand and contract, so we decontours pattern almost likerolled-up piece of cloth.
geological strata.
vised a program where the shape of
Fig. 1 Diagram showing how a robotic arm is used to shave off fabric from a rollthe brand logo shifted autonoof cloth to form an item of clothing. Courtesy of noiz
mously on the screen. When wind
generated by a fan installed below
came into contact with the screen,
it fluttered like a Japanese noren
cloth curtain. At that very instant,a signal from an in-built code wassent, making it look as if the image
was flying in the wind (Fig. 4). In
other words, although there ought
to have been no interaction between things and information, we
succeeded in creating a situation
Fig. 2 Shaving a roll of cloth with a robot arm. Courtesy of noiz
where the image catches the wind,and flies up as a result. This project was an experimentin having the visual information of an image design amoment that felt haptic in some way.
Here, I would like to introduce a collaboration
we did with the digital sound artist Kazuhiro Jo. Most
artists who work with sound use a visual coding software called Max/MSP. At noiz, we also use visual coding
when we need to create a certain form. The idea for thisproject emerged out of a half-joking conversation I had
with Mr. Jo: we thought that we could create a form
even if we converted sound into shape, and shape intosound. The result was an architectural work called
Fig. 3 Roll from ANREALAGE 2017–18 A/W Paris
Flipmata (2012), which was exhibited in Taipei as aCollection
piece of public art (Fig. 5).
Collaborators: ANREALAGE, Kohei Nawa
Photo: VOGUE JAPANThe work picks up background noise in the city,
gives it some logic using Max/MSP, and then converts
these patterns into a physical form. This form consistsof an opening and closing board pattern installed on topof the tiled wall of a building. Flipmata is a homage todigital technology: its opening and closing board pattern form also applies the logic of the simulation gameConway’s Game of Life. The opening and closing patternchanges its form autonomously, giving rise to new patterns. In this way, the forms of these patterns are in turntransformed into sounds that are ultimately returned tothe city. Through the intervention of technology andFig. 4 Autumn 2016 window display at BAO BAO
programs, sound and architecture, or cities and archiISSEY MIYAKE Matsuya Ginza
Collaborator: Teppei Nomoto
tecture, suddenly start to interact with each other. The
Photo: Yasuhiro Takagi
moment that they are put onto a platform, the fellow

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［22］

attributes of information and objects that werepreviously disconnected become linked to one
another. In a sense, you could say that this worksought to deliberately accomplish this in an architectural context.
Although the stance that we occupy ismore practical than artistic, we have experienced
moments where the border between informationand objects gradually becomes more ambiguous,
the more projects we embark on. It is my hopethat this will be something we can achieve in thecontext of our collaborative projects.

Fig. 5 noiz, FLIPMATA (2012) installation at National Taipei
College of Business, Taipei, Taiwan
Collaborators: Kazuhiro Jo + Why-ixd
Photo: Kyle Yu# The Higher-Order World That Architects Deal With
Next, I would like to introduce Morphing Furniture,a project we undertook in Taipei more than ten
years ago, as a concrete example of digital fabrication (Fig. 6). I am sure many of you who aredesigners may find this slide full of shapes thatyou recognize (Fig. 7). First up on the left is the
Panton Chair, with Frank O. Gehry’s Wiggle Side
Chair behind it, and the Zig-Zag Chair at the back.
In front on the right we have Eero Saarinen’s Tulip
Chair. If we take the cross-sectional profiles offamous chairs from around the world, past andFig. 6 noiz, Morphing Furniture (2009)
Photo: Kyle Yu / Daici Anopresent, and digitize them, we could customize
your home by connecting these chairs using yourpreferred order, combination, quantity, and distance. In terms of the configuration of thisproject, we wrote a program, after which the computer uses a technology called morphing to
extract all the cross sections one by one. This datais then sent to a nearby numerical control routerby email. As long as you cut the sections in orderand go through the holes in order to connect
them, you can make any chair no matter how
complicated its form may be. Although the result
Fig. 7 noiz, Morphing Furniture (2009)is a piece of furniture, it is not a mass-produced
Photo: Kyle Yu / Daici Ano
industrial product. Rather than mass production,
you might call this mass customization.
Leaving aside the strict definition of computational design, thanks to the increased performance of computers since the 1990s, strange forms have finally become possible using digitaltechnology, even in the architecture world. The only thing is that we didn’t go so far as to realize
these bizarre forms as actual objects at the time. Since the 2000s, with the development of digital fabrication, we are moving towards a situation where strange forms can be converted into
strange data outputs, which can then be produced as objects.
What is interesting now in the 2010s is this: if your strangely shaped object no longer
serves your purposes, it has now become possible to go back and fiddle with the original data,and create a different output all over again. Things that only flowed in one direction, whether
due to causal relationships or the flow of time, have now come to constitute a dimension thatFormation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［23］

we can design. And it’s not just the flow of time: the structure of something, its cost, the laws
surrounding it, the materials that made it—all of this can be expressed in numbers. These things
can now be described on a computer, and dealt with as a single dimension. In other words,
while architects were supposed to deal with objects on a three-dimensional XYZ axis, they have
had no choice but to become professionals who design composite entities of an overwhelmingly higher order.
That said, architects have probably had to address such causal relationships and higher
orders for a long time. In my view, they relied on experience and instinct to deal with extraordinarily complex, muddled things and concepts that were difficult to share with others in an
objective fashion. In contrast to this, thanks to digital technology, a feedback loop can be created whereby we describe a higher order of relationships, objectively output that, shape it into
something as-is, then return to a causal relationship, and do it all over again. We have reached apoint where it is possible to bring these things into the physical world using digital fabrication.
The word “architecture” tends to be understood in terms of fixed, stationary, three-dimensional
objects. However, as it became rapidly possible to address a higher order of things, the external
composite body of causal relationships accompanied by a dynamic flow of information has now
come to be considered as architecture. To put it another way: form is only a partial manifestation of all of this, and architects now have to address all of that information. Architecture now
has to deal with scanning and sensing, or technologies that control group behavior.
However, the architecture world is a heavy and ponderous industry that is positively
averse to the dynamic, the changeable, the ambiguous, and that which cannot be completely
calculated. So where do we take our cues from? The movie and game industry.
If you look at a scene from the shoot of a Hollywood computer-animated film, for example, motion capture is used with the actors to produce the movement. In Toy Story, from the
1990s, the face patches were created by moving a slider to make angry or troubled facial expressions. Today, however, the capabilities of computer-generated physical simulation programs
are astonishing. Adjusting all 10,000 sliders to create a smiling face exceeds the threshold ofcomplexity and becomes impossible. Basically, it is much faster and more logical to use motion
capture and get actors to perform. In any case, this is a cheaper input method, even if you wereto use famous actors.
In a situation where we have to decide on the product number of the steel frame and eachand every measurement on the so-called design drawing, how can we deal with the scale of architecture and cities that exceed this threshold value? If we twist a piece of konnyaku jelly, we
can preserve a certain physical relationship at any point, and allow it to undergo a bizarre deformation. This task becomes difficult and laborious if you try to go by calculations: but all you
have to do is buy some konnyaku for ¥50 (about 50 cents) and try twisting it around. In addition,in terms of the human body, we have now reached a point where the use of motion capture andskeletal and muscle simulations can generate movements that the person in question cannot
perform by him or herself.
That said, although we pride ourselves on our capacity for technological development
and creative problem-solving with respect to a visible object or target, we have a habit of giving
up when it comes to the environment. Architecture can’t be equipped with that many sensors,
and we are not operating in a situation where we can perform scanning, sensing, and simulations with the help of actuators. There is a sense in which we have surrendered to theconventional wisdom that architecture is a stationary, three-dimensional object. But perhaps
we don’t need to make such a concession.

# The Proliferation of Possibilities due to Technology
Recently, the myoelectric prosthesis has come much closer to becoming a practical reality. By
wearing these two robotic arms as prostheses, the myoelectric sensors allow you to move a
prosthesis just by thinking about it in your mind. With a certain level of training, it isFormation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［24］

apparently possible to move the prosthesis by thinking, to have it take up a bottle of water andopen the cap, allowing you to drink the water. One of the possibilities that lies beyond this is,for example, to be able to move a third or fourth arm attached somewhere else. There are possibilities that transcend what a normal human body is capable of. Your own arm might be
attached to a door far from the body, so that it could open the door whenever someone comesalong. In short, situations where the philosophical question of where your body and self, as
well as the environment, begins and ends, is gradually becoming an ambiguous one due to theimpact of real technologies.
For example, what would happen if I were able to turn off the lights in this room just by
thinking about it? In that case, it might not only be me who has access to the lights. Everyone inthis room might have that access. If so, it might become necessary for some kind of artificial
intelligence to be installed in this building as an OS, so that the AI can assess the situation andautomatically decide which person would have priority in each place. If it came to that, however, do architects have the know-how to ascertain which optimal structure, equipment, andsystem would allow us to control this situation? The answer is: not at all.
Going further, I think it is a real possibility that we will soon see offices where robots
that move around by themselves will fetch the coffee. The only thing that will pose some difficulties is the fact that physical objects, for these robots, are dark matter that resist observation.
Objects become acknowledged for the first time when digital data about them is provided. The
moment the locations of the desks, chairs, and corridors are described to them digitally, thesethings become visible: the robots become aware of this environment. This digital agent might
be the AI installed in the building, or an automated robot or vehicle. In order for this performance to be truly shared in common, however, this physical world first needs to be describedand acknowledged from their perspective. That is to say: it is necessary to learn this perspective in the first place.
Today, we perceive the physical world as real, in addition to recognizing digital worlds
like the Internet as another, parallel reality. This isn’t all, however. Some believe that it may benecessary to create a third world—one in which digital agents recognize the physical world,
physical agents like us humans recognize the digital one, and interactions can take place between this shared cluster of overlapping information and objects. I call this “common ground.”If we do not create this common ground, this new world, that is neither digital nor physical, I
believe that we are headed for a situation where neither recognition nor performance is possible, and which will not support a business platform.
Currently, we are trying tocreate an interactive tatami straw
room mat. As opposed to the conventional 1:2 rectangular tatami
mats laid out in an orthogonal
fashion, our idea basically runs
like this: if it isn’t orthogonal, thenit doesn’t have to be a four-sided
room. If we can obtain data througha 3D scan, we can create the patterns and turn them into a product,
Fig. 8 TESSE (2019), created in collaboration with Kunieda Co., Ltd., a tatami
mat manufacturer
which can then be delivered anyPhoto: Yasuhiro Takagi
where in the world (Fig. 8).
At the moment, tatami mat
makers are limited by the fact that they need to be relatively close to the client: the craftsperson
actually brings along a tape measure to the site to take measurements in order to ensure accuracy. If all this can be integrated in terms of data, the whole world naturally becomes a potential
market. What’s more, it becomes possible to create customized solutions for rooms of any
shape. Even a traditional industry like tatami mats can suddenly start to bring new value to theFormation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［25］

table through the power of design and technology.
As these issues begin to unravel—shifts in this kind of structure, and how the environment as a whole will change accordingly—there will be possibilities that allow us to think more
freely. This would be a situation in which the “common ground” I just mentioned becomesconsolidated. In my view, it ought to be possible to gradually realize an environment that allows for implementation, even if every single environment in our daily life has not been
appropriately adjusted.
Finally, I would just like to mention the 2025 World Expo that will take place in Osaka, thevenues for which I have been involved in planning for a long time. Let’s say that there is a dispute between countries over the sites where their pavilions are to be located. There may bestronger or weaker countries, some who would prefer not to be next to a certain country, a preference for the three Baltic states to be together, or an increase or decrease in the number ofparticipants. Such issues need to be dealt with in an interactive manner. In addition, if the border between immobile buildings and cars and other means of transport that can be moved to acertain extent becomes ambiguous, then the city as a whole ought to also shift in a dynamic way.
The design know-how that can answer the question of what sort of technological implementation is possible, and how the digital, physical, and information worlds can yield a better
performance, however, is not something that the architecture world possesses yet. We are at apoint where we are working to accomplish further technological progress that will prove indispensable for these tasks.

Keisuke Toyoda｜Born in 1972, Keisuke Toyoda holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the
University of Tokyo (1996) and a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia
University’s Graduate School of Architecture (2002). His career has involved stints at Tadao Ando
Architect & Associates (Osaka, 1996–2000) and SHoP Architects (New York, 2002–2006). He
founded noiz / architects with Jia-Shuan Tsai in 2007, based in both Tokyo and Taipei. Kosuke Sakai
joined noiz as a partner from 2016. Toyoda actively incorporates computational design into his
blueprints, production, research, and consulting, and implements these methods across various
fields, freely shifting between architecture, product design, urban planning, and fashion.
https://noizarchitects.com

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［26］

Arranging Nodes:
Forming a Virtual Community
tomad Organizer, DJ / Head of Maltine Records

Founding the netlabel Maltine Records
in 2005, tomad has overseen over
170 music releases and attracted attention both at home and abroad.
With a particular focus on dancemusic, he has also worked proactively with overseas artists andorganized events in Manila, China,
and New York. In his presentation,
tomad discussed his interpretation ofa label as a node connecting artists,music, and events while responding
fluidly to the environments and infrastructures surrounding music thathave continued to change ever since
the emergence of social media.

tomad# A Netlabel Launched in High School
Being neither an artist nor a critic, I would liketo use this opportunity to explore what I havedone until now through the record label Maltine
Records, including its relationship with theInternet.
To start with the obvious: What is Maltine
Records? At its simplest, it is a netlabel where
you can download music for free. Moreover, it isa web platform where you can enjoy albums andEPs of tracks by various artists (Fig. 1).
I founded Maltine Records back in 2005,
14 years ago. Back then, I was a first grader inhigh school and had created some music with
my friends but, not really having the money tomake a CD, I was wondering how I could release
what we had done. I then noticed that there wasthis other, quite simple format available, wherebya record label that I liked was operating as a netlabel, allowing people to click a link andFig. 1 Maltine Records website (http://maltinerecords.cs8.
biz/)
download tracks uploaded to the website as a
MP3 file. If I were just to rent a server, I realized, I
could also start doing this tomorrow, so I
straightaway tried it out. I first uploaded and released the music I made with my friends.
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［27］

It was at this time that I more or less decided the direction of the music I would handle as a label. It would have thetwo elements of dance music and pop music. Back then, I
was listening to a lot of post-1990s techno and house. Butamong the music that contained a mixture of this andJapanese pop music—or let’s say, dance tracks mixed withthe elements of melody and singing—there didn’t seem to be
anything that matched my tastes. As such, I based the musicin principle on a mix of these two “colors” and decided torelease as much as I could.
Initially I was releasing my friends’ music but thenFig. 2 CD album cover for MP3 Killed The
CD Star? (released August 4th, 2010)
artists who liked what I was doing kept on coming, with theresult that today the label has released 170 works and hasaround 200 artists.
The basic way in which we release music is throughMP3 files, though since 2012 and 2013 we have also been
making our music available on SoundCloud and YouTube. In
addition, we have issued a few physical releases at particularjunctures, such as our first CD, MP3 Killed The CD Star?, which
we put out in 2010 to mark our 50th release (Fig. 2). It included
a CD featuring a DJ mix of Maltine Records music as well as
an empty CD-R. Anyone who bought the CD release could
then download the original tracks from the Maltine Records
website and write the data onto the CD-R via their computer
to complete the product. Based on our experiences as a netlabel distributing content online, we made this kind of physicalrelease with the aim of demolishing the privileges latentFig. 3 Maltine Book: Maltine Records 2005–
within the format of the CD as well as those of the music in2015 10th Anniversary Issue (Switch
Publishing, 2015)
dustry attendant on that. In 2015 and as our 100th release, we
produced a book called Maltine Book: Maltine Records 2005–2015 10th Anniversary Issue in partnership with
Switch Publishing, bringing together the ten
years of the label’s activities (Fig. 3).
Our output also includes various items ofmerchandise as well as regular label events. The
biggest to date has been “Tokyo,” which was heldat Liquidroom in Ebisu in 2014. It featured alineup of artists from home and abroad, attracting 1,000 people (Fig. 4). In this way, Maltine
Records is involved in making many kinds ofFig. 4 Maltine Records event “Tokyo” at LIQUIDROOM in
Ebisu (2014)
things with a focus on music.

# Differentiation as a Netlabel
As I have continued to run my netlabel, I have arrived at a definition that seems particularly
important for me: a netlabel is not a business. In the first place, my motivation for starting thelabel was not a commercial one, and I am rather now working with an emphasis on shaping
Maltine Records as a brand or as a name.
I would like to quote from Maltine Book, in which I wrote briefly about this point.
“Though we are all ‘labels,’ there is nonetheless a difference in terms of direction whencompared with the major record labels. The latter invest capital in artists that they think
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［28］

will sell at some point in time, using their know-how to build buzz, sell CDs, and makeprofit. On the other hand, Maltine Records affixes itself to artists regardless of whether or
not they will bring us profit, based on a consistent attitude and identity. And doing so
forms an vague overall image associated with the label’s name.”(Maltine Book, “Column: She is My Dream Girl,” October 2014, “Hotel,” 2015, p. 119)While this hasn’t always been the vision from the very beginning up until the present,
this way of thinking has nonetheless solidified as I have continued my activities as a netlabel.
To put this a little more concisely and comprehensibly, I arrived at the idea that what I am
doing is organizing a kind of “virtual community.” It is the image of a zone or territory where
various things, from artists to music and audience events, are intersecting. The goal of my activities is that the attitudes and identity of Maltine Records emerges through our releases andevents. If the “territory” of Maltine Records then exists within the connections between people
and between the different music releases, then it surely follows that other labels also have theirown respective territories. As such, I am conscious of the question of through what kinds ofreleases we can differentiate Maltine Records from other labels. And when, for instance, ascheduled release arrives, we also spend time pondering how we can expand the “color” of thelabel. This is more or less the way that a netlabel regularly operates.
And it seems to me that these kinds of activities are best described as “arranging a node.”
A node generally refers to a point at which lines connect, or a point of contact in a network, but
I think that humans can also be nodes, as can the things that artists create, and even something
like an incident or event. By arranging these “nodes,” by intersecting various elements in parallel without giving one or the other any special treatment, the “virtual community” that is arecord label emerges.
I am constantly prioritizing the question of what kind of identity the Maltine Records
virtual community should maintain in order to build the best position as a label. When runningthe day-to-day operations of the netlabel, be it deciding the next release, thinking about thecontent of an event, or considering who to collaborate with, this has become the most important point.

# Netlabels Boosted by the Spread of Social MediaAt the risk of shifting gears somewhat, I will now talk more generally
about the situation for netlabels.
The “Japanese Netlabel Map” collects together the activities of the
major netlabels in Japan fromwhen the first one appeared in2001 up until 2015 (Fig. 5). It is organized like a chronology mappingout each of the netlabel’s trajectories, categorized according to
Fig. 5 Chart mapping changes in netlabel genres and websites across timemusical genre like J-Pop, techno,(Akami Records, “Japanese Netlabel Map,” Maltine Book: Maltine Records 2005–2015 10th Anniversary Issue, Switch Publishing, 2015, pp. 130–1).
or noise. What is most striking isthat the number of netlabels rapidly increases from around 2010.
Why did this happen? I tried to think about this in my own way as someone who has beenrunning a netlabel since 2005. From the 1990s through to around the start of the 2000s, weshared music among our close circle of friends or when fans of a certain type of music came
together, or through online forums and bulletin boards. But from around 2010, social media
became more widespread and used by a greater variety of people. Take Twitter, for instance. I
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［29］

can announce some information about a music release and it will gradually spread, retweetedby friends and then friends of friends. This kind of infrastructure in which music can be disseminated online by people who are not essentially well-known figures was basically notavailable until about 2010. To me, then, it makes sense that netlabels in Japan would increase somuch from around then.
Going back to the term I proposed earlier, I think that the spread of social media hassuddenly made visible the networks formed by nodes. Of course, with a physical release, wewere always able to view the relationship that exists between artists and music. But it’s also
different: you had to go to a record store and spend time looking for things, and it was often hard
to find the connections between certain artists or where certain music figured within a label’s
lineup. But to take Twitter again, the relationship between artists and listeners is visible andyou can immediately check how many followers an artist has, and so on. Listeners can share
recommendations and impressions about music with each other; artists, too, can share information about how to make music. Increasing numbers of artists are directly communicatingwith listeners in this way. Thanks to the spread of social media, these kinds of small, individual
networks previously difficult to see have become visible. Accordingly, the networks have grown
and the number of netlabels risen, leading to an increase in the number of people who actually
make and introduce music.
However, this sudden visualization of social relations also led to a kind of congestion of
networks in around 2015, whereby people seemed to feel like it was now a little hard to breathe.
It was like we had stopped seeking out new kinds of encounters online, as if we were isolated ina so-called “filter bubble” where we only consume information that we already like and increasingly found it harder to come into contact with people, ideas, or tastes different from our own.
Here is a concrete example of the influence social media has had on music. On
SoundCloud, individual artists can release their music, which listeners can then follow and fellow artists or listeners can “like” or add comments. The system works by clicking the “like”
button to show your appreciation of the music, so good tracks see their number of “likes” growand grow. But at a certain point, we reach the stage where everyone is just making music in orderto acquire “likes.” This then means that more individual elements or sounds that are very new
don’t attract a positive response. The end result is that only music that is easy to understand andwhich has a kind of pop sound gets noticed. It feels like the young people who want to make newmusic are right now all aspiring toward similar trends. What I sense from running my netlabel
and being involved with various kinds of artists is that while the Internet has certainly made itmuch easier for people to release and disseminate music, we are also in situation where musicand expression has become more homogeneous.
It is these circumstances that led the online music magazine Pitchfork to publish an article in 2015 called “PC Music, Hipster Runoff and the Year of the Internet Hangover.”* “These
concepts felt sexy and vital in the early 2010s,” the writer Meaghan Garvey asserts, “but in 2015,‘digital maximalism’ isn’t so much a limitless frontier as our exhausting day-to-day reality.” Sodoes that mean that we all got social media fatigue around 2015?
In fact, it was around 2015 that the Maltine Records scene started to see its listeners increase as more and more people heard about the label through social media. Other netlabels also
increased their releases and listeners, leading to a rise in the number of artists involved in this
output. This is also the time when Maltine Records held its event “Tokyo” simultaneously acrosstwo venues and attracting 1,000 people. The event felt very liberated, as if the lines between
artists and listeners or fans have melted away, where lots of artists gathered and came onstage
together. Being a “virtual community,” unlike the regular music industry, it seems as if Maltine
Records could get past the issue of social media fatigue and expand a new “node” by holding an
event in the actual, offline world.

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［30］

# Linking up with Cities in Asia
As various nodes appear, Maltine Records unconsciously and arbitrarily makes connections
with other countries, such as by holding eventsin London in 2015 and New York in 2016. It wasincredibly fun to see our fan base spreading like
this, though being so heavily based online alsomeant it seemed like listeners and fans were increasing without it feeling real. With expansion
premised on social media connections, you canalmost predict how things will develop next andso I began to lose interest on a personal level.
Fig. 6 “x-pol: Buwan Buwan x Maltine” (XX:XX, Manila),organized by the Japan Foundation Asia Center in 2017
It was at this point that I was contacted by
Photo: Tamio Iwaya (GraphersRock)the Japan Foundation Asia Center, asking me if I
wanted to do research on artists in Asia. At thattime I had no clue about the music scene in other
Asian countries, but I felt like I would find something if I went precisely because I was so ignorant.
By coincidence, I was just then curious about a
Beijing-based label called Do Hits, around which
there seemed to be kind of hybrid scene that wasneither global nor local. As such, I decided totake part in the research survey.
After the survey, I was also involved in organizing an actual event. I held an event in
Fig. 7 “BORDERING PRACTICE” (WWW X, Tokyo), organizedby the Japan Foundation Asia Center in 2018
Manila with the local netlabel Buwan Buwan
Photo: Jun Yokoyama
Collective, which was then followed by anotherevent at Shibuya’s WWW X that brought together
people from Indonesia, Manila, and Taiwan, and even further afield from America and Canada(Figs. 6, 7). Having learned that there are like-minded labels in Manila and Jakarta, I now want toarrange nodes between the cities and stay connected and aware of one another. I think this willlead to new kinds of encounters that will stimulate the imaginations of artists. At this stage, I
still don’t know if we can actually do it or not, but this is the sort of modest activity I hope tocontinue in the future.
In March 2019, I will go to Jakarta and work with artists from Manila, Jakarta, and Tokyo
to create a piece of music collaboratively. I am also hoping to hold more events in Southeast Asia
as well as maintain a state of constant communication whereby we can remain in touch andregularly engage in dialogue while nonetheless retaining each group’s individual autonomy.
*Meaghan Garvey, “PC Music, Hipster Runoff and the Year of the Internet Hangover,” Pitchfork, May 26, 2015(https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/773-pc-music-hipster-runoff-and-the-year-of-the-internet-hangover/)tomad ｜Launching the online record label Maltine Records in 2005 when he was just 15 years old,
tomad has 170 releases to his name. Maltine Records has gained attention as a leading symbol of the
new dance-pop music scene and as an icon of tomad’s generation in Tokyo. He has held events in
Manila, Shenzhen, and New York, and has also produced songs for foreign artists. In 2015, hepublished Maltine Book (Switch Publishing), bringing together the activities of the label tocommemorate the tenth anniversary of its founding.
http://maltinerecords.cs8.biz

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［31］

Discussion and Q&A
Ei Wada + Lu Yang + Eyedropper Fill + Keisuke Toyoda + tomad | Minoru Hatanaka (moderator)

Redefining Technology
Minoru Hatanaka: We will now have a discussion and Q&A session with today’s speakers. The firstpart of our program focused on the theme of creativity in the age of the Internet. In the speakers’
presentations, we saw how the Internet is directly implicated in each of their activities as a matter ofcourse. We were also introduced to individual examples where technology has expanded the scope of
their activities, as well as modes of thinking premised on the advancement of network technologies.
While Marshall McLuhan said that “the medium is the message,” the technology and media
that we deploy can also draw out new forms of content and meaning. The question of what “medium”
means is already implicit in everyone’s practices, and we also saw examples of discovering a sense offestivity or religious values through the act of redefining technology. What does each of you think itmeans to redefine technology in terms of the fields that you are active in?
Eyedropper Fill: For us, the act of redefining things that one is accustomed to using on a regularbasis is a matter of making something new from what already exists, or else making use of thesethings in a different fashion so that something better can emerge. We create new media throughthe act of redefining technology. In that sense, you could say that we are building new visions
and artworks in this way.
Keisuke Toyoda: For me, it is definitely not a straightforward case of technology worship, where
one can leave all decisions to so-called artificial superintelligence. These days, when you get
into a taxi, advertisements appear on the small monitor in front of the seat. It’s probably performing some kind of facial recognition: whenever I get in, all I see are ads for recruiting and job
sites. Just like TV ads, though, I also want to see some advertising images that aren’t targetingme. I think we are currently in a situation where our experiences differ even if we occupy thesame space, and where a diversity of choice is disappearing before we even realize it as a resultof technology. This is why I believe that the value of things that demonstrate a particular worldview in a concrete way by being based on a certain judgment, even though its foundations areunclear—such as you find in the activities of everyone here today—will in fact increase.
Ei Wada: As for me, I use technology in ways that deviate from what you find in instructions anduser manuals, or technologies that have outlived their original role and function—which is, I
suppose, in itself a kind of redefinition. I call this “shedding,” in the sense of a snake shedding
its skin. When you have shed your original function and become stark naked, the essential interest and charm of that technology becomes apparent. I’m talking about things like electricity,
radio waves, electrons, and electromagnetic forces. Ultimately, you could say that working withthese technologies is a matter of reverse engineering. Or rather, the question of how things
come into this universe, through what sort of mechanisms, and how they unfold, is really the
result of a repeated process of grasping these things through human hands. Then the next stage
becomes a matter of understanding why something exists where it does: of fantasizing about an
Earth that transcends a particular region, a universe that transcends the Earth, invisible worlds.
This is a worldview that could also be found in Lu Yang’s presentation, I believe. In my case, themood is festive, whereas hers is a vision of hell.
Lu Yang: For me, technology is merely a tool. It is something that has always been present, as a
response to a particular era, but I think the contemporary age has assigned it overdue
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［32］

importance. Technology exists for the sake of humanity:
it is nothing more than that.
On the other hand, I believe it
is possible to establish andredefine ghosts, spirits, andreligious worldviews on thebasis of various influences,
operations, and relationships.
As Wada mentioned, there arecharacters and things in mywork that go back and forth
between different worldviews. We are too locked into athree-dimensional state. For From left: Minoru Hatanata, Ei Wada, Lu Yang, Eyedropper Fill, Keisuke Toyoda, tomad
an artist, it is a relatively
straightforward matter to re-examine reality by breaking free of the three-dimensional world.

Creativity in the Internet Age, and “Locality” in This Context
Hatanaka: Some of you mentioned how the act of redefining technology serves to expand the world,and create a new worldview. In his presentation, tomad also talked about how he aspired toward a
musical practice that transcends the local or regional so as not to be confined to a fixed place andenvironment. Electronic music, in particular, is said to be a genre of music with scant regard for national attributes, for instance. On the other hand, because electronic music exists in a global context,
the activities of its musicians also demonstrate the local and regional disparities and the sense of individuality that unintentionally arise from this music.
For me, the computational design in Toyoda’s practices is using computers to break throughthe limits of human thinking. Is it possible, however, to incorporate unique local elements?
tomad: In terms of the music scene, the quality of songs has definitely improved as a result oftechnological advancements on the production side. On the other hand, the enhanced level of thetechnology that we can deploy means that everyone now sounds more or less the same. So where
do these artists differ from one another? I would say that the differences come from things like
individual fantasies and trivial, insignificant memories—perhaps you can call this a kind of locality or a regional character. We are in a situation where differences in individual character
become apparent precisely because the Internet environment has made technology flat.
Toyoda: I grew up in an area that had the feel of an archetypal planned “new town,” where there
was nothing but right-angled, man-made structures. Just on the opposite side of the national
highway was an old fishing village, where I really sensed the accumulated layers of history, andan atmosphere suffused with the thoughts and memories of all sorts of people. Even if you wereable to create an architectural copy of that village, an individual designer wouldn’t be able todesign these collective accumulations. This was also one of the motivations that led me to startworking with computational design. Artists have talents and abilities that cannot be fully explained, and the results might be sloppy. That said, this situation is not reproducible. If there
was the possibility of an approach that could take a more technical direction, I feel that it would
lie in digital technology. If we could use computational design to realize things with a sense of
locality—by which I mean a strong sense of an accumulation of old vestiges, so to speak—thiswould be an approach that can be calculated. And I feel it would be interesting in terms of how
this could be shared with society.
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［33］

The Relationship Between Artistic Creativity and Politics
Hatanaka: Let’s now take some questions from the audience.
Eyedropper Fill talked about art education in Thailand. What sort of education do you think will be
important in the future?
Eyedropper Fill: We operate on the premise that Thai culture itself, not just our art education, isextremely closed and parochial. If you teach Asian culture, for example, it’s only about Asian
culture, with no exchange with or input from anything else. If it’s technology, then you only
teach technology. What we try to do is to close that gap. We get scientific fields to try to understand art, to share knowledge, to collaborate. In all these things I think it is important to makeuse of the Internet.
Our dynamism comes from demonstrating our adaptability more than ever before. In the
future, media art will take on the status of a tradition. Then the things used in media art will be
nothing more than tools that need renewing. Our practice is based on this important message:
that creativity ought to be constantly renewed and rejuvenated.
Q1

Q 2 Whereas Eyedropper Fill and Lu Yang spoke about topics related to the politics in their own
countries, the three Japanese artists did not address political issues at all. Does politics influence artistic production?
Wada: Although I don’t address current affairs directly, I do think that there is a political significance embedded in my own mental state, or in the act of creating virtual hometowns andplaces. Strange parallel worlds appear where tradition and the digital collide with each other. I
fantasize that this situation might become a political experiment. In the meantime, I delude
myself into thinking that we might see the emergence of communities based on a concept otherthan the nation-state and the citizen, like nations that exist online.
Toyoda: One of the indices that we have in our practice centers on the cultivation of a terrain, so
to speak, that emerges out of a set of relationships or mechanics different from what came before. In Japan today, for instance, we are seeing a situation where people don’t trust the national
system—or rather, they are quietly resisting it.
tomad: For me, I tend to want to create spaces through music where politics doesn’t become anissue. I think it’s also important to have spaces where you can escape. Bringing politics intomusic is something that you can do to convey a message, but for me, the politics in my mind has
to do with a certain reversal, which allows you to intentionally opt to maintain a certain distance from it.
Hatanaka: Up until now, there was a certain brand of art that also constituted a means of articulating resistance against politics. Even if an openly political position wasn’t apparent,
the act of proposing alternative designs for systems could be said to constitute a kind of political approach.
Q 3 I would like to pose the next question to Mr. Toyoda. Famous designers have a certain authorial
identity. With the development of AI technology, however, when the optimization of things in accordance with mass production and the popular tastes of the masses becomes a given, will we see adwindling necessity for designers? How do you think this situation will pan out in the future?
Toyoda: Previously, design was a matter of demonstrating something through objects. For instance, in addition to designing the form of things, computational design can also be deployed
to think about models of logic or the processes themselves that generate these forms, while
also allowing us to think in parallel about the aesthetics of why they are beautiful. The scope ofthese meta-attributes gradually expands, along with the domains that can deal with these
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［34］

things, and the corresponding choices. Many people often ask the question: “Will the use of AI
lead to a dwindling number of occupations?” That number will probably decrease—at least interms of “occupations” corresponding to the value systems in the world as we know it today. If
we create AI while also educating people about it at the same time, it also ought to lead to an
explosion of professions involved in new creative pursuits around this phenomenon. It’s justthat we can’t see this happening yet. I am quite certain that a new wave of professional skills
and values is coming.
Q 4 The speakers at this discussion taught me a lot about the idea of diversity as a result of the digital.

Could you perhaps each mention one keyword that connects the idea of digital technology to creativity?
Personally, words like “chaos” and “complex systems” come to mind. What does everyone think?
tomad: The field I deal with is music, so rather than the rational elements, I think that it is important for individual beliefs and fantasies, or worldviews espoused by a certain person, to
continue to exist, even as the digital intervenes.
Toyoda: For me, digital technology transforms values. When these values completely leave therealm of the world we know, we are no longer able to even acknowledge those values as such,and neither are we able to read them. I think it is important to forge some sort of shared narrative while effecting a gradual transformation of these values through a measured
departure—halfway outside our zone of familiarity, for example. The overly technical fails tohold one’s interest, I think.
Eyedropper Fill: To us, digital technology is merely a medium for discovering creativity. The
most vital thing is human sensibility. What we would like the audience to take away from ourwork is a feeling of inspiration, and a sense of taste.
Lu: Our generation is incredibly blessed. Those who make digital artworks, in particular, live ina well-equipped environment right from the start, and are very lucky in that sense. Take myself,
for instance: when one painting is finished, that isn’t the end. Thanks to computers, you can doall sorts of processing and manipulation really quickly, and at a low cost. Even as a beginner,
regardless of whether you have money or not, you can easily make art that uses computers, andshow it online right away.
It’s not just the environment in which we create—it’s the same with our human networks.
Twenty years ago, a social network of personal connections was extremely important. One hundred years ago, it was necessary to spend a month building up your connections, learning themethods used to create your work, and coming and going from the place where you were creating. Today, though, you can establish your own networks just through social media.
Wada: For me, “digital” used to refer to an approach that allowed you to describe everything thatexisted in the physical world using only two numbers, 0 and 1. On the other hand, if you wanted
to convey those 0s and 1s, you also had to describe them in the physical world. There was always
a sense of wavering, and two layers—a digital one and a physical one—were necessary. This issomething totally fascinating to me.
Hatanaka: I took Wada’s last remark to mean that the digital and physical worlds are always
giving feedback to each other. Accordingly, one cannot just rely on digital technology moving
forward: feedback from or to the physical world is going to be necessary whatever the case. Forme, this is perhaps where the “digital” really comes into existence.
We’ve just about run out of time, so I will close the discussion here.

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［35］

[Session 2]

Producing New Formsof Expression
The phenomenon of “international production” continues to expand, thanks tocollaborations and the formation of networks between various specialists
that transcend nations, languages, and artistic categories. Session 2 looked at the situationin Japan and abroad in terms of how exhibitions and music-related projects
are disseminating new forms of artistic expression.

Moderator & SpeakerSpeakers

dj sniff
Turntablist, DJ, Curator [ Japan]

Kodama Kanazawa

Riar Rizaldi

Independent curator /Senior Deputy Director of Curatorial
Affairs, Towada Art Center [ Japan]

Artist, Researcher [Indonesia]

After working for 12 years in public art museums in Japan such asContemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Kodama Kanazawa began
working independently in 2013. From 2017, she has also served as
Senior Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at Towada Art Center in
Aomori, Japan. Her recent curatorial projects include “Yuko Mohri:
Assume That There Is Friction and Resistance” (Towada Art Center,2018), “CHILDHOOD: Another banana day for the dream-fish” (Palaisde Tokyo, Paris, 2018), “Rafaël Rozendaal: GENEROSITY” (Towada Art
Center, 2018), and KENPOKU ART 2016 (multiple sites, Ibaraki
Prefecture, 2016).
https://kodamakanazawa.com

Resisting the Mainstream: The Internet,
Experience, and Reproduction
Kodama Kanazawa Independent curator / Senior Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, Towada Art CenterIn the second part of the symposium,
Shanghai-based independent curator
Kodama Kanazawa assumed the roleof moderator, and introduced a number of exhibitions that she curated
featuring new media art or reproducible works of art. In her presentation,
Kanazawa discussed a kind of art
that departs from the trends andmovements of modern and contemporary art history in Japan, thecreativity that emerges from the relationship between art and technology,
and the potential they possess.
Kodama Kanazawa# What One Has Seen, and What One Has Not
I am a freelance contemporary art
curator as well as, since 2017, theSenior Deputy Director of Curatorial
Affairs at Towada Art Center. I was
originally an assistant curator at
the Contemporary Art Museum,Kumamoto before moving to the
Kawasaki City Museum as curator
in 2006, and became independent
in 2013. I am currently based in
Shanghai while also working in
Fig. 1 Installation view of “Yuichi Yokoyama—I am depicting time: Complete
Japan. I have also curated exhibiRecords of Neo Manga” (2010, Kawasaki City Museum)
tions of works related to new media
art and the Internet.
Today, I would like to speak briefly about my previous experiences as well as my interestsand concerns as a curator, based on my time spent living and working abroad, and the exhibitions I have curated of artists who work with Internet-related themes.
In 2010, I curated an exhibition by Yuichi Yokoyama called “Yuichi Yokoyama—I am depicting time: Complete Records of Neo Manga” at the Kawasaki City Museum (Fig. 1). Yokoyama
depicts the visions he sees through the format of manga. He is interested less in exhibiting his
work than in publishing it as manga: this is how his work can take the form of a book that costs
only something like ¥1,000 (about $10), and thus reach a wider audience. Yokoyama also makes
paintings, but he sees this as a hobby. “I find it such a shame when a work becomes the property
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［37］

of a collector and fails to see the light of day,”
Yokoyama has said. “It’s much more exciting forme when my work is published in the form of
manga and becomes circulated.”
This exhibition was a collaboration with
Torafu Architects. We installed tables to create
two circuit-like structures so that visitors would
be able to read the story in a certain order. Visitors
moved horizontally one step at a time whilelooking at the original illustrations on the tables.
Fig. 2 Lee Wen, Ping-Pong Go Round (1998/2015). Installation
view of “Whose Game Is It?” (2015, Royal College of Art,As they walked around the perimeter of the cirLondon), co-curated by Jennifer KY Lam, Hena Lee, Yingting
Xie, and Kodama Kanazawa
cular table, the surrounding scenery changed.
Photo: Marcos Sebastián
For this exhibition, an effort was made to produce an experience while simultaneously
creating a device that would immerse the viewer
in an artistic world.
Subsequently, I pursued graduate studies
at the Royal College of Art, London. For our final
assignment, my classmates and I were divided
into teams and asked to produce an exhibition.
Although these teams were formed with people
with whom you got along, all the Asians stuck
together: my team consisted of a Singaporean, aFig. 3 Yuko Mohri, Urban Mining: Sea (2015). Installation
view of “Spectrum: Examining Today, Searching for the
Chinese, and a Korean-Brazilian whose parents
Future” (2015, Spiral)
had moved from South Korea to Brazil.
Photo: Nobutada Omote. Courtesy of SPIRAL/Wacoal Art
Center
The resultant exhibition, “Whose Game Is
It?,” was a very playful affair. As our budget wasinsufficient to ship Lee Wen’s Ping-Pong Go
Round, a work that allows you to play table tennis
from multiple directions, we created a version
ourselves by hand with the permission and diFig. 4
rection of the artist, making for an extremely
Takashi
Kuribayashi,memorable experience (Fig. 2). As there were also
Vortex (2015).
Installation view
many other works based on the theme of audiof “Spectrum:
ence participation, our exhibition felt completely
Examining
Today, Searchingdifferent from those of the other teams.
for the Future”
After that, I returned to Japan, and co-cu(2015, Spiral)
Photo: Nobutada
rated “Spectrum: Examining Today, Searching for
Omote. Courtesy
the Future” (2015) with Yoshie Ota, a curator atof SPIRAL/
Wacoal Art
Spiral, an exhibition commemorating the 30thCenteranniversary of the Spiral in Aoyama, Tokyo. Fourartists participated, one of whom was Yuko
Mohri. Although Mohri’s practice is what you might call “new media art,” by deploying a number of devices to transform invisible energies such as electricity or electromagnetism, her work
demonstrates the various forms of energy that exist around us (Fig. 3).
Takashi Kuribayashi’s chandelier work was also excellent. Seemingly beautiful at firstglance, it was actually made up of glass words: these words are drawn from the text of the letterthat Einstein had written to then-President Roosevelt, seeking permission to develop the atomic
bomb—extremely political content (Fig. 4). As the words are inverted, one has to turn around andread the shadows that they cast. In this way, we curated an exhibition related to what is visible
and invisible, what one has seen, and what one has not.
In 2016, I worked as the curator for KENPOKU ART 2016, a sprawling art festival in Ibaraki,
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［38］

Japan. Although the scope of the Echigo-Tsumari
Art Triennale is also fairly considerable,
KENPOKU ART was held over an area twice aslarge. Fumio Nanjo, director of the Mori Art
Museum, served as director, while the curation
was handled by Yukiko Shikata and myself.
This art festival was filled with an experimental spirit. There were works produced byteams selected via an art hackathon, whichbrought together 60 people chosen through an
Fig. 5 Shogo Abiru (sculptor), Sakura Kai (designer), Jiro
Hashimoto (musician), Mafumi Hishida (scientist), Masaru
open call. First, improvised teams were formed,
Mizuochi (engineer), and Yuma Yanagisawa (programmer),Interfering Floating Bodies (2016).
with various experts in them. Ideas for works
Installation view of KENPOKU ART 2016.
were considered over four days, presentations
Photo: Keizo Kioku. Courtesy of KENPOKU ART 2016
were given, and three teams were then chosen toactually show their work. So this was a test of
one’s physical ability to come up with ideas. One
example was a work involving soap bubbles suspended for a long time in the air inside a glass
bowl, which was produced collaboratively by aglass artisan, a physics researcher, and artists
working with video, space, and music (Fig. 5).
KENPOKU ART 2016 also featured the workof Internet artist Rafaël Rozendaal, who createswebsites as artworks—or rather, makes moving
Fig. 6 Installation view of “Rafaël Rozendaal: GENEROSITY”
paintings. On his website are many works, which(2018, Towada Art Center) Photo: Kuniya Oyamada
he then takes out into the streets of the city during
events. With Nissan as a sponsor, Rozendaal
loaded a projector onto one of their electric cars
and, using it as a power source, went out into thestreets to make projections on buildings.
One of the speakers yesterday, Ei Wada,also participated in KENPOKU ART, as he mentioned in his presentation. Hitachi City, where
Wada has a workshop, is home to the headquarters of the eponymous home appliancemanufacturer. Hitachi’s former researchers as
Fig. 7 Installation view of “Yuko Mohri: Assume That ThereIs Friction and Resistance” (2018, Towada Art Center)
well as the general public gathered at Wada’s
Photo: Kuniya Oyamada
workshop to develop musical instruments using
home appliances for the duration of the festival,
practicing on them, and even giving performances during the closing party. This concert was
something quite special, with a performance of Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” using instruments made out of electric fans.
In February 2018, we held the “Rafaël Rozendaal: Generosity” exhibition at Towada Art
Center. I was surprised to hear that this was his first solo exhibition at a museum, and came tothe conclusion that Rozendaal, who exhibits his work online, had not generally been seen as an
artist who shows in museums. At this exhibition, by projecting so-called “moving images” usingeight projectors, Rozendaal’s website artworks gave the audience the impression of having entered into a website (Fig. 6).
Currently on view is a solo exhibition by Yuko Mohri, “Assume That There Is Friction andResistance.” This is also Mohri’s first solo exhibition at a museum. Within the installation are
moving sculptures and a spiral staircase that goes round and round (Fig. 7). These works are madeto show how invisible energies envelop the spaces that surround us.
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［39］

For September 2019, we are planning a solo exhibition by AKI INOMATA, who is known
for her hermit crab works with shells made using a 3D printer.

# The Internet as Absolutely Necessary for Realizing Exhibitions
If we think about the relationship between ourselves and the Internet, which is also the themeof this symposium, I would say that it is obviously a very important tool. This situation whereby
I can live in Shanghai while also being able to direct curatorial affairs at a museum in Aomori
has been made possible by the Internet. Basically, I work using email and Skype, in addition to
Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Line, WhatsApp, and Slack. We communicate using a variety ofplatforms and can create a single workplace, so it is clear that the Internet is vital as a tool.
When we work with an Internet artist like Rafaël Rozendaal, I also think that there is anextremely intimate relationship between the Internet and ourselves, in the sense that we aresupporting the creation of an artist who is inspired by the technologies of a new era.
There is another thing that has occurred to me. Even if I work with new media artists,
my professional expertise does not become deeper, nor do I become better versed in that particular field. And it is not the case that I want to somehow showcase these new media artists
in an art context, either. Rather, I observe various practices that I think really need to beshown, at this present moment, from various perspectives, and then offer these artists theopportunity to exhibit with us. For instance, the next exhibition at Towada Art Center, basedon the theme of community art, will feature works that are different from new media art andInternet-related practices.
In view of all this, I feel that I have always been conscious of resisting the mainstream.
The things that have been deemed to be part of the mainstream in the history of modern andcontemporary Japanese art have all been Western. Japan’s modernization, and its self-imposed
cultural imperialism, continue to be major themes in my own work and research.
This mainstream has placed an emphasis on the inimitable originality and one-off natureof artworks produced by a single artist. As a rule, collectors place value on this one-off quality andpurchase works based on it. Artworks enter the vaults of these collectors, and the opportunities
for these works to be seen dwindle to nothing—or else to an extremely small number.
My interest has always been not in the world of such artworks, but rather in a more democratic vision of what art can and might be. With art that reaches its fullest realization by being
reproduced and circulated, many people can sense its value and share this kind of art. Here, we
can see the emergence of technology in the Internet age that is not simply a tool, or rather creativity through the Internet and art.
In a previous age where the one-off quality of the artwork was privileged, the mainstream
was deemed to consist of a handful of mostly Western cities. Creativity in the age of the Internet,
however, fiercely resists this mainstream in a geographical sense, too.

Kodama Kanazawa｜(p. 36)

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［40］

How Can We Play Together?:
Improvising as a Way to Establish
a Relationship Between Artists
dj sniff Turntablist, DJ, Curator

Based in Europe and Asia, dj sniff has
established himself as a prolific artist
in experimental, improvised, andelectronic music with turntables andhis own original instruments, while
also working as a curator for music
projects in and outside Japan. He has
pursued a collaborative approachthrough organizing a festival withother Asian artists, seeking out the
new kinds of music that emerge
when musicians and audiences withdifferent contexts and languages
come together.
dj sniff (right) and Kodama Kanazawa (left)# From an Artist’s Perspective
Usually when I give presentations, it’s about myown work as an artist, but today I would like totalk about something I rarely have the chance todiscuss in public: my curatorial work. My talkwill focus on Asian Meeting Festival (AMF),
which was organized by the Japan Foundation
Asia Center between 2014 to 2017 with Otomo
Yoshihide as artistic director and Yuen Chee Waiand myself as project directors. AMF consists of aseries of concerts and workshops that brings together independent artists throughout Asia who
Fig. 1 Performance at Asian Meeting Festival 2016 (Otomo
Yoshihide in front)
are active in the field of experimental, improvised, and noise music (Fig. 1).
As a musician I work independently, but as a curator I have worked for art and educational institutions in The Netherlands and Hong Kong. However, these activities also developedout of independently organizing DJ events with friends in the late 1990s in Tokyo. Although I
never received a formal music education, my musical roots lie in club culture and hip hoptaught me that I could become a musician through listening to music. There was film called
Juice (1992, USA), in particular, that made me want to be a DJ in 1994. I lived in San Francisco
between 1997 and 1998, and I experienced the open atmosphere of rave parties and the solidarityof the Bay Area hip hop community. This inspired me to start organizing my own events when I
later returned to Japan.
It also really brings back memories from my youth whenever I come to ICC. During college, I was an art history and aesthetics major and, although I was quite skeptical about new
media art, I still often came to ICC to see exhibitions. It was here where I saw Danny Rozin’s
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［41］

Wooden Mirror (1999), which led me to go to graduate school in New York and eventually becomecompletely immersed in this new field of art.
I specialized in building electronic instruments and developing interfaces for computer
music. After my education in New York, I moved
to The Netherlands to work at Studio for
Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM), which wasestablished in 1969 in Amsterdam. I started out
first as an intern in the lab building hardware
and later became the artistic director in 2007 andFig. 2 Music studio at STEIM
held the position until 2012. It was a small organization, so I also led the research groups andcoordinated the artist residency program while living in the guesthouse (Fig. 2).
Whenever curating or organizing events I try to maintain my perspective as an artist. I
actually don’t like the description of “curator.” During my time in The Netherlands, I worked
with cultural subsidy systems and, more often than not, decisions over funding were made bypeople who had no involvement in art practice. Themes were set based on funding opportunities and artists were asked to make something that could fit that agenda. It really bothered methat I was working within this system. Since then my desire has been to create spaces whereartists have autonomy and can explore freely on their own terms.

# Featuring the “Other”
After I arrived to Amsterdam, I became active inthe free improvisation music scene. I participated as a musician, but also through STEIM
supported many artists out of an interest in howtechnology can help one’s musical expression inthis field. I initially thought of free improvisation as something completely open, where you
can play freely with anyone that you had justmet. Similarly, I thought of my field of musicthat was driven by technology as something democratizing, helping people like myself who
Fig. 3 Performance at Future Sounds of Folk 2011
didn’t have training in music become musicians.
However, I started to gradually realize that evenin these fields there are traditions, conventions, and unspoken rules that function as a language. How you succeed in these fields depends on how fluent you are in its language, and you
are constantly examined and tested as you navigate the scenes.
The Future Sound of Folk 2011 that I organized with Singaporean artist One Man Nation(OMN) was one of the moments that I became aware of this (Fig. 3). For three months, we supported OMN’s research activities in Indonesia collaborating with exceptional musicians, whothen later came to Europe for an artist residency at STEIM and concert tour in multiple cities.
Wukir Suryadi—one half of the now world-renowned band Senyawa—from Yogyakarta andIman Jimbot from Bandung were chosen to participate in this project. Their music was exceptional but initially I really couldn’t understand it at all. They played what seemed like traditional
instruments but the sounds were anything but traditional: they were very distorted and noisy,
making it hard to decipher what the musical roots were. I couldn’t really have in-depth conversations about their music either, because at the time they didn’t speak much English. I later
realized that even between the two Indonesians they had difficulty communicating with eachother because they came from different regions and cultural backgrounds.
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［42］

Despite all of my linguistic tools, including the language of free improvisation andtechnology, failing to communicate meant thatthey truly felt like the “other.” Nevertheless, theirmusic touched me and made me reconsider myown judgments of music. Since then, I have consciously tried to include musicians who are
outside of the usual contexts and not reject any
simply because they didn’t speak my “language.”
The guesthouse played a significant role
when communication was difficult. STEIM had
Fig. 4 Guesthouse at STEIM
its studios on the first floor and workshop andlabs on the second floor, while the third, fourth,and fifth floors were used as the guesthouse. I lived at the rear of the second floor and anotherstaff member lived on the third floor: we were truly embedded. The fourth and fifth floors had aconstant flow of artists visiting from around the world (Fig. 4). English was generally the common language, but of course some couldn’t speak it. I witnessed here on numerous occasions
how people can form a common understanding between each other through sharing a living
space, eating together, and conversing on a daily basis. This made me realize how important it
was to communicate not only through music but in other aspects of life too. However, this was
also a time that I became discouraged by the fact that when I made an effort to present thingsfrom other contexts in ways that people could nonetheless understand or accept, they were stillconsumed as something exotic. I didn’t feel like Europe was the place for me anymore and I
decided to move to Hong Kong.

# Improvising as a Way to Establish a Relationship Between Artists
As a visiting assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong, I was teaching physical computing and sound art. There were two things that left a strong impression on me during my timein Hong Kong. One was the screening of documentary film BISING: Noise & Experimental Musicin Indonesia (2014), which is actually co-directed by my fellow presenter today, Riar Rizaldi.
From meeting Wukir and Jimbot, I knew that there was something exciting happening inIndonesia, and seeing this film made me really want to go to there and see it for myself. By coincidence, I received a phone call from Otomo Yoshihide soon after I saw the documentary, asking
me if I wanted to join AMF, which he was rebooting with the help of the Japan Foundation Asia
Center. The other was that several months later, the Umbrella Movement happened. Many of mystudents were on the frontlines of the protests and it was very inspiring to see such solidarityand hope from them. These were turning points that shifted my work toward an Asian context
and I soon completely forgot about Europe and new media art.
AMF originally started in 2005, when Otomo self-funded a series of concerts to create
more exchange between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese artists and audiences. He felt an urge toencourage more direct communication between people in Asia at a time when the media wasplaying up political tension and hate speech was starting spread online.
Otomo, Chee Wai, and myself all met through our activities in the European free improvisation and noise music scene. As we started to work together on AMF we came to agree on
certain programming criteria for the festival based on our musical backgrounds and experiences. Some of these are “unique musical style,” “a critical view towards historical, political, andcultural contexts,” “diversity in nationality, ethnicity, social class, and musical instruments,”
and “active in a role in an artist network.” The last one points to artists who are organizing
events or running spaces. These artists often play roles as a node in the artist network whereparticipants of AMF can reunite after the festival and continue their collaboration. Our first AMF
together was in 2015 with three concerts that took place in Tokyo and Kyoto (Fig. 5).
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［43］

We invited eleven artists
from all over Asia and there was alarge audience turnout. The program was diverse and included
musicians that were outside thetypical field of improvised and experimental music. Most artists met
for the first time and were asked to
improvise together on stage. The
resulting music was engaging but
also messy, reflecting the different
musical backgrounds and fitting acertain stereotype of Asia as chaotic. The concerts didn’t follow a
Fig. 5 Performance at Tokyo concert, Asian Meeting Festival 2015
model of improvisation seen in
Europe, and the disjointed moments and noisy sounds could be seen as conversations between different languages trying tofind common ground. From the perspective of cultural exchange, the festival aligned with narratives of Asia and multiculturalism and seemed to be a success, but from a musical point ofview, I was unsure if it really served its purpose and couldn’t help but think that the musicians
were frustrated at some level. They came to Japan for the first time and had a chance to play infront of a large audience, but they were asked to do something different from what they usually
do. It is difficult to express yourself in a new environment with people that you just met.
For the next edition in 2016, we organized a total of seven concerts that took place inthree different cities of Japan. Three of these concerts followed the format of the previous year
where everyone played together, but with the other four we wanted to make sure that every artist
felt like he or she was able to express themselves fully, so we mixed it up with concerts in smaller
venues and had them play solo sets during an online streaming concert at Red Bull Studios
Tokyo. As a result, the last concert, which was held at a former elementary school gymnasium in
Kyoto, was fantastic. There was something wonderfully organic about how everyone communicated with each other and played together freely. It was a performance that truly left an
impression. Afterwards, when I thought about what made the difference, the fact that everyone
had three days, off in Kyoto prior to the concert and spent time together getting to know eachother better was probably a key factor behind how well they played at the concert. Some of themembers in the group hadn’t talked at all until then, partially due to the language barrier. But
during those three days, they became like a family where each one assumed roles. Pete TR fromThailand became the youngest brother who was always getting himself into trouble. SonX from
Vietnam became the quiet father who rarely spoke but was always generous. There was also the
responsible sister, the drunken uncle, and so on. Somehow these relationships had a positiveeffect on how they then conversed on stage and improvised together. It was similar to what I
experienced at the STEIM guesthouse, where the time you spent outside of music became themost valuable experience.

# Pleasant NoiseThe success in Kyoto made us think: What kind of process and experience do we need to provide
for musicians coming from different backgrounds and different languages to play together andmake new music?
With this in mind, when programming AMF 2017, which was held in Fukuoka, Kyoto,
Sendai, and Sapporo, we included a walking tour for the musicians led by sound artist Akio
Suzuki (Fig. 6). Akio took us to his favorite local listening spots in the Kyotango region, which had
inspired many of his sound works. This was a really good experience for everyone to take a breakFormation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［44］

from playing and spend time together just listening to sounds in nature. The festival ended with
two shows in Sapporo that we felt were among
the best concerts we had ever done (Fig. 7). The
steps we took to build relationships between theartists created an awareness in the group of consciously listening together. It also helped that we
had been working with the same production staff
for the last three years. Although the Asia Center
announced a few months prior to the event that
this was going to be the final year it would serveas the main organizers of AMF, Chee Wai and myself felt confident that we had found a working
model for the festival where we carefully think
about the time the artists spend together prior tothe concerts (Fig. 8).
What was also unique about this edition
was that we coordinated a series of sound workshops for members of the public a few weeks
before the event took place in Sapporo (Fig. 9).
Over the course of two weeks, we conducted“noise” instrument-building workshops withartists and gave lectures on the history of improvised and experimental music. We wanted toconvey that even though noise may generally
have a negative connotation because it tends tocome from other people, when it becomes “your”
noise it can be something pleasant. The musiccoming from your neighbors, for instance, may
be just noise to you, but when you are playing
music in your house it is for your own pleasure.
Therefore, the act of embodying noise relates tonotions of tolerance and acceptance of the“other.” By making your own noise instrument orlearning how to produce unusual sounds, even if
it’s just a sine wave, it becomes precious and,more importantly, yours. After these workshops,
people were more invested in sound, and became
interested in how others were making theirsounds. Since Sapporo, we have tried to organize
these kinds of workshop in conjunction with theconcert programs in each location that the festival takes place. We took this model to Taiwan thefollowing year for AMF 2018.
Today my talk was titled “How can we play
together?” This simple question has been at thecore my activities with AMF and in building a
network in Asia. It has expanded to thinking
about how both audiences and musicians canexperience music not through stereotypes of experimental or improvisational music, but as aunique musical experience. As I think about how
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network

Fig. 6 Sound tour by performers from Asian Meeting Festival
2017

Fig. 7 Performers at Sapporo concert, Asian Meeting Festival
2017: dj sniff (second from right in front row), Otomo
Yoshihide (second from right in back row), Yuen Chee Wai(far left in back row)

Fig. 8 Sapporo concert at Asian Meeting Festival 2017

Fig. 9 Workshop at Asian Meeting Festival 2017［45］

we will move forward, I have come to believe that the question we are really asking is: How can
we listen together?

dj sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit)｜Born in 1978, dj sniff obtained his master’s degree from theInteractive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He was artistic director of STEIM
in Amsterdam until 2012, where he organized several projects. As a performer, he combines theturntable with various original tools, and works in the fields of experimental music, improvisations,and electronic music. He was a visiting assistant professor at the School of Creative Media at City
University of Hong Kong until 2017. He is currently based in Tokyo.
http://www.djsniff.com

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［46］

Liberating the Internet from
Universality and Globalization
Riar Rizaldi Artist, Researcher

Riar Rizaldi is an artist originally fromIndonesia and now based in HongKong. In his presentation, he discussed the concepts behind an
exhibition he curated featuring artists from Japan and Indonesia. He
expanded on this to challenge ournotions of a universal Internet andpost-Internet condition, arguing for
more locally informed, freer engagement with digital culture.

Riar Rizaldi (right) and Kodama Kanazawa (left)# The Dream of Decentralization
The “Dildo for Indonesia” meme, showing a doctored image of a fictional presidential candidate
meeting Donald Trump, was a response to the then-upcoming presidential election in Indonesia.
In an interview, the viral meme’s creator stated that what he did was a form of education to
make the public address electoral politics more critically. Dildo for Indonesia has become a catharsis for Indonesia’s electoral politics, which is plagued by post-truth, hoaxes, and theInternet culture war.
The polarization of two major political ideologies, namely the “central/liberal figure” and“right/military figure,” formed a new visual culture that was used as a weapon to attack eachside. When the Internet is politically weaponized and user-generated content utilized as adversarial tactics, it results in the duality of real-life-shaped Internet and Internet-shaped real life. If
we take out its aesthetic-driven meaning and incorporate the term as it is into our daily lives, are
we really in the “post-Internet” condition? And as an artist, what can I learn and show from thisso-called post-Internet condition, which supposes we are living through an epochal transformation of networked culture and the Internet?
Internet networks in Indonesia were first publicly accessible at the same time as the dotcom bubble in the West. Though the dotcom bubble did not have much direct influence on
Indonesia, since the Reformasi (the political reformation) and the Asian financial crisis werethen taking place, the infrastructure of the Internet was formed by the digital companies thatsurvived the bubble. This then accelerated when Nokia decided to launch their latest E90
Communicator in Indonesia in 2007, opening a fresh range of markets for business and executives as well as new opportunities for mobile Internet. This was followed by the rise of broadband
connection that made access to Internet cheaper than dial-up. The cultural formation of apre-social-media Internet promised a utopia of a decentralized virtual world for the post-Reformasi Indonesia. Under the Suharto regime (the military dictatorship that ruled the archipelago
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［47］

for more than 30 years), information was produced or made available only by the central government through the Ministry of Information (Departemen Penerangan). The Internet rather
provided a platform for artists, musician, cultural producers, and the public to exercise freedomof expression.
Unfortunately, the dream did not last long. The notion of decentralization was eventually
co-opted by the Web 2.0 approach of building a networked society. With all of its faux ideas thatsound good on paper, such as the participatory network and collaborative consumption, Web
2.0 is filled with centralized companies and the involvement of authority. Platform capitalist
organizations like Google and Facebook invest in Indonesia. With more than 100 million users,
at least half of the total population in Indonesia has access to the Internet and places the country
among the top ten for Internet users in the world. In this respect, it is no wonder that Indonesia
has produced four unicorn startup companies.
We have gone backward in time to when information was organized and managed by thecenter, resulting in online persecution, constant surveillance, censorship, heavily copyrighted
cultural artifacts, and right-wing online groups. The sharing culture promoted by the cultural
producers in the mid-2000s through netlabels and free video-sharing platforms is now being
eroded by corporations that exploit the notion of sharing and the commons.
This is what forced me, as an artist, to rethink and reconfigure the notion of the Internet
as a decentralized platform. Most of us take for granted the basic essence of the Internet, inwhich it functions as a network or networking process, whereas the exchange of information isfostered. The Internet opens up new possibilities for global kinship solidarity, non-monetary
cooperative, collective survival, and sharing cultures. At a time when the Internet is controlled
and increasingly monetized, how do we create our own global village? What kind of collective
survival do we need? What kind of aesthetic form and artistic practices are required?

# The Significance of Internet of (No)Things“Internet of (No)Things: Ubiquitous Networking
and Artistic Intervention” was an exhibition organized by the Japan Foundation Asia Center that
I curated as part of the Indonesia Netaudio
Festival in 2018 (Fig. 1). Inviting Indonesian andJapanese artists to present their work as well as
exchange ideas and culture through creativity,
the exhibition formed a critical assessment of
the Internet, whether in Indonesia or globally,and explored new forms of artistic practice generated, critically commented, and expressed
Fig. 1 Preview of the exhibition “Internet of (No)Things:
Ubiquitous Networking and Artistic Intervention” (2018,
through and with the Internet for the public in
Jogja National Museum) Photo: Swandi Ranadila
Indonesia. I took the role of curatorship as an
artistic endeavor to map the global implications of network technology.
I think art can function as a means for exposing the limits of technology. Overcoming thelimits of the network society and reflecting on Internet infrastructures was the conceptual
framework behind the development of “Internet of (No)Things.” Through the practices of nine
artists, I attempted to restore the fundamental function of aesthetic as a vessel for sensibility.
The aim was to confront the public’s definition of Internet culture and allow them to discuss thecapabilities of the network society. Some of the presented works emphasized the potential foraudiences to position themselves critically within the discourse of the Internet, to think beyond
the framework of a passive user.

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［48］

# From Essence to Embodiment
The approaches on display in this exhibition were
diverse, from a work that live-streamed CCTV to aforgotten Indonesian artist who utilized YouTube
as a platform to share his early 3D animation
work. In addition, this exhibition provided a novel
perception on the chaotic and equilibrium natureof today’s virtual world. Apart from artworks derived or generated from digital technology, theexhibition included artworks that questioned thephysicality of the network. Artists working withphysical objects were invited to conceptually reFig. 2 Mira Rizki, Network of Whispers (2018). Installation
view of “Internet of (No)Things” (2018, Jogja National
think the physical aspect of the network andMuseum) Photo: Swandi Ranadila
Internet. In The Question Concerning Technology,
Heidegger famously stresses that the essence ofmodern technology is far from the techne (technique); rather, it is purely what he called “enframed” (das Gestell). Every being is reduced as a “standing-reserve” that can be measured,calculated, and mined. Writing in the age of the atomic bomb, Heidegger emphasizes the importance of anamnesis; to recall the origin, the essence of modern technology, in order to move on.
Drawing from this concept, it was necessary to present in the exhibition the physical representations of the essence of the network as an exploration of the genesis of the Internet. The site-specific,
physically structured works such as Mira Rizki’s Networks of Whispers provided an understandingof modern network technology that differed from its generic portrayal as a digital-data-based formula through employing physical and “primitive” components (Fig. 2).
The exhibition subverted the jargon of the Internet of Things (IoT) to provide a criticalsuggestion that the Internet is already embodied in any activities we experience. IoT is increasingly popular as many companies push the term as an apparent solution to our future needs.
This is a future where objects—or any being—are interconnected with the network in order togenerate hyper-efficient task management. Regardless of my personal captological and technophobia stance, humans or objects have always been cybernetic at a transcendental level, meaningthat the circular causality and the self-regulation system is incorporated into our daily mechanism since the presence of the network (or media) is becoming more mobile and embedded inour gestures. In fact, we are living in a hyper-mediated world. The obvious example is the use ofvernacular language determined by the mode of screen-based visual communication. In thecontemporary condition, we tend to communicate with each other in a visual form.
This transformation was expressed by Arief Budiman, Igor Tamerlan, and exonemo intheir work for the exhibition. They investigated the method of our contemporary communication apparatuses that are filled with visual codes. They acknowledged that our knowledge of
informatics is not exclusively obtained through verbal and textual means, but also avatars anddigital representation. The distinction between online and offline is blurred as the geographically intimate conversation in the physical space is not much more real than the stickers andemojis exchanged on WhatsApp or LINE.

# On the Multiplicity of the Internet
Working together with Japanese artists in this exhibition challenged my assumption that technological thinking is universal. In our globalized world, we use the same type of technology. But
the concept of technology is experienced and articulated differently in different cultures. The
notion of the universality of technology is something that I tried to contest through the practiceof Indonesian and Japanese artists involved in this exhibition. Globalization forces us to see
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［49］

Internet culture monolithically, when it is not.
Though the Internet revolutionized information
technology worldwide, network technology
should not necessarily be understood as a single
form. The circulation of political memes inIndonesia is similar to what is happening in the
West—predominantly in the US—and if genealogically traced, the culture of memes on theInternet originates from a popular imageboard
Fig. 3 Ai Hasegawa, (Im)possible Baby (2015–16). Installationsite in Japan in the early 2000s. However, whenview of “Internet of (No)Things” (2018, Jogja National
contextualized to particular cases and cultures,
Museum) Photo: Swandi Ranadila
the circulation and techniques are distorted andappropriated to local customs.
In this exhibition, I invited Ai Hasegawa
as well as Kazuki Saita and Soichiro Mihara topresent their work. The Indonesian visitors responded with great interest to Ai Hasegawa’s
speculative (Im)possible Baby, which imagines
what the children of a same-sex mixed-race couple would look like (Fig. 3). They saw the work as aform of dialogue in the sense that the concept is
Fig. 4 Bugis people living in Indonesia
being discussed anonymously by many people
Courtesy of Al Jazeera
through adding their opinions onto the wall,
mimicking the comments thread of a website.
This speculation as well as the questions surrounding bioethics provoked by this work
challenged our understanding of bioengineeringand social norms established for hundreds ofyears. Suggesting that social norms are constructed, rather than essential, is similar to thesuggestion that technology is non-universal.
If we were to speculate that colonialism,
Fig. 5 Kazuki Saita and Soichiro Mihara's presentation inmonotheistic religion, and capitalism never hapside the installation moids 2.2.2—acoustic emergence (2009–)
pened in Indonesia, the idea of biologicalat “Internet of (No)Things” (2018, Jogja National Museum)
Photo: Swandi Ranadilachildren born to a same-sex couple might notseem so alien. This is because indigenous people
already had nonbinary concepts of gender and sexual orientation. For example, the Bugis people
recognized the existence of five genders (Fig. 4). If this belief system can evolve simultaneouslywith technological innovation that is determined by the norms of the community, then the demand to develop a certain kind of technological approach is accustomed by the cultural code of
one community. If we see the possibility of technological multiplicity through this framework,
then things become very intriguing when we place Hasegawa’s work within the context of the
non-universal Internet.
Kazuki Saita and Soichiro Mihara brought the “2.2.2” version of their seminal work
moids—acoustic emergence into a space at Jogja National Museum (Fig. 5). Similar to the work ofMira Rizki, which filled the physical space with structural objects, moids is a visual reenactmentof what Deleuze and Guattari call rhizome, or ramified multiplicities. It also works as an automaton that plays on the division between culture and nature. Culture (technology) synthesizesorganic sound taken from the natural (world), and the synthesized sound is then projected backinto the acoustic space. This notion of automata is also conceived as a non-universal concept
via a media-archeological excavation of Arab-Islamic views from the 9th century: that technology is built to glorify God, rather than focusing on the functionality of expanding the capabilities
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［50］

of the human body. However, as observed through many spatial perspectives, moids could also
be imagined as the neuro-networks inside our brain. It transmits signals to ignite a reaction—in
this sense, a reaction between the acoustic space where the work is installed and the synthetic
sound it creates. This work engages with viewers by staging reciprocity through causal interaction. This was important for the exhibition’s conceptual framework that restored the notion ofaesthetic as sensibility. Moreover, this work structurally represents the idea of a decentralized
network in that connections are engaged in a more rhizomatic manner, rather than vertically.

# What the Internet Represents
Another crucial point that I tried to develop in
this exhibition was the mode of representationthat occurs within new forms of expression. The
Internet offers an inclusive space for novel ways
to express our thoughts, images, and ideals.
Representation, then, becomes an important discourse to discuss when we talk about Internet
practices. In this exhibition, I attempted to build
a conversation on representation and abstraction
through the visual language presented by the artist collective Tromarama and artist Ayano Sudo
Fig. 6 Tromarama, Soliloquy (2018). Installation view of(Fig. 6). Tromarama's Soliloquy transformed repre“Internet of (No)Things” (2018, Jogja National Museum)
Photo: Tromarama
sentation into a form of abstraction by utilizing
social media mechanisms, intriguingly shifting
tweets through the mode of representing that is a hashtag into a switch and relay (which is fundamental in any contemporary technology). The hashtag #kinship in this work echoes the ideaof collaborative survival. The lights they used as a device to represent the tweets are a fragile apparatus, showing the transformation of complex representation into abstraction. The interaction
between technology and non-technology then becomes a fascinating black box to be observed.
In contrast to Tromarama, Ayano Sudo employed a mode of representation with a familiar and ubiquitous visual tactic. Her series Metamorphose appropriated the common
denominator of memetic imagery, a visuality that has the potential to easily circulate in thevirtual domain. This potential is also what makes Sudo’s work accessible to the public. It generates as a space for taking selfies. The public then becomes a visual producer on the network as
the selfie is uploaded to social media platforms. This image produced by the public throughperformative action sets their most ideal representation. In this case, the public is represented
in two different worlds—in the network and real world, with both involving Sudo’s work. From
Tromarama and Sudo’s contributions to the exhibition, the intersection between representation
and abstraction emerged within and outside the network.

# Now, in the Post-Internet
Can we answer that big question that I started with: Are we really in the post-Internet era? I
would like to propose an answer: no, we have never been in the post-Internet. We will never pass
the notion of Internet. We are still trying to figure out how we deal with it.
In the precarious conditions under which we are now living, the question we should ask
is not about the production of cultural practices and the terminology of “post-Internet,” butrather the more crucial one of how the Internet can aesthetically (through sensibility) and practically (through creativity) form a new approach to developing global solidarity. How can cultural
production initiated by art institutions be an intersection for developing critical and radical
sustainability? Before the Internet becomes “post,” we must figure out how to decolonize theInternet itself from its centralized state. After all, it is supposed to be a platform for people, forFormation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［51］

sharing. This is the role of aesthetics: to bring back our dream of an inclusive Internet.
Rethinking the origin of the Internet, the universality of the Internet, the intersectionality of network, and modes of representation, and exposing the limits of technologicaldevelopment are important starting points for media art to reflect our contemporary condition.
Media art should be our answer in these desperate times. To all artists, art institutions, andcultural producers who still believe in the power of the network society, creative commons, andsharing culture, thank you for your hard work. Let’s make our Internet more liberated!

Riar Rizaldi ｜Riar Rizaldi is an artist from Indonesia and currently based in Hong Kong. His work
mainly focuses on the relationship between humans and technology, consumer electronics, theoryfiction, image circulation, and network intervention. Through his work, he questions the notion of(a) temporality, image politics, digital materiality, media archeology, and the unanticipatedconsequences of technologies in human life. He is also actively composing and performing sonicfiction using the methods of field recording and foley through programming languages. He has also
curated ARKIPEL Penal Colony – Jakarta International Documentary & Experimental Film Festival
2017 and “Internet of (No)Things: Ubiquitous Networking and Artistic Intervention,” organized by
the Japan Foundation Asia Center at Jogja National Museum in 2018. He is currently a PhD candidate
at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.
http://rizaldiriar.com

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［52］

[Session 3]

Creating a Cultural Scene in Asia
Session 3 looked at several case studies where culture scenes were createdthrough media partnerships. The session offered the audience and participants
an opportunity to learn more about reciprocal interactions in post-Internet culture
as well as the future of the Asian youth cultures that emerge from this.

Moderator

Speakers

Yohei Kawada
Editor [ Japan]

Marvin Conanan
Kei Wakabayashi
Editor [ Japan]

Founder, Editor in Chief of PURVEYR [Philippines]

Tetsuro Wada
Editor in Chief of FNMNL [ Japan]

Born in 1971, Kei Wakabayashi spent his childhood in London and
New York. After majoring in French literature at Waseda University,
he started his publishing career at Heibonsha and was in charge of
Taiyo, the legendary Japanese cultural magazine. In 2000, he becamea freelance editor and produced numerous publications from magazines and books to exhibition catalogues across a broad range offields. He was appointed editor in chief of WIRED Japan in 2012, before leaving the publication in 2017. He is also a music journalist andfounder of blkswn publishers.
https://blkswn.tokyo

Choi Jang-min + Kwon Hyuk-inFounders, Editors in Chief of VISLA Magazine [South Korea]

The Importance of Building Sustainable
Relationships: Publishing a Special Issue
on Asian Music
Yohei Kawada Editor

Yohei Kawada was at the time of thesymposium the director of STUDIOVOICE, the influential Japanese magazine that relaunched after closing ten
years ago. With each issue focusing
on a different main theme, it has recently covered the music scene in
Asia. Preparing this series of issues
involved confronting the impossibility of seeing Asia as a single, unified
cultural sphere and, as an editor, thedifficult process of considering how
best to convey information aboutcomplex and varied contexts. Kawada
Yohei Kawada (center), STUDIO VOICE editor Shunta Ishigami (right),
discussed the cultural scenes in Asia
Kei Wakabayashi (left)that his team could only discoverthrough on-site research and interviews as well as the necessity today, when sharing things easily andquickly online has become the norm, for more careful, long-term dialogue and collaboration.

# Thinking of Asia as an Immense Cultural Sphere
I am a freelance editor and work as a director for the magazine
STUDIO VOICE. In September 2018, I put together a special
issue of the magazine about music in Asia called “Flood ofSounds from Asia: Music Emerging in Asia Today” (Fig. 1). WhileI don’t know the exact numbers, the issue sold well and became
quite a talking point, and I have since frequently received invitations to talk at events like this. I recently often see coverageof so-called “Asian music” in the media, so it would appear as if
people are paying attention to this theme.
This symposium explores the formation of culture in
the post-Internet era, though STUDIO VOICE is a print media
and thus an example of old media. It is published only inJapanese and comes out just twice a year. I would like today toFig. 1 STUDIO VOICE issue 413, “Floodof Sounds from Asia: Music Emerging
share some insights based on the experience of the editors in
in Asia Today” (INFAS PUBLICATIONS,
dealing with the question of what STUDIO VOICE should do as
September 2018)a magazine facing various challenges. I think what I will talkabout will be most relevant to people working in the media,
especially editors, in Japan.
When lumping everything together under the label of “Asian music,” we were certainly
aware that this kind of naming or framing was in itself very brutal. In the grip of a sense of guilt
or despondency attendant on this, we arrived at the question of how can we grasp or interpret
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［54］

the immense cultural sphere that is Asia, where
so many nations of varying geography and history are found, and then input this into ourbodies? And is it possible ultimately to take what
we absorbed and then, based on our accumulated, highly personal experiences, somehow
integrate it into the pages of a magazine? It is inevitably difficult to generalize about the media
today, so I would like to focus specifically on our
thinking that led up to the special issue we published last year.

STUDIO VOICESTUDIO VOICE is a culture magazine published by
INFAS PUBLICATIONS, INC. It was launched in Japan
in 1976 as a spin-off from Interview, the magazine
started by Andy Warhol in New York in 1969. It
closed down in 2009 but relaunched in April 2015,
since when it has been published twice a year. With
the September 2018 issue, it launched a three-partseries focusing on culture in Asia.
http://www.studiovoice.jp/# Localizing European and American Magazines for the Asian Market
Before that, though, I should explain how STUDIO VOICE itself
came about. As one of only a few comprehensive magazines
about culture in Japan, it launched in 1976 as a spin-off fromInterview, the magazine started by Andy Warhol in New York in
1969. Notwithstanding a circulation that is a mere fraction of
the big commercial magazines put out by the major publishers,
it has continued for over 40 years as a magazine able to extract
aspects of contemporary culture and subcultures throughhands-on coverage and issues highlighting one main theme
each time, in the process establishing a prominent reputationin Japan among magazines of this type. And even outside
Japan, in Asia, whenever we work with creatives from Thailand,
China, or South Korea, STUDIO VOICE seems to be a magazine
Fig. 2 STUDIO VOICE issue 411, “Alternative
Eroticism: Shifting Eros” (INFAS
with which people in the creative industries of certain ages are
PUBLICATIONS, September 2017)
familiar to some extent.
The magazine closed down in 2009 but relaunched in2015, with external directors like myself becoming involved from the September 2017 to
September 2019 issues. I put together the “Alternative Eroticism: Shifting Eros” issue throughtrial and error, but the insight I could gain from this was that an editor should absorb and be
stimulated by subjects that are constantly in flux, and then record those changes from the inside (Fig. 2). I arrived at an image of an editor as like a single moving body that continues while
physically and mentally moving such elements as much as possible. From this time I started tobelieve that editors should always be versatile and variable in order to engage with different
topics. I subsequently oversaw the “Documentary/Non-Fiction: Can we see if we try?” issue andthen the “Flood of Sounds from Asia: Music Emerging in Asia Today” issue.
When we were growing up, magazines served a significant function as ways to learn
about culture in Japan and overseas, from fashion to music and art. But today, in the so-called
post-Internet present, it seems in general that fewer people now obtain their information fromprint magazines.
Among magazines that belong to culture and fashion categories similarly to STUDIOVOICE, I think many are essentially published as localized versions of American or European
magazines. This is the strong impression you get if you walk into bookstores in other Asian
countries. It is certainly the case with Vogue or GQ, for instance, or even with WIRED, where this
symposium’s moderator, Kei Wakabayashi, used to work. There are many such global magazines, particularly those originating in the Anglosphere. But when these are localized for Asian
countries, the local publisher contracted to produce the new version has to deal with many restrictions regarding what they can do. There are all kinds of stipulations and constraints, fromsharing concepts and reusing content to photographs, the tone and manner of text, and even
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［55］

font, layout, and other design aspects. And it is hard to imagine the inverse situation of an Asianmagazine being localized for European or American countries.
When we write about our own country’s culture in our own language, based on what experiences are the cultural values determined, and on what basis do we then talk about othercountries’ circumstances? These are questions that I recently ponder. Whenever a magazine
talks about “Asia,” we as editors surely always need to pay attention to the position from whichthat statement is being made.

# The Problem of “Asia” as a Grouping
When it came to putting together our special
issue, there wasn’t anyone well versed in Asianmusic on the editorial team and, moreover, wefaced practical problems in terms of economics
that forced us to limit the area that we could
cover, arguably complicating our original motives for making the issue in the first place. In
regard to moving around Asia, it is possible to do
this relatively cheaply with flights by low-cost
Fig. 3 88NIGHTMARKET, a fashion ecommerce platform bycarriers and sometimes it is even cheaper than88rising
using the Shinkansen bullet train to travel within
Japan. On the other hand, while K-pop and Asian
hip hop has attracted global attention of late through the likes of music platform 88rising (Fig. 3),
a sense of unease quickly emerged during the comparatively early stages of preparing the issue
due to the realization that rather than this “Asia” enjoying attention from the global market,
there is a not inconsiderable number of artists and so on doing something quite different intheir practices.
Conceptually speaking, we fixed a theme of “music and place” from the start and planned
to do interviews on a per-city basis. But when we actually started to do this, we ended up notincluding Japan or Tokyo. We hadn’t originally intended to narrow things down to only Asian
countries other than Japan, though we ultimately could not figure out how we should integrate
Japan and Tokyo into “Asian music.” While we did explore other cities in Japan beyond Tokyo,
when it came to grasping things within the larger framework of Asia, the position of our own
country of Japan was vague and not concrete. And that has seemed to remain the case even now.
For deciding the interviewees, we listened to as much we could by musicians from Asia
while still in Japan. We spent some one or two months searching widely regardless of genre or
rating using the same means as people normally use to find and play music—namely, iTunes,
Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, and so on. In this way, it took us around two months to attempt
an understanding of how the various musicians are interrelated and gain an overview. And thenwe started doing interviews locally.
The editorial team shared some rules such as only interviewing artists who are based intheir own countries, impartiality in terms of musical genre, directly visiting all sites, not relying
on writers in Japan, not fixating on traditions and “native” elements, and bringing out somekind of sense of the contemporary in the music. These were not stated explicitly but were rulesthat became shared hazily as we internally discussed the process of continuing the research.
We eventually divided the issue into three main chapters. The first dealt with the musicscene in Shanghai and China; the second with the indie music scene that is emerging in Manila,
the Philippines; and the third on the present state of hip hop culture in Thailand. In addition, we
did interviews on the situation in other countries and introduced this elsewhere in the issue.
After doing careful preliminary research as much as we could from Japan, we went to takea tentative look and do interviews in the local areas. Inevitably, of course, many aspects weredifferent to how we had anticipated and our awareness of things continued to evolve while we
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［56］

were there.
Howie Lee, a major presence on the
Chinese electronic music scene, for instance, has
effectively put his own label Do Hits on hiatus
and is exploring new possibilities while devoting
himself to Chinese folk music (Fig. 4). At the
Shanghai club ALL, the previously central figure
and resident DJ Tzusing has left and now ayounger generation of talent is emerging in thelocal scene (Fig. 5). In Manila, while the local indie
scene has extended on a concrete level, several
artists complained that the inner mentality ofthe scene has become somewhat closed and is
one of the reasons that things are stagnating.
This may well be self-evident, but while
Asian music is today achieving attention and acclaim on the global stage, this is ultimately just
one side of things, and the actual local circumstances are developing more complexly andfluidly depending on the country, city, and area.
This is what we covered from our very narrowperspective when doing our interviews and so on
in 2018, and then collected together as one issue.
As the things we understood after doing interviews increased, so too did the things we didn’t
understand many times over. This was a task inwhich we directly experienced the impossibilityof a definition of Asia and also, simultaneously, a
process by which we felt very strongly the potential for countries in Asia with different cultures,histories, and languages to connect with one another and with the rest of the world.
From this experience, we decided not tostop after just one special issue on Asia but rather
to continue thinking about this topic across amore medium-term span. We are planning an
issue on fashion in Asia for March 2019, followed
by one on art in Asia in September (Fig. 6).

Fig. 4 Interview with Howie Lee (STUDIO VOICE issue 413)

Fig. 5 Interview with Tzusing (STUDIO VOICE issue 413)

Fig. 6 STUDIOVOICE issue 414,
“Self-Fashioning
from Asia:
Undetermined
Style” (INFASPUBLICATIONS,March 2019)# Changing Your Own Awareness and Body
I’d like now to share some insights we gained from doing this issue in relation to this session’s
theme of creating cultural scenes in Asia.
In the issue, the hip hop scene in Thailand was covered by Young-G and MMM (Triple M)of the Yamanashi-based hip hop group stillichimiya, and the Japanese DJ unit Soi48, whichmostly makes Thai music. Since first meeting to work on Bangkok Nites (2016) by the filmmaking
collective Kuzoku, they have frequently traveled to Thailand and developed sustained links to its
hip hop scene, continuing to conduct interviews with various local music figures by way of doinga survey. Grouping these activities together as the One Mekong Project, or OMK Project, they are
excavating the rich music of the Mekong region from its relationships with the historical past,culture, and old popular songs. Our coverage of the Thai scene in the issue was based on these
activities and approaches by the Japanese musicians. Within this, the exchange between Young-G
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［57］

and JUU, a rapper based in the Thai regions ofIsan and Khon Kaen, in particularly feels like one
ideal model when it comes to considering how
we can form networks in Asia in the future.
Like other countries, hip hop has become
mainstream in Thailand and young rappers experimenting with a range of styles continue toappear. Among them, JUU is quite distinct in that
he takes old Thai words and essences of traditional Thai music like mor lam and luk thung, andFig. 7 Interview with JUU (STUDIO VOICE issue 413)
integrates them into current sounds in highly
idiosyncratic ways (Fig. 7). Young-G was extremely
impressed by this approach and has traveled to Thailand on numerous occasions to graduallydevelop his exchange with JUU.
When Japanese artists work in some way with artists overseas, I think it often takes theform of releasing music created collaboratively. But in the case of JUU and Young-G, ever since
first meeting several years ago they have avoided just doing easy joint projects and have rather
focused on spending time engaged in careful dialogue. First visiting each other’s respective
bases and there understanding what music is like within local lifestyles and the kind of thinking behind how they approach their music, only then have they started to invite one another totake part in events and gradually share things with audiences. While they have been working
together actively as OMK for just one year, their renown is steadily rising at home and abroad as
they attract new fans.
As time is limited, I will refrain from going into detail at this juncture, but suffice to say
they launched two events called Jyoto (“Shanghai and Tokyo”) and In & Out at the Shibuya live
music venue WWW last year, and are building an ambitious and sustained platform where
Asian artists can perform together. That a venue as large as WWW engages with long-term collaborations like this also greatly inspired us while researching and preparing the issue.
By someone who is involved in all aspects of content, we might mean an editor in thecase of the media, or a director in the case of a record label, or someone in the PR or similar
department for a regular corporation. Regardless, continuing to effect change on our own bodyand perception seems absolutely key for changing conditions permeated by a sense of stagnation or confinement.

Yohei Kawada｜Yohei Kawada joined an editing company after graduating from university. In
2013, he established TOmagazine, a culture guide for the 23 wards in Tokyo that introduced very local
sites. He was the editor in chief until the sixth issue. In 2015, he became a freelance editor, working
mostly on editing and direction for publications and advertisements. Prominent examples of his
output include YELLOW MAGAZINE with Gen Hoshino, jozo2050 by Hakuhodo’s WHERE ART and
SCIENCE FALL IN LOVE lab, GO Journal, a para-sports graphic magazine supervised by Mika
Ninagawa, and the culture magazine STUDIO VOICE (issues 411–415).

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［58］

Reaching Young Asian Cultural Creatives
Across Multiple Platforms
Marvin Conanan Founder, Editor in Chief of PURVEYRMarvin Conanan runs PURVEYR, an
online magazine that also has an annual print version as well as events,
stores, and more. He spoke about the
local contexts in the Philippines fromwhich the project started and thechallenges and necessity for operating across multiple platforms in thedigital era, when a young creative
audience in Asia is hungry for content about cultural scenes.

Marvin Conanan# Growing Cultural and Creative Cities in the Philippines
The Philippines is an archipelago of over 7,000
islands and, at around 300,000 square kilometers, a little smaller than Japan but with apopulation of over 100 million. We’re mostly
known for our nature and beaches, and a lot of
tourists inevitably go straight to the resorts. They
tend to overlook Manila or our cities, which I feelis actually a big part of the Philippines. And thisis what PURVEYR focuses on.
Fig. 1 As a brand, PURVEYR has different departments: digital, print, events, and retail.
PURVEYR looks at culture in terms ofurban culture and creative culture. When we
started in 2012, there was no media platform or media title with a focus on local culture, or atleast the way we wanted, which was to look at certain subcultures in fashion and music. These
areas are growing in the Philippines, with many new collaborations and artists emerging. Thereis an exciting mixture of both contemporary and traditional practitioners.
This session is framed around “creating a cultural scene in Asia.” Personally, I don’t feellike we can create culture itself. Instead, we can be an instrument to forge growth and changes.
And this is precisely what PURVEYR is trying to do (Fig. 1).
PURVEYR operates on a small scale. The management team is just my partner, Sara
Martinez, and myself, and then the only other full-time people are the ones in the store. We recently added a part-time online editor to help me in terms of putting out more content, but all
our contributors are working on a per-project basis. It’s really self-funded. The good thing withstarting with a website is that you don’t need a lot of money. And since this is not somethingpeople are doing in the Philippines yet at this time, some writers are willing to work pro bono
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［59］

because there are no channels to write somePURVEYR
thing like the kind of content we put out.
Based in Manila, the Philippines, PURVEYR is a
PURVEYR started as a digital media
brand that aspires to foster the creative spirit
through a website and then (Fig. 2), after three
through Filipino stories, objects, and experiences. It
years, we produced a print magazine. We felt thatlaunched in 2012 as a culture and lifestyle website,
but has since developed into an all-encompassing
there wasn’t any magazine that was catering tobrand across various facets—digital (PURVEYR.
what we like. Of course, there were a lot of glosscom), print (PURVEYR Magazine), events and retailies like the monthly magazines, but they didn’t(PURVEYR Post)—that each reflects its philosophy.
The PURVEYR brand continuously evolves to engage
cover what was available locally or produced lodeeper with the local creative community while also
cally. Our vision is to be at the center of a society
establishing a platform that cultivates creativity andthat’s creative and cultural. The way we look at
culture as a whole.
http://purveyr.com
our media is a little different to a traditional
media. We envision our media as a brand that
can affect and engage audiences across different
platforms. Our mission is to foster the creative
spirit through stories, objects, and experiences.
The stories appear digitally, through the magazine; the objects are the results of collaborations
with some brands and artists; the experiences
are events and art stores.
Paul H. Ray is a sociologist who has been
following a subculture of America that he feels is
now present worldwide. He calls the people inFig. 2 PURVEYR.com was PURVEYR’s first project when it
this subculture the “cultural creatives.” These arelaunched in 2012. It currently curates content according tothree categories: “culture,” “work,” and “lifestyle.”
creatives who care deeply about ecology and saving the planet. They care about relationships,social justice, self-actualization, spirituality, andself-expression. They might comprise tens of millions of people in America and Europe. It is the
middle ground between the traditional and the modern. If we regard the “traditionalist” thinking today as dominant among baby boomers and “modern” attitudes among more recent
generations, cultural creatives are balancing both worlds. And these people seem to be the best
way to define our target for PURVEYR.

# Working Simultaneously Across Different Platforms
As we have heard today about Thailand andIndonesia, social media is very important to theway young people in Asia consume content andmedia, and engage in political and social issues.
According to a recent study, the Philippines is
the top nation in terms of daily Internet usage.
The population is online for ten hours and 30
minutes a day, followed by Brazil at nine hours
and 30 minutes.
Fig. 3 PURVEYR’s digital output includes not only feature-length articles, videos, and other content, but also a
Since print is only really popular withrobust social media presence.
older generations, we have to engage as a media
and brand across different platforms. PURVEYR.
com launched in 2012. We also use social media because it taps our market in the easiest andmost convenient way possible (Fig. 3). Our social media output is more constant and comprises
fast, aesthetic content, but our website features more long-form content and editorials. The reality today is that many people don’t spend much time actually reading online. As such, we
produce a range of content, from fashion shoots to interviews and podcasts. When we started inFormation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［60］

2012, our pillars were the usual ones: music, art,
fashion, and so on. Now we have changed ourapproach, since we can’t compete with the big
magazines for advertisers. Our three pillars ofculture, lifestyle, and work define every aspect of
the life of cultural creatives: how they live; howthey perceive culture; and how they work andpursue things. The content on PURVEYR.com isfiltered through these three categories.
We started our print platform in 2016
(Fig. 4). It was initially biannual, but this year
we’re switching to annual because it’s really expensive to produce a magazine. People often ask
why we expanded to a print format when all print
magazines are doing the opposite—that is,
switching to web. It’s because we look at it in adifferent manner. Our print magazine is a marketing tool, another medium to engage with
Fig. 4 Browsing the print edition of PURVEYR
different audiences. Digital is very young; printis older, but there is a physical aspect to it that
digital can’t have. A lot of our readers come from
Brooklyn or elsewhere in the United States because PURVEYR is available in places like New
York and London. There are also Filipinos who
yearn for a connection with Filipino culture andsee and relate to things in the magazine that they
won’t be able to find online, simply because
there is so much out there online. It’s the focused
Fig. 5 The brand bazaar event Pursuit Fair
quality of print that we really like.
In terms of the kinds of events that we create, examples include a magazine launch orlaunching something in a store. An event likePursuit Fair (Fig. 5), a bazaar featuring 50–70 local
brands selling things, is intended to create certain values with our audience: commerce,creativity, and community. The participants canengage with their consumers and our audience
as well, who are all interested in Filipino culture
Fig. 6 Post Store Bankgai, one of PURVEYR’s physical storesand creative culture. Pursuit Fair is a one-day,
twice-yearly event with brands you can’t normally see anywhere else because they are only online and don’t usually take part in bazaars. In
this way, it’s a special one-day event that allows people to directly meet the owners of these online brands.
We started our retail platform in 2017, because we felt like we needed to do somethingelse after launching the print magazine. We were looking for further opportunities where we
can grow the brand. Pursuit Fair is only a one-day event, so many people will miss it. After organizing a few of the bazaars, we felt that we needed an actual store to have an avenue for people
who can’t always go to the event but want to support local talent or check out local brands andart. The store is very small, just 20 square meters, but we have a patio outside (Fig. 6). A lot of
people hang out there and it becomes somewhere for people, including kids, to interact anddiscover likeminded people. We now have two stores that offer local products and services: onethat is focused on street culture and another on contemporary creative culture (Fig. 7).
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［61］

Sound Fiesta is a concept that we createdlast year with Cosmic Sonic Arts, an electronic
music school and production studio run by Jorge
Juan B. Wieneke V (aka similarobjects). We wanted
to promote Filipino music on YouTube because
we see a lot of music on YouTube that’s foreign. As
such, we put together a live music event for
Filipino music that’s diverse, not shy about including mainstream music but also looking atother genres (Fig. 8). As realists, we also try to monetize content, hence our tie-ups with sponsors
like Johnnie Walker or adidas Originals for events.
That being said, we approach and deal withbrands in a different way to a mainstream magazine, who might just go after any sponsor. It can be
hard to explain what we are doing and why, butwhen brands really understand it kind of clicks ina way that they relate to and it’s then easier to create content that fits to both their brand and ours.
We organize branded events, for example, hiring
aspiring fashion photographers to take the photos
and then publishing them online.

Fig. 7 Inside Post Store Pablacion, another PURVEYR store

Fig. 8 Sound Fiesta music event featuring the hip hop artist
Peaceful Gemini# Tips for Affecting Culture
My first tip for how to affect culture and build a scene is to create your vision and believe in it,
even if others won’t. In 2012, not a lot of people understood what we do. But we stuck with it andfor many years we were not earning a lot or even anything. However, we were passionate about
it and we stuck to our vision, and people eventually resonated with it.
Number two: build a brand to strengthen your message and communication. Consistency
is key in terms of making yourself more influential. Take big brands like CNN, Vice, or GQ, they
focus on something. Sometimes being too general really waters down your message. Knowing
about how your brand affects every aspect of your audience or how you engage with it is a big
part in becoming more influential or powerful as a media title.
My third tip: shine a light on stories that are in harmony with your vision. This is why weshifted our direction as a media brand. If you just make content in order to build a readership, it
might not follow your vision and that taints what you’re trying to do. Always think about yourwork within the framework of your vision.
Next: be present. That is, attend events, converse, and always connect. I feel like a lot of
editors or would-be editors are stuck at home or the office. I feel like if you want to know more,know more stories, engage more people, you have to go outside and converse with others. And
that links to my final tip: collaborate and work with others in your community.

# Staying in the Philippines but Looking Beyond
We look toward Japan as the kind of level or audience we want to reach. The language barrier isstill a serious obstacle to this, though. We cannot afford to invest in translation, like someAmerican and European magazines do. Nonetheless, Japan is a culture—whether it is in Tokyo,
Osaka, or Kyoto—that we really look up to in the Philippines.
While we focus our efforts on promoting things taking place in the Philippines, whenever an outside group or organization comes to us, as long as there is a certain element that
relates to the Philippines, we are open to partnerships and collaborations. For example, aFormation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［62］

cultural festival happening in Singapore might invite us to cover its events. If there is some sortof connection to Filipino artists, then we are excited to feature it and share this content with ouraudience. We are always searching for new ways to relate things to our vision and the Philippines.

Marvin Conanan｜Marvin Conanan is a passionate advocate of the Philippines and its creative
culture, firmly believing that its talent and creativity is worth celebrating and cultivating. Before
founding PURVEYR in 2012, Conanan worked for various companies in addition to launching a few
small businesses of his own. In 2015, however, he focused all his energies on PURVEYR as his fulltime endeavor. In six years, the project has grown to become a multidimensional brand producing
digital content and an annual print magazine, running two retail stores, and hosting several events
each year. All of these are done to make PURVEYR into an all-encompassing media/social brand thatengages with the creative community at different levels and in various aspects of people’s lives.

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［63］

An Online Media Collaboration
Sharing Local Culture Across National Borders
Tetsuro Wada Editor in Chief of FNMNL
Choi Jang-min + Kwon Hyuk-in Founders, Editors in Chief of VISLA Magazine

Japanese online platform FNMNL(pronounced “phenomenal”) has recently launched a partnership withVISLA Magazine, a web media in
South Korea. In this presentation,FNMNL’s Tetsuro Wada joined
VISLA’s Jang-min Choi and Hyuk-in
Kwon to discuss their attitudes toward their own and each other’scultural scenes as well as the respective media circumstances in the twocountries that led to this transnational digital collaboration.
Tetsuro Wada (left), Choi Jang-min (center), Kwon Hyuk-in (right)# Launching Online Media Platforms, Inspired by Music
Tetsuro Wada: In December 2018, FNMNL and
VISLA Magazine started sharing content as a formof collaboration. Regarding concrete examples of
the new collaboration, we don’t have much topresent yet because our efforts have only justbegun. Instead, we would like to talk about theprocess behind launching this collaboration and,more generally, to share information about themedia circumstances in Japan and South Korea.
Choi Jang-min: To start with a brief introduction
to VISLA, the magazine was started almost six
years ago by Kwon Hyuk-in and myself. We’ve
been friends since we were 12 years old and welaunched VISLA as a web media as an extensionof that partnership we have built up over theyears (Fig. 1). Since we have no money, doing it
online was the most realistic approach at first,
though two years ago we started publishing aprint magazine, too, which comes out every threemonths. In terms of the format, the print version
is actually a pretty large size (Fig. 2).
As a media we mainly publish content online or in the print version but we also do a lot of
agency work, since money is always an issue.
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network

Fig. 1 VISLA Magagine website, featuring various categories
like “music,” “fashion,” “art,” “bodymove,” and “event”

Fig. 2 Print edition of VISLA Magazine (dimensions: 310 ×
460 mm)［64］

That being said, we focus efforts also on our own
FNMNL
branding for reasons I will discuss later. We are a
FNMNL (pronounced “phenomenal”) is a news
media platform but we’re also concerned about
website launched in 2016. The team behind it range
our brand. As such, we make our own merchanfrom people with experience directing a music
dise and we do our own events. I met Tetsuro
website to photographers working domestically andinternationally. Together they bring their expertise
Wada almost a year ago at my friend’s brand
to bear on introducing the latest trends in music,
pop-up event in Tokyo. And since then, Hyuk-in
fashion, and art. Using their networks with local
and Tetsuro talked a lot about collaborating andartists, the team’s aim is to create a new culture
this is how we got where are today.
scene alongside the next generation of creative
talent who are quick to consume information via
I was born in Seoul but I moved to America
the Internet. In 2018, it began partnering on projects
when I was 17 years old. The one thing that I reallywith VISLA Magazine in South Korea.
liked doing was sharing content. So what you
http://fnmnl.tva
read in our magazine is all the stuff I like. I had a
VISLA Magazine
kind of epiphany while I was a student America
VISLA Magazine is an independent web magazine
and it led me to start the magazine with my best
launched in Seoul, South Korea, in 2013. In addition
to fashion, art, and music subcultures in Korea, it
friend, with whom I share very similar tastes,
also introduces culture scenes in Japan, the Unitedback in Korea after I graduated. There were alStates, and Europe. Online since 2012, the platformready some online magazines in Korea but mostly
launched a free print edition, VISLA Magazine, inabout fashion, so I really wanted to do something
2017, published four times per year. Working closelywith the street culture scene in Seoul, VISLA
else. We’re both big fans of music, so that got us
Magazine’s team plans events, creates products,
thinking if we could do something related toand engages with audiences in ways that go beyond
music, skateboarding, street art, and so on.
the bounds of conventional media.
http://visla.kr
Wada: I would now like to give an overview about
FNMNL. It wasn’t started by a media company.
We were actually working in music distribution.
As you know, digital downloads is now making itvery tough for the Japanese music industry, so
we expanded and launched FNMNL in 2016 as anextension of our music activities (Fig. 3). However,we were worried that it would be too restrictive
and small in scale if it was only music news,
which led us to take on content about fashion
related to music and culture more generally. The
online content is one thing but, as you heard forFig. 3 FNMNL website, featuring categories like “music,”“fashion,” and “culture”
VISLA, we also do agency work and some client
projects within our business remit. In the end,
those activities bring us the most profit, so we have to utilize that and invest it back in the platform to create content.

# Different Scenes and Situations in Korea and Japan
Wada: Starting from 2011, I took an interest in K-pop and South Korean music. Right now, South
Korean artists often come to Japan, perhaps as many as one or more groups a month, but backthen not so many underground musicians or artists came here. A label or artist possibly organized something once per year, but that was about it. I thought I might be able to make acontribution to this.
Choi: Korea is experiencing a rise in street fashion. Unlike in Japan, where this kind of street
culture happened a long time ago, it was really only a subculture in Korea until recently, when it
has become much more established. In fact, it’s more or less part of the mainstream. The market
for sneakers has also really jumped. There is a lot of demand and hype about certain footwear,
and you can see long lines outside stores as people wait to pick up the latest sneakers. In termsof music, Korean hip hop is really strong at the moment and I think one of the biggest reasons is
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［65］

a TV show called Show Me the Money. The result
is a lot of rappers are making money while retaining their originality. Hyuk-in and I grew up
with hip hop music but back then people thought
we were kind of weird because we listened to it.
Ironically, every young kid today wants to be arapper! In our magazine, though, we cover not
only hip hop but also other genres of music. The
Fig. 4 “FORCE BY ME—RUDY LIM & KUSTOOL,” a video
scene is changing a lot and there is plenty of pofrom VISLA Magazine’s YouTube channel, featuring an interview with Korean artist RUDY LIM & KUSTOOL, who
tential for crossovers and expansion.
took apart a Nike sneaker and made it into an artwork
With respect to the infrastructure, KoreanInternet speed has become really fast, meaning
content has shifted to online. Instagram is incredibly important in Korea, much more so thanprint magazines. We are living in an age whenthe most significant platforms are Instagram andYouTube. A lot of high-quality content is uploaded onto YouTube channels. And it’s no longer
the case that this content is made by a company;
it might be just one guy. I believe things are a litFig. 5 Example of an article on the FNMNL website about atle slower in Japan but the trend cycle in Korea isfashion and music collaboration project: t-shirts jointly
created by Tokyo and Swiss skateboard brands, withsuper fast. I think this is because so much of conJapanese rappers in the lookbook
tent is now online and so easy to check andconsume (Fig. 4).
Wada: Many people overseas with an interest in Japanese street culture are focused on the street
fashion (Fig. 5). But when I became interested in Korean street culture, my focus was much moreon music than fashion. In Japan, hip hop and other types of music are popular particularly withyoung people, but this has not resulted in attention from consumers outside the country.
Though there are various reasons for this, Japan has continued to develop businesses whose
revenues come exclusively from the domestic market and, as such, it is only looking inward—atthe consumers and opportunities locally.

# Views on the Scenes in Each Other’s Countries
Wada: In Korea, there is a large and structured
K-pop industry and hip hop exists as one part ofthis. Show Me the Money, as Choi said, is now
serving as a gateway to mainstream success.
They have established mechanisms to producestars and built a solid growth model. There is anegative side to this, of course. Originality may
end up sacrificed in the face of satisfying trends.
If you look at the playlist for Spotify in Korea,
there is certainly plenty of quality music but it all
Fig. 6 Website of the fashion brand MISCHIEF
sounds very similar. The quality, though, makes
it appear quite international. As such, the artists
are closer to the global scene than in Japan. Alongside this growth in music, street fashion isdeveloping. The brand MISCHIEF, for instance, has already gained a lot of fans in Japan (Fig. 6).
We can also see significant growth outside hip hop in the club music scene.
Choi: The way I view Japanese culture is firstly affected by its long history. The Japanese know
their roots well. They know history. But Korea is more about what is trending right now. Secondly,
Japan has a strong domestic market. This has its pros and cons, for sure, but whether it isFormation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［66］

fashion or music, Japanese producers know how to make money from the local consumers.
Thirdly, when Japan adopts something from another country, you use your creativity to makenew Japanese stars. Hyuk-in and I were born in 1986 as part of a generation that grew up watching anime and playing video games. We are all very familiar with Japanese culture.

# Online Media Contexts in the Two Countries
Wada: In Japan, it’s tough to run an online media platform in terms of the business side ofthings. If you’re a media outlet that focuses on culture, it’s especially difficult to be independentand profitable as a standalone business. We are trying to transition magazines from print to web
but the business model is radically different. As such, the transition has seemed slow so far. In
the case of culture-related web media, we have to produce content for clients to survive but
many brands and clients now create their own media, with the end result that there are just too
many platforms out there. Many media accordingly shutter in less than a year because they can’t
adequately monetize their content. Advertising revenue is increasing, though, and changing in
relation to the way digital media works. Clients are approaching and investing directly in
Instagrammers and YouTubers to promote their business. Just being an online media platform
alone is pretty hard if you want to make a living and sustain your content.
Choi: Japanese used to have a strong print magazine market but the Korean print media market
has already been dead for a while. The growth rate for print magazine advertising from 2015
until 2018 decreased but for online magazine increased. There are still many paper magazines in
Korea, of course, but most of them are globally licensed magazines with an established name.
The actual power of print media is really weak now. Being a print magazine has become merely
a matter of status and making money with a print title is really hard because people in Korea
don’t spend money on content anymore. Instead, we have to figure out other ways to makemoney. What’s different today is that brands have started to spend money on promoting things
online or making online content. There are lots of platforms today, each with different pros andcons. One major drawback, though, is that if you put too much effort into a certain online platform and it suddenly changes its system or shuts down, you might lose everything. Increasingly
we are seeing a new casual breed of media that does not even calling itself “media.” They’re justlike a Facebook page or Instagram account. After all, the social media influencers and YouTubers
make a lot of money these days. On the other hand, there is potential here for a new title becauseof the decline in print media in Korea if you have the right approach.

# A Transnational Collaboration
Wada: Though I have been following Korean culture, I was never able to find an appropriate
partner to work with until now. When I looked at Korean web media and online magazines related to music, they were already strong with regard to content. What could a Japanese partner
like me offer them? When I actually met the team from VISLA, however, I realized that they wereinterested in Japanese fashion and art, and that the Japanese and Korean music scenes were alsoquite close. We each had the information that the other wanted. As such, before we started any
concrete collaborations and monetizing anything, we prioritized the content, which ensured
that our discussions proceeded smoothly.
Choi: VISLA is working with FNMNL primarily because of content and shared tastes. It’s also
about the perspective. FNMNL is talking about the local scene in Japan in a way that VISLA never
could. You can also tell that FNMNL really cares about what it features, which is important because it means the shared content will showcase precisely curated examples of local andunderground culture to a different audience.
Of course, there is the issue of translation and the language barrier, but digital tools makethat much less of a challenge, and we can be in contact so much faster and more easily today due
to the Internet. We will pick out articles that we want to share or produce together, translate theFormation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［67］

content, and then publish it on our respective
platforms. This might be an interview with aninteresting artist but it’s also lots of news content. This is a matter of efficiency, too, since it’s
tough on your resources to make daily news
content (Fig. 7).
Wada: Moving beyond just sharing, our futureplans include collaboratively creating new content from scratch. For example, utilizing eachother’s networks to make content about local
scenes in Japan or Korea. FNMNL might, for instance, go to Seoul to cover an artist with the helpof VISLA, and vice versa. Gradually this may build
into a platform and network between the twocountries. Likewise for client work, we might beable to find further ways to collaborate.
Choi: I have high hopes for the future in terms
Fig. 7 FNMNL-VISLA content collaboration: an article (top)of not only making good content but also develin Japanese by the FNMNL editors about a Ray Kunimoto
release; translated into Korean and published quickly on
oping ways to share it better. And this may go
VISLA (bottom)
further than just Japan and Korea, but also involve China and other parts of Asia. The
collaboration might result in pop-ups, merchandise, events, concerts, and more. In the end, I
hope what we can do is build a bridge connecting our two countries and cultures.

Tetsuro Wada｜Tetsuro Wada was formerly the director of club music download website
WASABEAT, where he wrote articles and planned content. Since 2016, he has run and served as chief
editor of the online magazine FNMNL, which features content about cutting-edge culture with afocus on music and fashion in Japan and abroad. As a writer, he has contributed to numerous
magazines, including EYESCREAM, Cyzo, and STUDIO VOICE. In addition to working as a DJ, he is alsoa music event organizer.
Choi Jang-min + Kwon Hyuk-in｜Choi Jang-min (left) and Kwon Hyuk-in (right) were born inSeoul, South Korea, in 1986. Choi was brought up in Seoul and San Francisco, returning to Korea
after he graduated college. The long-time friends founded VISLA Magazine together in 2013. Thoughstarted as an online magazine with a strong focus on hip hop and street culture, it now features awide range of content across multiple formats including a quarterly print edition.

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［68］

[Wrap-up Session]

Post-Internet and
Simultaneity in Asia

Moderator
Discussion and Q&A

To wrap up the symposium, a discussion was held between the moderators for each session. While attempting toredefine what “post-Internet” might entail, the scope of the conversation extended to the relationship between
informatization and globalization as well as cultural trends and ways of doing business in our globalized society.
Speakers

Minoru Hatanaka ｜ Chief Curator of NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC] [Japan] (p. 04)
Kodama Kanazawa ｜ Independent curator / Senior Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, Towada Art Center [Japan] (p. 36)
Kei Wakabayashi ｜ Editor [Japan] (p. 53)

What the Post-Internet Shows Us
Minoru Hatanaka: We have just come to the end of a two-day symposium on the theme of the“Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era.” Yesterday during the first session, we heard
from individuals in various fields talking about creativity in the age of the Internet. In today’s
two sessions, various speakers also shared their thoughts on how we can produce new forms ofexpression as well as creating a cultural scene in Asia.
Kodama Kanazawa, what were some of your impressions over the past two days?
Kodama Kanazawa: While we concluded that the Internet and technology are just tools, we also
pondered a range of other issues that could not be covered by this particular theme. During Riar
Rizaldi’s presentation today, he mentioned that the Internet environment is completely different depending on which country you are in.
I currently live in China, where you cannot use Gmail and Facebook without connecting
to a VPN. When you are in a situation where a different infrastructure leads to different sorts of
information being conveyed to you, your ideas are bound to be different as well. Even before we
start talking about the Internet environment, however, there are also differences in religion andculture depending on the society in question. We are at a point where these divergent situations
are colliding with each other in both directions: my impression is that the level of creativity andthe nature of diversity has also changed.
Hatanaka: During Riar Rizaldi’s presentation, he mentioned that the “post-Internet” hasn’t arrived yet, which made me think about the question of what sort of situation the “post-Internet”
is really referring to. The society depicted in Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?, which formed the basis for the film Blade Runner, is one where people are surveilled bya so-called Internet religion, something that was not clearly fleshed out in the film. In thisworld, God becomes omnipresent thanks to network circuits. Moreover, a society that has beenFormation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［69］

completely permeated by the Internet ends up as a total surveillance society, such as the one
found in George Orwell’s 1984. In reality, however, even if one strives to act freely online, there
will always be a degree of intervention by capital or influencers, for example: the Internet isbeing used with certain biases in place, and it is dubious whether this can really be considereda state of freedom. Whatever the situation in question, we cannot help but think about the issueof how significant the Internet really is in terms of its independence. A completely post-Internet
world, then, is very likely not going to be free. Kei Wakabayashi, what do you think?
Kei Wakabayashi: In the beginning, the Internet was really based on the idea of creating a decentralized world. However, what we have seen is the emergence of the Big Four tech companies of
Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, without this decentralized vision being realized. Around2016 and 2017, the view that the Internet itself had ended in failure reached something of a fever
pitch, particularly in Europe.
The reason for this is that the Internet was originally conceived as something of an asylum: a space where one could become someone different from one’s real self. In this respect,
there was a lot of talk about being able to conduct a truly free peer-to-peer exchange of values.
When money was deployed into this situation, however, it became necessary to have contractors that functioned as intermediaries. The strict deployment of money entailed the problem ofcurrencies, which led in turn to the question of nation-states. Subsequently, there was the problem of being unable to make a payment to a party that could not be identified, which led to a callfor these identities to be made to conform. So it became necessary to verify that the “self” invirtual cyberspace and the real world was identical, and this is where the issue of national jurisdiction came into the picture.
This is why the vision of connecting the world through the Internet becomes harder toachieve, the more ambiguous the borders between the real and virtual worlds become. A new
phenomenon that is now taking shape is the splitting of the Internet according to spheres andregions. China segregated itself from the very beginning, and Europe recently implemented its
General Data Protection Regulation, which has in effect created a kind of wall. The dream of adecentralized world, on the other hand, still remains to be achieved: you might say that we havereturned to the starting line once again. Instead of the post-Internet, I think the discussion will
return to the question of what ought to be done about the Internet in the first place.
The biggest difference between then and now is the fact that virtually everyone today has
a smartphone in his or her hands. Moving forward, the significance of how the Internet has
evolved will become evident. We will need to think properly about what sort of governance will
be necessary in this respect.
Hatanaka: In our daily lives, technology functions as something that manages us, whereas theInternet appeared as a sort of utopia in contrast to that. The idea itself of using technology in art,
however, has been around since the 1950s or ’60s. The reason for using technology was partially
due to anti-technology ideas. My own reading of the situation is that the use of technology in art
moving forward is going to diverge into two extremes: using technology with an anti-technology stance, or riding on the wave behind technology itself. As a global trend, you could also saythat it is something of a truism that large corporations and countries flatter technologists andput them on a pedestal.

Reorganizing the Global
Hatanaka: The theme of my session in part one was creation. For Kanazawa’s session in part two,
the themes were production and curation, while Wakabayashi’s session in part three focused on
the question of how to understand, introduce, and disseminate these terms.
When we understand these three elements in terms of a single movement, we tend to
think of the capital involved, or the fact that influencers are making the most money out of
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［70］this—at least in terms of what we just heard today during part three.
Roughly 20 years have already passed since the Internet became widespread and ubiquitous. For this reason, I think it is necessary to think about what this world that has become
decentralized as a result, at least to some extent, ought to look like moving forward, and how wemight go about reorganizing it. Due to recent developments in information society, there havealso been certain reconfigurations in the Asian region. Something about the relationship between Japan and Asia has clearly changed.
Kanazawa: In my opinion, the changes in the contemporary art world in Asia have been particularly evident. About 150 years ago, various Asian countries imported the notion of contemporary
art—“Western art,” so to speak. Despite a time lag, these Asian countries are going through thesame process. Everyone is experiencing this incredible turbulence that comes in the wake ofso-called cultural colonialism. Takashi Murakami sees this phenomenon in terms of a complex.
It’s an extremely complicated situation. What is the truth about the past? What should we pursue? What was really interesting about the past? All these questions start to become rather
opaque. Under these circumstances, a particular coterie of people will continue to insist that
Europe represents the gold standard, while others will be opposed to this position. However,there are certain points of confusion where these two positions become mixed. And I think that
other ways of looking at this situation have emerged, ever since we started to gain access to theInternet. Even without looking to Europe, we discovered that there were many outstanding artists in various places, whether it was Western Europe or Asia. In that sense, we might say that acertain kind of geographical disparity has disappeared.
Hatanaka: It is tempting to think that this sense of simultaneity found in Asia has emerged as aresult of geographical and temporal disparities becoming nullified with the advent of theInternet. If you visit the contemporary art museums in each of these countries, however, youfind that they all have avant-garde forms of artistic expression, for instance, in spite of the factthat they emerged in different eras. There is a certain synchronicity to the shifts and changes inart that occurred in Asia. At the same time, locality also naturally comes into play here, so if research into Asian art starts to flourish, the avant-garde art in each country is certainly going tobecome the object of that research.
Wakabayashi: When I was at WIRED, we did a special issue on Africa. The things I heard thenwere the same as what I heard from my friends in Southeast Asia. There are wealthy people inboth Africa and Southeast Asia, and the sons of these families study abroad in Europe. Up until
now, almost none of them were able to return to their home countries. Or rather, even if theydid, there was apparently no work for them. Someone from Ghana I know called them “creative
refugees.” For example, there were many of these sons of wealthy families who worked in ateliers in Europe after studying architecture in London. But my Ghanaian friend also said that for
the first time a generation that is able to come back has emerged. I feel that this could actually
be quite a significant development.
Choi Jang-min from VISLA Magazine grew up in America, but these kinds of people havebeen returning to South Korea of late and creating new kinds of media. In other words, they already have a network in place: they can connect the Korean music scene with the American
scene. An incredibly dynamic shift is underway.
There is also this phenomenon where major American rappers can hook Nigerian artists
up thanks to a network of Nigerian immigrants who were raised in the US. I think it’s not somuch that everyone is now connected thanks to the Internet, but rather that there is now another layer that gives rise to situations where people can return to their home countries and findwork because of the Internet. We are seeing the emergence of an interesting situation where
people are reorganizing the “global” in the realms of both media and fashion.
Hatanaka: Music is an art form where a certain longing or aspiration for different countries andethnicities is particularly strong, isn’t it? It keeps evolving through exchanges with a diverse
range of different cultures. It’s not so much a desire to become someone from another country,
but rather a longing for a connection to that country.
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［71］

Wakabayashi: The phenomenon of a disappearing center has manifested itself in the field ofmusic in a way that is easily understood, in terms of both the music industry and from a cultural perspective.

Post-Internet Movements
Wakabayashi: Allow me to share some of my thoughts.
I think what dj sniff said was really interesting. It’s the same in music or anything else. If
the relationship between those who produce art and those who receive it becomes decided, itsoon devolves into a relationship divided into those who consume and those who are consumed, even if money doesn’t enter the equation. Take the example of musical improvisation:
despite the fact that not much money intervenes, if there is a customer and a performer involved, you will always see a dynamic in which the performer seeks to make the customer moresatisfied. We face the same difficulty as well: as Yohei Kawada mentioned during the third session, editors used to be the ones who held all the information, and this information was
supposed to be transmitted to those who were unaware of it. Naturally, monetary exchanges
take place, and a relationship of consumption emerges. I am wondering if it would be possible
to break free of this persistent relationship.
That’s when I realized that thinking about the acts of listening or reading was an interesting issue. Listening and reading are not things that you actually learn from people, but everyone
does them. People who are good writers are definitely also good readers. By the same token, goodmusicians are also good listeners. When it comes to musical improvisation, I think it’s crucial tobe able to “listen” to the space. If those who produce art and those who receive it are occupying
the same position, I think something will emerge from that—something that isn’t a relationshipbased on consumption. There is a certain fundamental nature to these passive acts like listening
or reading: my sense was that they might be able to generate some kind of new value.
Hatanaka: We were just talking about a time lag in terms of information. The value of being able
to introduce something earlier than anyone else has largely been leveled by the Internet. In
order to generate value out of information, then, it becomes a matter of how to create movements and trends using this information, whether it’s through a combination of approaches, orcreating a particular scene around something.
Kanazawa: Creating something together through collaborations, for instance.
Wakabayashi: That’s definitely true. This is particularly evident in the fashion industry: eventhough there is a complete saturation of information, there are still trends, just like before. In
Japan, though, I have the impression that we are continuing to see an absence of trends.
Kanazawa: In art, there are certain trends when it comes to the market. But otherwise, I really
wonder: perhaps it all depends on what the prevailing mood is. I think it might be rather difficult to launch a major movement, in a post-Internet context.
Wakabayashi: I think we are seeing two things happening at once: on the one hand, you havespecific trends that repeat themselves, while on the other hand you have underlying value systems that are undergoing major shifts. The act of lifting something up in terms of a grassroots
movement, as seen in social media, and the act of manipulating popular opinion in the style ofthe mass media in order to create movements—these are the two main modalities. The circumstances that are able to produce a shift in values, it seems to me, are not going to occur easily inJapan. Of late, my feeling is that what is also required is a certain ability to rally young talent
together who can embody these new values, and turn this demographic into a movement.
When thinking about the post-Internet, there are also people who can create bona fidemovements that further the discourse, as it were. A liberal contingent that can make this happen, however, has not been formed, in terms of either a historical phenomenon or a global
movement. My sense is that there must be a better way of making this happen.
Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［72］

Hatanaka: Since, in a sense,radicalism is individualism,
it isn’t really suitable for mobilizing people or agitating.
It is fundamentally difficult
to mobilize for something.
There was a certain eager anticipation that creating major
movements would help to disseminate discourses that wereanti-ideological, thanks to theway in which the Internet tolerated and cultivated a cultureof diversity. This potential is
From left: Minoru Hatanaka, Kodama Kanazawa, Kei Wakabayashi
still present, however. Now,
the most important consideration in the context of this Internet environment is what sort of mentality to have, and what sortof technology should be deployed.
Also in this vein, I think that the past two days have been quite meaningful in terms of thediversity of practices we have seen that operate within this Internet environment.

The State of Culture in an Era of Globalization
Hatanaka: Unfortunately, we are almost out of time, so perhaps we can take just one question
from the audience.
Q 1 Today, we are seeing various conflicts between countries erupt as a result of nationalism. At the
moment, I am wondering if culture can serve as an intermediary channel between such countries. What
do the speakers think about this sort of approach?
Kanazawa: Personally, I have been approaching my work with this constant expectation of what
culture can accomplish. The state of contemporary art in the past several years has been rather
fragmented. The Documenta from two years ago (2017), for instance, was held in Kassel inGermany and Athens, and there were almost no Asian artists. This isn’t to say that it was therefore to be condemned: this particular edition of Documenta seems to have been conceived toaddress the refugee question, and various other issues that Europe is urgently confronting. Oneof the themes was that Europe’s spiritual roots lay with Greece, so this Documenta did not encompass Asia.
For a time, globalization reached an incredibly advanced stage in London, as well. My
sense is that it embodied how optimistically the world could become interconnected. That quality, however, has gradually dissipated. As you might expect, people are now focusing rather on
issues that are more imminent and pressing.
Different people have different issues that they consider to be urgent, and I think regional
disparities are undeniable. If I decided to exhibit works dealing with the European refugee question in Japan, I think that a few steps would need to be taken first. In that sense, the situation inwhich topics become divided and segregated has also manifested itself in the realm of art.
So how can culture serve as an intermediary channel? We cannot rely on the optimistic
globalization of the 1990s and early 2000s, so it may be necessary to deploy an entirely different
scheme. This is the tentative conclusion I reached through a process of trial and error, as I wasworrying about this question.
Hatanaka: Just to go back to the presentations that we just heard, we have things like JapaneseFormation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［73］

hip hop and Korean hip hop, which are basically created by digesting an art form in one’s own
way, in the context of one’s home culture. In the same way, variations on all sorts of music, orother art forms, can also emerge. On the other hand, I think the very act of labelling somethinga “national culture” verges on the dangerous. The culture of one’s own country is no longer
something that emerges purely out of that one country. I think that understanding “culture” ina wider sense ought to be an important premise.
Wakabayashi: As for me, my sense is that it would be important to make proper economic connections. It’s not that collaborations between Korean and Japanese media would be beneficialfrom a humanistic perspective or something like that: it’s because they would yield good business possibilities. Conversely, it’s quite unfortunate that we don’t really regard China and Asia
as markets when we talk about “connecting” with them. In short, Japan only sees these countries as places to sell goods that we make. That’s only half of the equation, isn’t it? More vital is
the notion that we might have things to sell to each other if we produced things together. In thatsense, this is a kind of nationalism on the part of Japan. There are certain limits to attempting tocomplete the cycle of production only within one’s own national borders.
I often have the chance to speak with developers. They say things like “We’d like to givethis redevelopment project a truly international character,” or “Diversity is important.” But I’ll
often be thinking, “Isn’t this whole meeting just full of old Japanese men?” This is a huge problem. It will be disastrous if we don’t create an environment, even coercively, in which
non-Japanese can actively participate. We should start by creating a situation where we can exchange opinions in a casual way, and then move on to an environment where we can produce
things collaboratively.
Kanazawa: In his presentation today, dj sniff mentioned that it’s important to do things likegather in the guest room and have meals together. Human connections are essential. During the
1990s and early 2000s, it seems to me that the notion of connection was based on this ideologythat building economic links was essential. If you really feel that someone is doing somethingfascinating, will that mean that you will want to establish some visceral connection with them?
That’s easier said than done. It would take a steady, cumulative series of efforts, I think.
Wakabayashi: I don’t think we will see any long-term value emerge from short-term solutions.
Personally, I feel that Japan only makes a half-baked effort when it comes to thinking about issues that don’t necessarily have a final goal, in an unstructured or undirected context. When
there is some objective that needs to be purposefully attained within a short period of time, we
also don’t proceed very rationally. We will say, “Let’s achieve something purposefully,” whilesome other emotional consideration will subtly creep into the mix somewhere. So I think thatit’s important to have some kind of strategy that will help to define the scope of the domain inquestion. All this is rather abstract, but recently I’ve been thinking that this is something thatalways muddles things up.
Hatanaka: We’ve gone considerably past the time limit, so I’m going to close the discussion
here. Thank you to everyone for participating.

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era: Creation, Production, and Network［74］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 the sense of kinship and coexistence as neighboring inhabitants of Asia.
https://jfac.jp/en

Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)
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 3rd International symposium for Media Art

Formation of Culture in the Post-Internet Era:
Creation, Production, and Network
Report [PDF ver.]Published: February 21, 2020
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, Moeko Kashima (The Japan Foundation Asia Center)
Editing & Writing

William Andrews
Japanese Writing

Kenichi Abe
Translation

William Andrews (pp. 1, 27–31, 54–58)
Darryl Jingwen Wee (pp. 4–10, 21–26, 32–40, 53, 69–74)
Takuro Mizuta Lippit (pp. 41–46)
DesignIuko Matsukawa
Cover ImageSTUDIO PT. (Yosuke Nakanishi, Kohei Nakazawa, Koharu Nezu)© The Japan Foundation Asia Center / Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)
All rights reserved.