Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

168 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online169but enduring networks of indie film-makers, in which expertise, equipment and organizationaleffort are pooled and shared. 8 Many are plugged into international festival and fundingloops, yet the principle audience is still local, and gathers around both grassroots and morecommercial festivals. Online channels are far more important for community building andpromotion than they are for the actual dissemination of DV work.By comparison, ‘new media art’ is almost invisible. In a recent paper on new media art inThailand, I could highlight only a handful of Thai artists working with new media in reflexiveways. 9 A paper on Thai internet art would have been a very brief affair indeed. Even the fewwho engage with network thinking seem compelled to ‘realize’ their ideas offline, in more tangiblephysical forms. Here, the pop-media projects of Wit Pimkanchanapong are exemplary.In these works, video, computer graphics and mobile and locative media converge not invirtual space, but in the very physical, social spaces of the shopping mall and the rock festival.Wit is Thailand’s most conspicuous new media artist, but even in his practice, the webis only really a channel for promotion and documentation. Much of the work of conceptualistPratchaya Phinthong, who would never claim to be a new media artist, revolves around socialand technical systems of knowledge dissemination. In his 2006 installation Alone Together,Pratchaya created a quasi-domestic space in the gallery where visitors could watch cult andart movies from a DVD library, as well as duplicate films to take home, or add to the libraryfrom their own collection – a kind of offline peer-to-peer network. Again, new media thinking(in this case concerning international film piracy and its local market nuances) gravitatestowards shared, physical space, and the face-to-face encounter.Some analysis of recent video works – one mounted online, the other a ‘capture’ of onlineculture for offline exhibition – will illustrate the limitations that characterize network aestheticsin Thailand. The first was by the lauded indie film-maker, Anocha Suwichakornpong.The 2008 work Kissing in Public invited Thais to video themselves kissing in public, and toupload and share the video via a blog. Anocha made a pilot kissing short, to kick-start theproject, which she described as ‘an exercise in socio-cultural politics’. Video was cast as thewitness, evidentiary and transparent: ‘At the time where all eyes in Thailand and the mediafocus on national politics, we’d like to open up space, not only for debates, but real practices,on how the personal can and should be political, especially at this transitional period in Thaihistory’. 10 But the timing of this attempt to distribute authorship was awkward. To make thestreet the battleground for the defiance of social norms seems an oddly naïve choice, giventhat Bangkok’s middle class – the only conceivable audience for such a work – was at thetime rapidly becoming apathetic and desensitized to the street-protests that were shuttingdown parts of the city for months on end. That the site of this gesture would two years laterbecome a literal battleground, claiming 89 lives, only compounds the irony. Why even put8. These pools are perhaps less formal, and certainly less ethnically diverse, than those highlightedby researcher Gaik Cheng Khoo in neighbouring Malaysia. Gaik Cheng Khoo, ‘Just Do-It-(Yourself): Independent Filmmaking in Malaysia’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8.2 (2007): 227-247.9. Presented at the ASEAN Art Symposium, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, 2008.10. http://kissing-in-public.blogspot.com/.this material online? A cynic might see the privileged haute-bourgeoise parading her liberalcredentials for her backers on the international festival circuit, transgressing a cultural taboothat few of her compatriots seem to consider a problem. It is true that public displays of affectionare considered improper in conservative Thailand; what is less clear is that anyone cares.Indeed, the idea did not exactly catch on; the only takers seem to have been a performancecollective made up of young expatriates. Is this civil disobedience, or a form of elitist cosmopolitanism?If nothing else, it is a good demonstration of the narrow scope through which thenetwork’s potentials are seen. 11The lively indie film scene, of which Anocha is a leading figure, confirms this limitation.What is striking is that from this almost entirely digital field, the output is on the whole so notmulti-mediatized, so not networked, so not interactive, so not non-linear, so not recombinatoryor appropriative. That is, that ‘digital’ aesthetics, at least as they have been theorizedin the West, do not seem to have gained a foothold amongst people using similar tools andsoftware. Indie video-making tends to be personal, the work of an auteur, and appreciablyless observational than elsewhere in Southeast Asia. To explain this fact, it helps to considerthe peculiarities of documentary in Thailand. Classical documentary is done poorly and seldom,yet a few recent efforts deserve mention: a long-form take on the conflict in Thailand’ssouthern provinces directed by Manit Sriwanichpoom, Ing K. and outspoken senator, KraisakChoonhavan, Citizen Juling (2008); Panu Aree’s The Convert (2006) about inter-faith marriage,also shot largely in the south; and Pimpaka Towira’s The Truth Be Told (2007), a Davidand Goliath tale of a young journalist sued to within an inch of her life for defamation bythe Thaksin regime. These are the best of a bad bunch. All were independent productions;all ended up in the cinema, but in festivals only; and none really aspired to wider, commercialdistribution. All deployed a resolutely ‘objectivist’ documentary idiom, effacing thefilm-makers’ authorial and editorial presence and eschewing voiceover, with plenty of mobileand handheld camera work; and all, it seems worth noting, are essentially biographical narratives.The epistemological assumptions of these works, the sort of viewing they imagine,are those of celluloid documentary film. This is a romantic-journalistic idiom that leaves intactthe evidentiary claims of a medium it no longer actually employs – often without the rigouror transparency that bolstered such claims elsewhere. It seems that in Thailand, the movingimage either channels the romantic vision of the bourgeois individual, aspires to the veracityor authority of a public record, or both.11. Cf. Malaysia, where the witticisms and visual puns of Amir Muhammad’s video essays, forinstance, prod at the lighter and darker sides of Malaysian political culture. His scripts (andsubtitles) import the idioms of blogging, the timing and aesthetic of the chatlog. (See, e.g., hisMalaysian Gods, 2009.) Yet as in Thailand, network aesthetics may not have penetrated muchdeeper than this. Recent online video projects such as One Malaysia (an array of artists andpersonalities fighting racism by pooling their sentimental nationalism), and an ostensibly politicalshort film platform called 15 Malaysia, plug into the viral and link-based economies of Web 2.0,and are emblematic of the emergent multi-racial cosmopolitanism (on which, see Khoo, op. cit.).The ethos here, like the state’s, is more entrepreneurial than activist, harnessing the web as a PRvehicle and a site for ethical consumption, rather than a new logic of production, disseminationor aesthetics. An analogous program in Bangkok, meanwhile – the Thai Film Foundation’sNothing to Say (Pridi Banomyong Institute, October, 2008) – was a determinedly offline affair.