Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

174 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online175Jakarta’s biennial OK Video Festival, and from scores of similar initiatives across the archipelago.The authorial envelope is pushed by grassroots video clubs, NGOs and communityvideo workshops – models unthinkable in the era of celluloid – or activist projects organizedaround specific issues of community concern. Of course, the preference for local immediacyis not accidental, and such organizations play their part in determining the video agenda. Yetin Indonesia, to put the DV camera in the hands of marginalized and poor people somehowseems an obvious thing to do; and whether these initiatives overstep class boundaries ornot, the overall effect is a staggering multiplicity of voices. 19 In general, indie videos are notcircumscribed by the imagination of an individual video-maker, in marked contrast to theircounterparts in Thailand. Video’s existential or phenomenological phase – exemplified by theexperiments of, say, Bruce Nauman or Vito Acconci, and characterized by Rosalind Kraussas a kind of narcissism – seems to have been passed over in favour of a more popular modeprivileging an actuality constituted socially, rather than individually. 20 Perhaps this representsa new kind of reflexivity: social media don’t just depict the social, they begin to presupposecollective articulation. The ‘program’ of video here dilates to encompass its constitutive socialbonds. Even if the latter are strongly informed by network technologies, online disseminationis perhaps neither necessary nor sufficient for the validation of this sort of production. Whoneeds networked video, when there are video networks?The devolution of authorship is just one symptom of the proliferation of voices. Digital mediaalso widen the range of tones available to the individual, as in the work of John Torres, anemerging digital auteur from the Philippines. Torres’ images are remarkable for their unpolishedcandour. His unstaged, clearly non-industrial manner of production yields a kind ofdigital personal realism, distinct from the celluloid social realism that looms so large in thePhilippines’ film history. Torres’ videos exemplify the economy of ‘always-on’ digital media,culled from a constant, unscripted recording of quotidian life. His DV camera sits within awider ecology of convergent media – PCs, mobiles, dictaphones and voicemail, radio, television,karaoke, and the web – which are both channelled and represented in his loose, poeticnarratives. For a film-maker whose subject matter is relentlessly personal, this de-gearing ofauthorial unity is pivotal. For while it may have the style of an auteur, Torres’ video direct ismarked by what Jacques Derrida terms démultiplication: a proliferation of channels, voicesand tones. Derrida formulated this idea in an essay on ‘the apocalyptic tone’ in philosophy,and again in The Postcard – a book ‘stuffed with addresses, postal codes, crypted missives,anonymous letters, all of it confided to so many modes, genres, and tones’, in which headopts a diaristic, and at times a very personal voice. 21 In Torres’ own very personal videomemoirs,we find a similar form of tactical distraction or encryption, a diffraction of identity inkeeping with an era of total digital diffusion.Consider Torres’ response to a question from late critic and curator Alexis Tioseco, about themultiplying voices in his feature-length video, Todo Todo Teros (2006):AT: You have the narrative running through three channels – the voice-over, the onscreentext, and the images themselves. What inspired your use of on-screen text andis there a logic to its utilization? At times it contains the first person I … Is there a reasonthat you chose not to read these statements instead?JT: In the film I talk about being constantly under surveillance, so along with the characters,I try to communicate not just through voice but also through written word, SMS,song, performance, drawn images, and even gibberish/invented language… I don’tknow, maybe all the wiretapping and the “mother of all tapes” coming out in the newshave prepared me to resort to this mode of storytelling (laughs). 22It is unclear what, exactly, Torres is implying about the relationship between ‘surveillance’and the media he lists. Notably, however, the proliferation of formats is seen to promoteidentification between the film-maker and his subjects. The auteur’s response to the end ofprivacy is, perhaps paradoxically, the media equivalent of speaking in tongues, a multi-vocalchannelling that undermines the unity of a single, authorial voice.In his recent ‘Altermodern Manifesto’, super-curator Nicolas Bourriaud observes that today’sartists are ‘starting from a globalised state of culture’, one of the chief indices of which islanguage. Thanks to ‘increased communication, travel and migration’, he writes, ‘[m]ulticulturalismand identity is [sic] being overtaken by creolisation ... This new universalism is basedon translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing’. 23 My own survey of DV usage broadlyconfirms this view; language and translation are pivotal sites of aesthetic play in DV practiceAsia-wide. Yet I would not accept the conclusion Bourriaud wishes to draw from this: thathybridity (‘creolisation’) constitutes some kind of ‘universal’ project. For if digital media arefacilitating translation and understanding, they are just as often used to thwart communicationand foreground its failures.19. In addition to those already cited, key networks include community video facilitators KampungHalaman and photo-media collective MES 56 in Yogyakarta, ruang rupa in Jakarta and CommonRoom in Bandung. The penchant for lateral social engagement may even be partly attributable,ironically, to certain policies of the authoritarian state. E.g., rural-urban exchanges, instituted bySuharto’s militarist New Order government in the 1970s and 1980s, formed a kind of templatefor the strong NGO sector that was instrumental in bringing this regime down in the 1990s.These grass-roots networks had become channels for a generation of activists barred from directparticipation in the political sphere. See Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia, p. 197.20. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, October (Spring, 1976).21. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1987; and ‘On a newly arisen apocalyptic tone in philosophy’,in Peter Fenves (ed.) Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant,Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1993.22. Torres is referring to an eavesdropping scandal involving the Philippines President during anelection campaign: http://www.criticine.com/interview_article.php?id=22.23. Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Altermodern Manifesto’, http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm. See also his catalogue essay in Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009,London: Tate Publishing, 2009.