Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

176 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeAsia online177Such interventions against communication can be found in both Thailand and Indonesia. IfDV gives new currency to the vox populi – a form linking journalism to ethnographic film andoral history – it is also frequently an accessory to the deliberate warping of such feedback, byartists seeking to prevent the ethnographic subject from communicating as such. Thai examplesinclude Prateep Suthathongthai’s Explanation of the Word Thai (2007) which featuresreadings of Thai history in an ethnic minority language, rendered phonetically in subtitles;and Marut Lekphet’s Burmese Man Dancing (2008), which takes Thai stereotypes aboutBurmese immigrants drawn from a vox pop survey and subjects them to an arbitrary translationinto the unintelligible Symbol font. Both works turn on a translation that derails communication.In Indonesia, we find a similar typographic ploy in Muhammad Akbar’s Noise(2008). In this work, the monologue of a Japanese exchange student is rendered – again,phonetically – in Sundanese, the widely spoken dialect of the artist’s hometown, Bandung.In fact, this language’s neglected script derives from Kanji, and thus has more in commonwith written Japanese than with Bandung’s other, dominant scripts, Romanised Bahasa andSanskrit-based Javanese. These works remind us that language can be both a lubricant anda retardant of inter-cultural exchange. 24 Voices are subjected to a kind of formal scrambling,recalling the cross-cultural slippage of karaoke - ironically, Asia’s pop-cultural lingua franca.Against the hybridization Bourriaud sees as symptomatic of some new (but not that new)internationalism, I would posit instead a wider logic of démultiplication. In mistranslation,and de-couplings of the oral from the written, the video image finds greater amplitude – vocalrather than visual – without necessarily taking on the hypermediation associated with digitalconvergence elsewhere.How might such practices reflect on the epistemological status of DV in Southeast Asia?If my earlier proposition of a ‘non-evidentiary’ recording is sound, then the proliferation ofvoices would serve neither communication nor representation, but perhaps a collectivizationof history’s emergent channels. That the output of such collective expression should benon-evidentiary suggests one possible framing for a regional video agenda: video-makers arerefusing to play the game of absolute truth or indexicality. Rather than attempting to meetauthoritarian discourse or official history on its own turf – to ‘speak truth to power’ – theyprefer to put the new medium to work amongst themselves. This helps to explain why theoutput is overwhelmingly narrative – narrative knowledge, in these cultures, still reigns overanalytic or theoretical knowledge – but also why it is so often observational, since one needn’tfeign objectivity when the object is one’s own milieu. Finally, it suggests that for these users,DV’s greatest potential lies in its capacity to plug into, and channel, the older, oral modes ofexchange that mass and broadcast media have largely passed over.ReferencesBourriaud, Nicolas. Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009, London: Tate Publishing, 2009._____. ‘Altermodern Manifesto’, http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm.Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society, Oxford andNew York: Oxford University Press, 2001.Derrida, Jacques. ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’, in Peter Fenves (ed.) Raisingthe Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida,Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993._____. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1987.Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London: Reaktion Books, 2000.Khoo, Gaik Cheng. ‘Just Do-It-(Yourself): Independent Filmmaking in Malaysia’, Inter-Asia CulturalStudies 8.2 (2007): 227-247.Krauss, Rosalind. ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, October, (Spring, 1976): 50-64.KUNCI Cultural Studies Center and EngageMedia, Videochronic: Video Activism and Video Distributionin Indonesia, research report, Collingwood: EngageMedia, 2009.Murti, Krisna. Essays on Video Art and New Media: Indonesia and Beyond, Yogyakarta: IVAA, 2009.Rossiter, Ned. Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions, Rotterdam: NAiPublishers and Institute for Network Cultures, 2006.Teh, David. ‘Itinerant Cinema: the Social Surrealism of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’, (forthcoming).Vickers, Adrian. A History of Modern Indonesia, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2005.Weinberger, Eliot. ‘The Camera People’, in Charles Warren (ed.) Beyond Document: Essays on NonfictionFilm, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.24. See also Ariani Darmawan’s Still Life (made in 2006 with Hosanna Heinrich), in whichmiscommunication is a metaphor for inter-communal conflict, as four women have an absurdargument in four different languages.