Art in the Asia-Pacific

Intimate Publics

Larissa Hjorth, Natalie King, Mami Kataoka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317935711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Asian Art

As social, locative, and mobile media render the intimate public and the public intimate, this volume interrogates how this phenomenon impacts art practice and politics. Contributors bring together the worlds of art and media culture to rethink their intersections in light of participatory social media. By focusing upon the Asia-Pacific region, they seek to examine how regionalism and locality affect global circuits of culture. The book also offers a set of theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms for thinking about contemporary art practice more generally.

1 Intimate Publics The Place of Art and Media Cultures in the Asia-Pacific Region

Larissa Hjorth, Natalie King and Mami Kataoka

DOI: 10.4324/9781315858104-1

Intimate Entanglements

In India, one can find the third biggest usage of Facebook with more than 57 million users. In Indonesia, there are nearly 43 million Facebook users in a nation that has been dubbed “Twitter Nation”. In China, where Facebook is banned, a healthy diet of QQ, Weibo, WeChat, and Jiepang dominate, highlighting the significance of media-rich mobile media. For many of the older Chinese users, the mobile phone has been their only portal for the online, especially through QQ, which for many is synonymous with the not just social media but also with the Internet. With a strong shanzhai (copy) phone culture that keeps the smartphone prices down, we see more than 420 million of China’s total 564 million online users doing so from the mobile.

The Asia-Pacific is home to much of the world’s production of online and mobile technologies as witnessed in the exposé of Foxconn’s inhumane working conditions producing the world’s Apple products. It is also home to the world’s first example of mainstream mobile Internet in Japan more than fifteen years ago. With strong production and consumption patterns the region’s various and contesting social and mobile media cultures play a pivotal role in everyday life. Yet, discussions about the role of these media cultures and their relationship to art practice have remained relatively cursory. This is partly to do with the discomfort between art and new media practice which was reenacted by Claire Bishop in her recent discussion of the two fields. ¹ What becomes apparent is that the distance between the two fields is no longer tenable in practice, and thus, we need more complex conceptualizations about art’s role in contemporary online and mobile media.

This opening vignette seeks to sketch some of the complex and diverse ways online media in the region is playing out. It is personal as it is political. It is intimate as it is public. It is about providing new ways of traversing the social with the geographic, the political with the personal. With social and mobile media so prevalent, it requires us to revisit some of this century’s recent phenomenal shifts and turns—mobility, affective, and intimate—that have marked the social, cultural, and political fabric for this century. For some this saw the interior becoming the new exterior; ² for others it marked new types of migration (some chosen, some enforced). With the uneven rise of smartphones and social media globally, we see the growing significance of local and vernacular within media and art practices. As social, locative, and mobile media render the intimate public and the public intimate, how is this shaping, and being shaped by, the role of place, art practice, and politics? How are these new models for engagement, distribution, and participation—promised by online media—changing the way art is practiced and how audiences participate?

The all-pervasive role of social media within contemporary everyday life has created new challenges for traditional art and new media divides. ³ In this mediascape, what becomes apparent is the unavoidable role of media, and its focus on intimacy, as an integral part of the contemporary condition. Given that the “intimate” turn predates social media, turning to some of the initial debates by the likes of Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner can give us much insight into the politics of intimacy today. Writing before the onset of social media, Berlant observed that intimacy has taken on new geographies and forms of mobility, most notably as a kind of “publicness”. ⁴ As intimacy is negotiated within networked social media, the publicness—along with the continuous, full-time multitasking—of intimacy becomes increasingly tangible. They are now intimate publics. This shift undoubtedly transforms how we think about the politics of the personal. The impact on art, political or not, is unquestionable.

Taking intimate publics as the departure point, this collection of essays from key scholars, researchers, and curators in the region seeks to expand on the way in which place, screen media, and art are both practiced and reconceptualized in a period marked by increasingly mobile media cultures. Through the notion of intimate publics—as a rubric for new types of art engagement, literacy, and politics—the various essays reflect upon practices and challenges for the region. Drawing from a variety of case studies including the new regional initiative, Utopia, this publication tackles contemporary paradigms for art, politics and participation in the region.

In Intimate Publics, we bring together the worlds of art and media culture to rethink their intersections in light of participatory social media. Moreover, we consider the impact of social media and how it is shaping, and being shaped by, shifting public and private spaces. By focusing on the Asia-Pacific region, we also seek to examine how regionalism and locality are affecting global circuits of culture. In short, Intimate Publics endeavors to reveal new insights for conceptualizing the complicated entanglement of art and digital culture, and offers a set of theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms for thinking about contemporary practice more generally. The contributions from a diversity of art and digital culture experts from within and outside the region aim to contextualize, explore, and interrogate some of the key issues facing art and digital culture today.

In this introductory chapter, we outline some of the key theoretical notions informing this section, namely, mobile intimacy and intimate (social) publics. This section stems from a three-year Australian Research Council Discovery study on online media and intimacy in the region conducted by Hjorth and Michael Arnold. ⁵ Rather than defining the relationships through networks, ⁶ we draw from Sheller and Galloway who prefer “publics” to discuss the various overlays between media, culture, and politics. As we suggest in the conclusion of this chapter, “mobile publics” affords more possibilities for engaging with the complex encounters between media, art, and the environment today.

From the outset, we have noted that our approach to technology draws from science and technology studies (STS) traditions in which we see media as shaping, and being shaped by, culture. Just as social media has been deployed for banal activities that simplify definitions of the social, so too has it been viewed as a tool for political activism. Here it is important not to grant social media with the agency of making these politics happen but rather providing particular nodes of entanglement across temporal and spatial divides that have afforded new types of political affects. The paradoxical dynamic around the role of new media, between control and freedom, ⁷ and emerging forms of politics is most evident in the “ambivalent” and yet “situated” context of the Asia-Pacific region. ⁸ From demonstrations against nuclear power in locations such as Japan (post 3/11) to the political deployment of Facebook in Singapore for governmental elections, to the use of locative media for corporate surveillance in South Korea, ⁹ we are seeing social and mobile media being utilized to both reinforce older forms of politics while also creating more intimate and micro politics.

In particular, we differentiate “intimate publics”, that are tightly bound and share common emotional ground, “social publics” that also share emotional affinities, but are broader and less tightly bound by those affinities, and “social networks”, which are not constituted in common affect, but are instrumentally related in interconnected and ramified ego-based formations. ¹⁰ By deploying the notion of intimate publics and social publics as distinct from social networks, we argue that performances of affective interpersonal intimacy reflect an emerging approach to identity and collectivity and to the management of the social labor required to engage with others in this new public sphere.

Within art, the Asia-Pacific region is a leader in the take-up of social media to facilitate local and global connections and engagements between artists, publics, and institutions. There is a significant difference in how these media forms are being used in an explicitly political manner, which challenges the non-politicized discourses of participatory and collaborative practice that tend to dominate Eurocentric approaches. It was not by acci dent that one of the leaders in locative art, Rafael Lozano Hemmer, has conducted seminal works in the region. In particular, Relational Architecture 1, featured at the opening of the YCAM (Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media) in Japan (2003), required that participants’ phone have cutting-edge locative media capacities. Only in Japan, with its innovative mobile media, could such an event have taken place. With a few exceptional examples, however, art has been slow to adopt such technologies innovatively and continues to employ online media as a method to facilitate the production and distribution of information, rather than encouraging innovative user participation.

Japanese new media groups such as Candy Factory or Korean/American collaborative team Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries has been seen as indicative of the first generation of internet artists. ¹¹ But when one probes their motivations and ideologies, we see that the place of the online and mobile runs as an alternative to the preferred offline space. The aesthetics of both groups epitomizes the flash style of Web 1.0, yet in interview with the Candy Factory, the site of the online is a default space that runs parallel to the offline events. In sum, they are using the online as a site for dissemination rather than as part of the conceptual package. ¹² Yet regional precursors such as Japan’s Dumb Type and Korea’s Paik Nam June were quick to embrace the popular technologies of the moment as a commentary of broader sociopolitical trends.

Web 2.0 generation artists particularly China’s Cao Fei have been quick to incorporate online spaces such as Second Life as a parallel gallery and performative place. China’s most famous and political artist, Ai Weiwei, has eagerly incorporated new media tools especially Twitter to engage with Western audiences about Occidental views of China (given that Twitter is banned in China his engagement is clearly aimed at non-Chinese). So too, did the Korean collaborative group, INP, begin with Blast Theory–type performances (using mobile technologies to explore hybrid realities) and then quickly moved to software and hardware mobile-hacking workshops to unpack the political dimensions of media practice. INP saw mobile technologies as symbolic of South Korean politics and media ecology; thus, by deconstructing these symbols INP provided a space in which participants could question and challenge hegemonic technonationalism. ¹³

As one of the key regions for producing mobile technologies for global consumption, the politics of media practice—in its both software and hardware dimensions—can provide much fuel for conceptual and aesthetic exploration. As projects like Command N’s Akihabara TV Project (2000, 2001) demonstrated by placing video works on public and private screens in Tokyo’s Akihabara (Electric City), mobile media are transforming screen cultures and their role in place-making practices. As McQuire and Papastergiadis have explored in their Large Screens and the Transnational Public Sphere project, mobile technologies reflect the growing blur between public and private, work and leisure spaces as they discuss in their chapter in this collection. In The Media City, McQuire has eloquently explored these shifts in the urban fabric, a move away that could be characterized by the change from flâneurian to phoneurian depictions. ¹⁴ Rather than the nineteenth-century wanderer, flâneur, strolling through the streets representing a new form of leisure and encapsulating the urban experience, ¹⁵ the twenty-first-century urban stroller is more akin to the parkour or phoneur with mobile phone (and mini-world) in hand. The phoneur, as Robert Luke notes, is a node in the informational circuits of the city. ¹⁶ For Katina Michael and Roger Clarke, locative media's threat to privacy is most ominous in its covert forms. This "uberveillance" "has to do with the ability to obtain identification, near real-time locative tracking and condition monitoring of the subject". ¹⁷ As Alison Gazzard notes, second-generation locative media such as Foursquare promote the user to become the stalker, ¹⁸ whereas Ingrid Richardson argues that, locative media, with its ontology in mobile gaming, has adapted our experience of "being online" by dismantling actual/virtual dichotomies, which, in turn, provide complex and dynamic range of modalities of presence. ¹⁹

With locative media, we see the arrival of increased accessibility to augmented reality. Instead of replacing the analogue with the digital, the physical with the virtual, they open up hybrid realities that need new conceptual tools and located frameworks to unravel the dynamics. For de Souza e Silva, this creates what she calls “hybrid” spaces—that is, social situations in which borders between remote and contiguous contexts can no longer be clearly defined. ²⁰ In other words, locative media disrupt binary modes of co-presence such as virtual versus actual as well as highlighting the growing importance of localized notions of place. We are no longer looking at just the technology-mediated hypervisual d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Intimate Publics: The Place of Art and Media Cultures in the Asia-Pacific Region
• PART I Reconceptualizing the Region
• 2 Mega-Exhibitions, New Publics, and Asian Art Biennials
• 3 Dots in the Domain: The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
• 4 Beyond Institutional Thinking
• 5 Making Do: The Making of the Art and Digital Media in Southeast Asia
• 6 On List of Figures : Models beyond the Biennale
• PART II When Art and New Media Collide
• 7 Red Tape and Digital Talismans: Shaping Knowledge beneath Surveillance
• 8 Screen Ecologies: A Discussion of Art, Screen Cultures, and the Environment in the Region
• 9 Intimacy and Distance with the Public
• 10 Regional Standardization: MPEG and Intercultural Transmission
• 11 PlayStations: On Being Curated and Other Geo-Ethnographies
• PART III Vernacular, Media Practice, and Social Politics
• 12 Public Screens and Participatory Public Space
• 13 Mediating the Metropolis: New Media Art as a Laboratory for Urban Ecology in Indonesia
• 14 The Virtual List of Figures of Cao Fei
• 15 The Conjugations of Remix: Or, as Kurt Vonnegut Might Say, Being Spastic in Time
• 16 Toward Utopia: A Pan-Asian Incubator
• 17 Conclusion: Beyond the Intimate? The Place of the Public in the Region
• Contributors
• Index