What happens when media and technology are no longer new, but the stuff of everyday life? What happens when the technologies we grew up with become trash and treasure? 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presents its new exhibition, After Effect is a major exhibition curated by Olivier Krischer, which ponders the complex time and space in which we live. The exhibition includes eight artists from Japan, Europe, America and Australia whose works integrate technology into their practice and demonstrate a shift in our relationship to so-called new media, no longer simply nostalgic nor futuristic, but as an element of everyday experience.
Artists have often oriented their encounter with media technologies and concepts as pioneering explorations of a bright, uncertain future. For the artists in this exhibition, “new media” are no longer new, they are the stuff of everyday life. Technologies we grew up on are now displayed in museums, or found littering op-shops and eBay; as trash and treasure, or just spare parts.
The practices represented in After Effect speak very much to the present—to presence: what it constitutes to be here, now. To create is no longer conceived of as adding space to the known world; perhaps more than ever before creation means giving new meanings to things, proposing alternative arrangements, revisiting abandoned trajectories, and revealing possibilities. This is about finding additional ways of being with/in the same old world.
For some artists D.I.Y is a form of post-punk resistance to consumer “choice”; for others a bricoleur approach is fueled by a belief in open-source forms of knowledge sharing and the idealism of Creative Commons. Many share a passion for simply creating alternatives, impressing an individual presence, however ephemeral, on the digital sameness of our urban cultures. These works also confront the fact that media technologies have developed in a mutually beneficial relationship with globalised capital. The relationship of multinational companies to time and space functionally resembles the Internet; both are continuums. This is the time-space in which we live, we buy, we love, learn and make war; a complex, dynamic and ultra-real, “post-digital” present—after but not beyond the digital.
The artists in After Effect highlight the effective presence of a human subject in diverse media. Their work revisits the inherent contingency of media, not simply as the object of an abstract critical discourse, but rather as the site of renewable social formations.
Aikawa Masaru’s work is simultaneously a new original and an absolute copy, which enacts the complicated authenticity of mediated identity in digitally connected societies. In CDshe has completely recreated every element of the CD experience by hand, including not only hand-painted CD covers and sleeves, but also a recording of himself singing each album. These albums are then displayed as though in a music store, complete with wall-mounted listening stations. By engaging with both the form and content of CDs he playfully acknowledges the way we live with media as both object (i.e. form) and content.
However, the urge to record himself reenacting such content, such as his work VIDEOs, brings to mind content sharing websites like Youtube, where hierarchies of original, copy and remix are fluid, now in video as much as audio. It is unclear whether Aikawa’s work is simply a nostalgic memorial, or a renewed call for authenticity. What is a remix anyhow, if we no longer recognise an original?
Mateusz Herczka welcomes the question of whether his practice is art or science. In his ongoing project Open Out of Body Experience Herczka explores the creation of an out-of-body experience by shifting one’s physical perception, much like a video game. Yet, where games transfer perception into a virtual character through a game console, away from the body, the “avatar” you see in front of you in OOBE must be controlled by moving your whole body as an interface. Moreover, Herczka purposefully uses readily available technologies, such as video headsets used here, which are popular with remote-control plane enthusiasts.
Although OOBE is presented without any further suggestion as to its meaning, many participants have related such a disembodied point-of-view to the experience of contemporary warfare, government surveillance, or “live” news broadcasts, where mediated distance often virtualizes the real-world implications of our actions.
In Manga Farming Kawachi Koshi uses second-hand manga magazines, bought cheaply online in bulk, to grow herb and vegetable seedlings. The seeds are first brought to sprout before being transplanted one-by-one into pre-soaked manga, then watered regularly. Kawachi carefully selects where to plant the seedlings by re-reading the manga and marking interest points in the various stories. Here he presents a complete year’s worth of the popular biweekly Shonan Jump. While these plants in reality have a limited life span, Manga Farming represents an unlikely symbiosis of media and organic systems. How do we draw a line between culture and nature?
Kawachi, also known for making fragile sculptures from snack foods such as potato chips or rice-cracker sticks, presents manga in the same post-consumption context. Manga Farming, which is newly grown and perishes each time it is exhibited, subtly engages questions of sustainability and the creative adaptation of objects often rendered disposable or obsolete by the way we consume their contents.
Kehara Hiroki’s chosen medium is analogue broadcasting, both radio and television. His work subtly reclaims the institutional use of broadcasting technology throughout the twentieth century in the spirit of community radio—yet at a more personal, temporary and site-specific level. While the Internet aspires to reach worldwide, legal and technological restrictions limit the reach of personal analogue broadcasts. Kehara exploits the way this apparent weakness actually brings an audience together, in a specific place, often as a conduit for an existing community.
Rather than rejecting digital communications, Kehara’s guerilla or community broadcasts act as temporary interventions in the prevailing media structure, creating an alternative that people can use as they wish. This critically highlights the relationship of media to shared experience, and communal memories. Here Kehara presents video documentation from his The Last TV project, inspired by the end of analogue broadcasting in Japan, at 11:59 p.m., on the 24th of July this year.
Jason Kofke grew up surrounded by the promises of technological progress, tinkering in his father’s electrical store, in a town close to NASA’s space shuttle launch site. His work confronts twentieth century attempts by the industry of science to prepare for an essentially unforeseeable future. In After Effect Kofke exhibits a selection of illustrations exploring the legacy of a mid-twentieth century technological imaginary, including the scientific promise of continual territorial expansion (space exploration) and limitless power (nuclear energy).
Kofke’s 8mm film documents the KEK-B Positron Particle Accelerator, a hugely complex piece of scientific equipment used for physics research in Japan. By using an older apparatus (i.e. 8mm) to grasp a newer, more complex one, Kofke suggests the implications of knowledge production and obfuscation amidst technological “progress”. The film also highlights the aesthetic specificity of visual media, producing an uncanny sense of time-travel. With genuine curiosity rather than critique, Kofke renews a dialogue with a History and Future to which we are all heirs.
David Lawrey and Jaki Middleton probe a twentieth century cinematic nostalgia to reflect the ways popular culture has visualized two unknowns: the future and the other-worldly. Here science-fiction is an updated version of belief in the supernatural, as a narrative means of addressing the inexplicable. This relationship is referenced by the pair’s use of apparently old, pre-cinematic devices to create vivid optical illusions, which have the power to surprise an audience that has “seen it all before”.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell references the cult film, 2001 A Space Odyssey. However, the image of ghostly objects suspended in zero gravity conjures a more general sense of abandonment. Narratives of space exploration often contain such scenes of foreboding or anxiety, which here implies something more general about our relationship to technology and the future. With humour and pathos, the pair create images of the nostalgia and fantasy that have been integral parts of scientific progress, in our alleged conquest of the unknown.
Sumugan Sivanesan is an “anti-disciplinary” artist, whose artworks are often creative articulations of broader research projects, dealing with how we mediate a relationship with the past as history, and the representation of marginalised voices or experiences. His work enacts art as a practice of critical thought and knowledge production.
Here Sivanesan presents four versions of a CCTV video clip, appropriated from one of many Internet websites that have popularised images of narcotics-related crime from Mexico and Latin America. This work is part of a larger project exploring representations of violent death as real and performed, and their further mediation through the Internet. By manipulating the sound in three of the four videos, Sivanesan deepens the discomforting interest we feel toward such images of violence, which somehow cease to be records of a specific incident. Have all images become forms of entertainment? As an audience of witnesses and accomplices, we are taken on a blunt, brisk, highly complex emotional journey.
