The Japan Foundation Asia Center's ref:now—toward a new media culture in asia comprehensively showcases contemporary media culture and creativity through art, exchange, education, and collaboration. Shining a spotlight on the creative scene in Asia against the backdrop of the region's rapid development and advances in information technology, the project fosters intergenerational dialogue and partnership across exhibitions, workshops, symposia and performances that introduce the innovative fusion of technology and art that is new media art as well as trends in pop culture and music following the emergence of the Internet. Since the 2017 fiscal year the project has aspired to cultivate new platforms for media culture in Asia in cooperation with festivals and events in ASEAN members.
As part of this ongoing project, the Japan Foundation Asia Center now presents a special exhibition and music program in association with Indonesian Netaudio Festival 2018. Featuring artists from Japan and Indonesia whose work demonstrates unique approaches enhanced by technology, the exhibition and the concert explores various interdisciplinary forms of media and art such as video, sound, sculpture, photography, and performance. The project introduces prominent examples of dynamic culture in our network society as well as individual creativity that is strikingly synthesized with media technology.

Music Program: Partner Program with "Indonesian Netaudio Festival 2018-Sharing Over Netizen Explosion" ⇒

Exhibition"Internet of (No)Things: Ubiquitous Networking and Artistic Intervention"

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Curators' Message [abstract]
Riar Rizaldi

The information is anywhere, at any time, and is delivered in a manner appropriate to the location and context. While we can finally get to benefit from the full power of information technology, we miss the ability to absorb the esoteric bodies of knowledge on which it depends. Network technology like mobile telephone and Internet have become the world's largest shared platform for information exchange—this powerful informatics is already embodied with our life. At the same time network technology affects the way we communicate—textually, verbally and visually—as well as reconstructed the variety of contemporary technics: art, cinema, biotechnology, digital governance, platform capitalism. What challenges are presented by the ever-present networked technologies and infrastructures in our cultural activities?
As we drift past tipping points that blurred the distinction between online and offline, as we will have to accept that privacy may become a thing of the past, while a new form of visual language manufactured by the influx of memes from an image board like Futaba Channel, and as a post-truth agenda swarms through Facebook blatantly, the exhibition Internet of (No)Things explores the possibility of artistic practice and aesthetic form that critically interrogated the ubiquity of network technology.
Therefore, through the artistic works and intervention by the artists in the Internet of (No)Things exhibition we might encounter the challenges as well as opportunities provided by network technology for our cultural activities. Furthermore, the exhibition subverts the jargon of Internet of Things (IoT) to provide a critical thinking that the presence of Internet is already embodied to any activities we experienced it actually becomes nothing. Something that we do not care its mechanism: things just work. It becomes objects, it becomes air, it becomes space. Internet of nothing.

Curator Profile

Riar Rizaldi

Riar Rizaldi is an artist from Indonesia. His works mainly focus on the relationship between human and technology, media and consumer electronics, image circulation and network intervention. Through his works, he questions the notion of (a)temporality, image politics, theory-fiction, virtuality, media archeology and unanticipated consequences of technologies in human life. He is also actively composing and performing sounds using the methods of field recording and foley through programming language. In addition, he curated ARKIPEL Jakarta International Documentary & Experimental Film Festival (2017) and a co-founder of an art collective SALON in Bandung. He is currently a PhD candidate at School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.

Artist Profile

exonemo

The artist unit "exonemo" (by Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa) was formed in 1996 on the Internet. Their experimental projects are typically humorous and innovative explorations of the paradoxes of digital and analog computer networked and actual environments in our lives. Their The Road Movie won the Golden Nica for Net Vision category at Prix Ars Electronica 2006. They have been organizing the IDPW gatherings and "The Internet Yami-Ichi" since 2012. They live and work in New York and became a member of the first museum-led incubator NEW INC since 2015.

Ai Hasegawa

Artist and designer. Ai Hasegawa produced many works putting emphasis on subjects relating to technology and people with employing techniques such as Bio Art, Speculative Design and Design Fiction. She obtained degree of MA in 2012 from Design Interactions Course, Royal College of Art in Britain; worked as researcher at Design Fiction Group, MIT Media Lab from 2014 to fall of 2016; took degree of MS in 2016; serving as Project Researcher at The University of Tokyo since April 2017; won Excellence Award at Work Art Division in 19th Japan Media Arts Festival for Her Work Titled (Im)possible Baby, Case 01: Asako & Moriga; hold exhibitions within and outside Japan including at MORI ART MUSEUM and Ars Electronica.

Soichiro Mihara

Aiming to create artwork that openly engages with the world, Soichiro Mihara creates systems that employ materials and phenomenon such as sound, foam, radiation, rainbows, microorganisms, moss, electricity, airflow, and soil. From 2011 he has exhibited, in Japan and overseas, "[blank] project", which considers the relationship between technology and society. He has resided and produced art in 10 places in 8 countries, including the Arctic, a rainforest, a military border, and a bioart laboratory. Recently, his work was shown in a solo exhibition called "The World Filled with Blanks" (Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, 2013; Kyoto Art Center, 2016) and was shown in the group exhibitions "Elements of Art and Science" (Ars Electronica Center, 2016) and "Sound Art. Sound as a Medium of Art" (ZKM, 2012).

Kazuki Saita

Kazuki Saita is an electronic musical instrument producer and programmer. He is also a visiting head of the anonymous organization Kinoshita Lab and has completed a course at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences [IAMAS], at the School of Engineering at Tohoku University. While at IAMAS, he began producing a sound installation called "moids" with Soichiro Mihara and others. Currently, besides working at a music instrument production company as an engineer, he is also active producing home-made electric instruments and performing with The Breadboard Band, Re-inventing the Wheel project, and other groups. He also supervises translations of books on synthesizers and electronic engineering.

Ayano Sudo

The subject of her work is the desire to transform oneself, surpassing one's granted gender. Ayano Sudo photographs herself and other models in various locations and countries, and also in her studio in Japan; the settings and the processes that undertake the transformations thus go further beyond given nationality, sexuality, or time period. She received the Yasumasa Morimura prize, part of Mio Photo Osaka. Won Canon New Cosmos Grand Prix 2014. She will take part in the group exhibition "I know something about love, asian contemporary photography" at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in October 2018.

Tromarama

Tromarama is an Indonesian art collective founded in 2006 by Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans and Ruddy Hatumena. Engaging with the notion of hyperreality in the digital age, their projects explore the interrelationship between the virtual and the physical world. Their works often combine video, installations, computer programming and public participation depicting the influence of digital media on the society perception towards their surroundings.

Arief Budiman

Arief Budiman borns in Depok and currently works and study film at Institut Seni Indonesia, Yogyakarta. He uses moving image as a main medium of his artwork. Besides his practice in exploring the form of moving images spontaneously without urgency, he addresses the issues of life style, the behavior of contemporary society, Internet power and its application on his work. He is a member of Piring Tirbing, a collective that focus on audio visual production and the development of moving images.

Abi Rama

Abi Rama is a visual artist from Jakarta. Besides making comic and painting, his works revolve on the exploration of digital technology, electronic music, social media and multimedia performance. In 2017 he participated in residency program at Blast Theory, Brighton, UK. Abi is also the founder of Klub Karya Bulu Tangkis, in which an artist initiative that focus on providing space for experimentation and exploration of technology, visual and urban culture.

Mira Rizki Kurnia

Mira Rizki Kurnia is a media artist, using sound and its interactivity as her artistic practice. Her career started since a college student in Bandung Institute of Technology in Intermedia Studio. Relying on her sensibility of sound, she is trying to explore the possibilities of sound making through the interaction amongst its environment. Through her sound installation and pieces, she engages audience to the process of sound-making. Her idea is to try to engage people to be aware by the existence of—whether physical or not—sound. She tried to achieve it through playful activity, which is an interaction that everyone probably experiences in their life. She is also a member of an experimental band called Konstipasi.

Igor Tamerlan

Igor Tamerlan is a musician, environment activist and 3D video artist, renown for his song titled "Bali Vanili" in the 90's. At that time he was also known as a musician who firmly declared war with the music industry that he considered unjust. In the latter half of the '90s he created an electronic musical instrument which he named Teknogong. He uploaded most of all his video works on YouTube. Despite it may have looks strange, his video animation was full of criticisms of contemporary Indonesian social and cultural conditions conveyed in a satirical style. The works also contain very sharp statements on ecological issues and future world changes. Igor died in Yogyakarta in January 2018. Until now he is remembered as a forgotten visionary artist.

This is the certified project of beyond 2020 program.