AK): Reality Distortion Field

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The traveling exhibition, will happen in 4 cities from September 2013 to February 2014. More than 60 artists from Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam participate.

Date: 21 December - 16 February 2014
Location: Main Gallery, 7th floor,5th floor and 3rd floor By BACC Exhibition Department
Bangkok Art and Culture Centre and The Japan Foundation
Opening reception on Friday 20 December 2013, 18.00 hrs.

As part of the commemoration of the 40th Year of ASEAN-Japan Friendship and Cooperation in 2013, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in collaboration with the Japan Foundation present a media art exhibition from artists around the Southeast Asia region. With a group of young Southeast Asian curators and researchers with a strong background in media art and their Japanese counterparts jointly refine the concept of the exhibition through surveys and discussions; a number of artists and outstanding works from each country are selected and presented in an event that will be altered to fit the specific conditions of each region, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand. The exhibition will present interdisciplinary media art in the widest sense of the word and encompass genres such as film, digital video, anime, photography, sound, and performance (physical expression).

Participated Countries:
Japan Indonesia Malaysia Philippines Vietnam Singapore

Project Concept (Bangkok Version)
Media Shapes Mind: Mind Shapes Choice: Choice shapes Future

The Philosopher Nicolas Zurbrugg suggests that there are "Three defining characteristics of postmodern culture: its existential shifts, its conceptual shifts, and its technological shifts". These shifts have already been occurring all across geographies where our post-media condition producing new cultural habits and social conditions constructing an alternative structure that surfaces up diversity of needs. In this puzzling democratic world of technology, the phenomenon lies simply at choosing out of unlimited choices. In this condition, it shows a foundation of vast information that we now more than ever could find multitude of ways to mutual cross-fertilizations. It is a foundation of an exploring ground establishing vocabularies to define new behaviors that are a result from new constructed information, new knowledge, and new creativities. This phenomenon makes apparent that technology has been here, long enough to established its own realm, creating web that seeps into various aspects of life and shapes they way we live and perceive.

With this on-going social and cultural condition, Media/Art Kitchen- Reality Distortion Field in Bangkok proposes media art, not as the hype of the new, but it is the existing norm that indicates how we live with technology to conjuring up the new. 'Media Shapes Mind: Mind Shapes Choice: Choice Shapes Future' is a 'user-generated-content' attitude to suggest audience a personal viewpoint towards media and technology and the outcomes of what the artists have fused themselves into. It is an idea proposing to steer away from the concept of technology as newness or seeing art using technology as a tool, to art as life living with technology. It aims toward how we live in aesthetic of how it works, in what behavior it creates, and what context it nurtures rather than how it looks. It shows a humanistic side of codes and information without changing its nature. It proposes a bountiful ecology of systems, processes, relationships, participations, and networks rather than fixed objects. It utilizes a space where there could be alternative perception, physicality, or form to grab on reality. And it lends a platform for sharing plurality of competing behavior, and subjective narrative structure as opposed to telling a story from a legitimized content.

'Media Shapes Mind: Mind Shapes Choice: Choice Shapes Future' is then an open-ended concept to support the essence and attitude from Media/Art Kitchen- Reality Distortion Field that is not blind attitude towards technology or to pay homage to technology rather it is a suggestion to perceive media, technology, and its culture not as a threat but as an everyday attitude, and as an extended personal potential to find connection with arts and to seek a meaningful experience in everyday living, to take a conscious advantage of life in technological era. As kitchen suggests a place for process and action, the project aims to be a platform of on-going operations of thoughts, ideas, and experiences to instigate a special mindset that challenges the existing boundaries between vocabularies, disciplines, and thinking structures to pave a place for art forms (from either audiences or artists) that could arise from the stimulation of the art in the kitchen itself.

Curators (Japan/Thailand)

HATTORI Hiroyuki

OKAMURA Keiko

AIDA Daiya

Pichaya SUPHAVANIJ

Nikan WASINONDH

Artist

APOSTROPHY'S (Thailand)

B-floor (Thailand)

Bruce QUEK (Singapore)

Chulayarnnon SIRIPHOL (Thailand)

contact Gonzo (Japan)

Fairuz SULAIMAN (Malaysia)