drift net

26/02/07 
Post 002 
Mood = expository.

It begins with a sentence: September ’05, two Singapore bloggers charged for making seditious comments online: for shame, The Web, our last stronghold for free speech, falls also to the storm troopers, but does that flip the status quo?: no. Despite its potential, the mainstream blogosphere persists primarily as an aggregate diary of minutiae: shout-outs, documents of holidays, kawaii-ographs, quotidian babble.

Yet Choy Ka Fai, newly appointed Associate Artist at TheatreWorks: i) is inspired: ii) is intrigued by the blogosphere: iii) researches & digests it: iv) conceptualises Drift Net as a peformance/installation recreation of the “virtual blogger”, the everyman of the Internet, ten thousand disembodied voices now embodied onstage. Blog as arena of desire/dreams, repository of memory/voice.

Collaborators include: Japanese sound artist Daito Manabe & lighting/set designer Fujimoto Takayuki of Dumbtype, who will simulate the "metaphysical space" of the man venturing into his second life on the Internet. Singapore performance artist, 72-13 creative-in-residence, Rizman Putra's shifting body shall be upholstered with motion sensors => biofeedback to Daito's audio software, Fujimoto's LED display => conceptual scenario (of heightened sensation) whereby movement dictates landscape, rather than landscape movement.

There’s an inside joke here, re: real-life tech research into surgical implants that will enable bloggers to automatically upload every moment of their lives; captain's log of sleeping, eating, shitting, fucking, taking medication. No kidding: open-source body, private => public, secular rapture, flesh => word. Therefore Japanese network programmer Motoi Ishibashi brought in to implement art with hard science. Interactive website supplied by Torrance Goh from FARM (another 72-13 creative-in-residence), proposed as interactive community site in run-up to big show.

Of course real workshopping only begins 5 - 11 Feb/open studios for new media wannabes 23 - 24 Mar/sharing the luv. At present, international collaborative conversations occurring only (how else?) in cyberspace.

In fact: as artist Choy is hungry for reaction: finds standard gallery spaces passive & insufficient: “some sort of black hole,”; he calls it, with no urgency of response from lackadaisical audience: hence multimedia theatre. Also live: Singapore experimental/pop indie band aspidistrafly, mad photobloggers themselves: Choy thus also curator of diverse visuals from Daito and aspidistrafly, collator of the random.

You see, glorious bohliao-itude of blogosphere is also its saving grace: bloggers, unafraid of looking stupid, say what they mean: keep it real, says Choy. Drift Net performance is thus from one perspective a celebration of Mr _____ free to recreate cyberspace: imagineering, electronic phantasia, yadda yadda.

<blockquote>From perspective of artists, however, all is just another subtle game of police and sedition. Choy & Co. control all the technical parameters: there may be no way to dance beyond the border.</blockquote>

posted by Ng Yi-Sheng 
(72-13 ’07 Creative-In-Residence) 
4:16am