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Introduction:

This first half of this multimedia essay focuses on five installations that are included in Cinerama: Art and the Moving Image in Southeast Asia. 

Exhibit 1: oomleo, Maze Out (Indonesia)

Exhibit 5, Part a: The Propeller Group, AK-47 vs M16 (USA/Vietnam)

Exhibit 7: Ming Wong, Making Chinatown (Singapore)

Exhibit 8: Hayati Mokhtar, Falim House: Observations (Malaysia)

Exhibit 10: Korakrit Arunanondchai / Alex Gvojic, There’s a word I’m trying to remember, for a feeling I’m about to have (a distracted path towards extinction) (Thailand/USA)

Collectively, these installations emblematize the ‘ambivalence of motion’– a term discussed by critic Haidee Wasson in her book Useful Cinema. Drawing on Haidee’s concept of film’s ability to directly influence motion and the larger historical background within the museum,  this multimedia essay seeks to showcase how the spatial arrangement and the temporality of the cinerama installations in Cinerama: Art and the Moving Image in Southeast Asia (2017-2018) re-inscribes duration and historical meaning for the filmic subject and the audience viewer.

Note: The endless left to right scrolling of the website is intentionally constructed to replicate the museum fatigue exposed by viewers at Sam at 8Q. At the end of the screen there should be a "load more” button, to signal the viewer's delay between processing exhibits.

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Exhibit 1: oomleo (Narpati Awangga)

Maze Out

2017

Single-channel video (GIF animation) with sticker installation

Dimensions variable; video duration 3:45 mins

Collection of the Artist

Commissioned by Singapore Art Museum

Located at the front of the museum before the entrance at Sam at 8Q, this installation is the frontier between the museum and the outside world of Queen Street, and the Church of Saints Peter and Paul. Capsuled within a glass space where the museum inside is fully exposed to the outside world, Maze Out marks the liminal space between a suspended temporality of the cinerama space within SAM at 8Q and the linearity of time outside. 

Through the glitchy techno music broadcast to the outside world and the fun lego-like sticker installation fronted by the moving GIF animation on the screen, the externalised pixel grid of the moving digital image is used to attract visitors, who are subconsciously hooked into finding out “what is going on”. 

The flashing GIF animation and the disembodied pixel structures of man and machinery are scattered around the distinct white space of the museum’s gallery, which becomes immediately reminiscent of the ‘white cube’ space of art galleries.

However unlike traditional art exhibits that require visitors to have some context to fully understand the exhibit, oomleo’s Maze Out draws the unsuspecting viewer in as he oscillates between curiosity and boredom outside the immediate vicinity of 8Q in which passers-by are overfed with visual stimuli− confronted with the immediacy of the viewer and installation through the gallery’s transparency, and the dizzying loop of its external projected sound.

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Technological pixel-art, GIF form

Maze Out presents a continuous slippage between what critic Charles Bernstein claims as a “messy abstraction” and “clean abstraction”, through the defamiliarization of pixel-art stickers that appear to consume the gallery’s walls.

The messiness of the sticker installation is juxtaposed against the clean space of the flashing television screen mounted on the wall, which gives rise to a continuous digital and physical loop that viewers inside and outside of the exhibition are trapped into.

The pixel grid of the digital image on the screen is explicitly aligned with glitch, a contemporary aesthetic form which centres around error. Upon entering the exhibit, visitors enter into contact within the original art piece, where they are overfed and fully immersed within the visual stimuli of the pixel. 

The series of images presented before point to a uniform entrapment of  Indonesian society, where workers are perpetually sent on a technological rat-race like an arcade game reminiscent of the 1980s. Except however, their movement is encumbered by the maze of industrial machinery which induces a form of stasis through fatigue or death. 

ommleo, also known as Narpati Awangga points beyond the inter-connectivity of Indonesian society, by exposing the insidiousness of the industrial everyday that undergirds the cohesiveness of productivity. Workers are haunted by fast-moving conveyor belt images, where the movement of machine perpetually outruns the pace of the human.

The worker’s struggles to reach his end-point “destination” is outlined by the moving image’s inability to perform its assigned function— even as it loops, glitches deliberately occur, freezing the image temporarily onscreen. This manufactured glitch bleeds into temporal spaces, where workers are induced into intentional failure either by machinery or by the opposing forces of criminals. 

Here, the linearity of the moving image is torn apart by the workers that are embodied as the mosaic installation of runaway pieces, which bleed from the temporal cinerama space to the gallery’s physical walls.

What results then is paralysis of the filmic workman subject and the visitor within the performative spaces of the gallery’s walls, which merge cohesively into the production site of abstract pixel psychedelia. 

Source: Charles Bernstein, "Disfiguring Abstraction," Critical Inquiry 39, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 486-497. https://doi.org/10.1086/670042

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Source: https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/SgKiZl6dARYOKg

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Audience Experience

In a lighthearted contemporary twist, Maze Out encourages visitors to partake in the original exhibit by pasting stickers of the everyday worker-man on the wall. This act pays homage to its dematerialised simultaneity that is abstracted into the physical ‘white cube’ space.

The conventional tools of projection are eschewed for the visitor’s participation�� in graspable, fun art stickers that present visitors with a materiality which they can add to the exhibit. 

For oomleo it is a reconfiguration of the celluloid (sticker paper) as canvas, as visitors are encouraged to add to the production of the photographic image through their miniature stickers. 

The presence of these stickers scattered around the ‘white cube’ gallery space is magnified by the transparency of the glass doors and walls, which add to the three-dimensionality of the space.

The haptic visuality of the larger sticker installation of the maze draws visitors in through the trial and error act of maze-solving. For the viewer it is a direct mental stimulation; however the body is forced to use its sense of touch in order to identify with the abstract temporality of the maze.

In trying to navigate out of the claustrophobic industrial setting, the viewer is made to figure out where his “I” is in relation to the “here” or “now” of the ambiguous spatial environment mapped on the wall.

oomleo extrapolates glitch art, and its concern in reducing error to the restricted configurations of the maze. Options are intentionally limited to produce malfunction which adds to the endless, abstracted image. 

Visitors are made to wipe out their previous attempts and retrace their routes, just like the memory error of a glitch registering within the unforgiving industrial world of Indonesian society.

In the physical act of pasting stickers onto the wall, participants are encouraged to touch and see with their fingers, which allows them to gain a corporeal understanding of the entrapment that the artist is trying to express.

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Medium Employed

“In its conception, the Delay Time feature invented by CompuServe allowed developers specify a delay between graphics in terms of hundredth of a second divisions. Rather than immediately processing the entirety of the data stream instantaneously, a compliant decoder would process a graphic until it had encountered an extension block describing a delay time. It would then, having rendered the graphic described in that portion of the data stream, proceed to render the next graphic. Thus, it was possible to transmit moving images via the Graphic Interchange Format.”

— Hickey, Philip

The Technical History of the GIF, 1987-2015 in Gestures and GIFs: Examining the relationship between Multimodal GIF/text utterances and Speech/gesture utterance systems, pp.13

Maze Out’s sticker installation foregrounds the single-channel GIF or the Graphics Interchange Format animation video. Here the narrative of labour entrapment unravels through a hybrid form of audio-visual convergence with the painting. 

Music is often absent within traditional forms of museum art. In manufacturing a glitching cacophony blasted through the external speaker outside the exhibit, music combines with the glitch techno-form of the GIF animation to create a perpetual disturbance on the feedback loop created by the GIF form.

While the interactive act of pasting stickers on the wall accords the viewer some agency unlike the static and sentimentalised traditional image, this is robbed within the transparent setting of gallery space, where he becomes the object upon which passers-by project their gaze on.

Critic Philip Hickey argues that the “powerful affective capability” of the animated GIF loop “heighten(s) the awareness of the viewer” and highlights the moving subject. 

Through visual modality meaning is deliberately communicated within a distorted aesthetic in ceaseless loop— which seemingly liberates the image and worker from traditional stasis in its constructed delay. However, the cyclical repetition of the moving image ruptures this promise, entrapping it instead within continuous motion. 

Combined with the repetitive pauses and delays of the GIF form, oomleo fuses the sensory impressions of sound and sight into a claustrophobic collective imposed onto the bodies of viewers. 

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Maze Out: An analysis

Contrary to the composite form of the Renaissance painting located within the frame, oomleo’s invocation of sound, sight and touch in Maze Out recreates a cinematic temporality and experience which exceeds the screen.

The agency that is ascribed to the viewing subject through his act of placing the sticker on the wall is paradoxically limited as participants are simultaneously objectified within the transparent ‘white cube’ space of the gallery, by outside passers-by along Queen street.

Here, oomleo mediates between the dichotomies of cinema and gallery space through the performative. The moving image on screen and the use of the projector invokes a cinematic experience, whose fictional temporalities extend into the physical spatiality of the museum’s gallery.

The clear distinctions between the whiteness of museum space and the ‘black box’ cinematic space are rigorously blurred in oomleo’s emphasis on abstraction.

In being forced to confront the hybrid temporalities of past and present, and conflicting visual and spatial spaces mapped onto the gallery space, viewers are forced to contemplate their sense of time and space within a confined museum-cinema hybrid space.