Actualizing virtual displacement

Actualizing virtual displacement

by Prof. Drs M Dwi Marianto, MFA, PhD

One day I walk in to a café with the excuse of having coffee.Actually, I was paying attention to several costumers that seemed to be enjoy themselves in “surfing” or “walking” anywhere inside the world that the Internet offers; the technology that opens unlimited access to virtual spaces. Some seemed to enjoy themselves, the others looked bored; but for sure, all of them are communicating to other people across each virtual places; sending pictures, sharing feelings through words and images, with codes and available icons. It reminds me a nowadays-common quote that one of my graduate students in Yogyakarta-Indonesian Institute of Arts said, “Through Internet, people travels everywhere without moving anywhere. So, now, you can see the “midnight community” in our campus; surfing, traveling and keep seeing other individual through images, texts, and whatever that is already coded through their laptop systems.” The new culture has begun, and many people are addicted to it.

After the café, intentionally I walked out to observe whatever caught my attention at a crowded crossing at the end of Mataram Street. There were many people using cell-phones while driving -both motorcycles and cars. Relaxed and smooth; showing no special expression. Communicating, in that sense and with that way, is a common thing. More than that, some people even read/write/send text-messages while driving.Acrobatic, yet real; in such situation, the potentiality of danger to the doer, or the others, is sort of forgotten. This new branch of culture has (again) been approved as “normality”.

Tired of observing a street full of vehicles, yet lacking trees and oxygen, I felt dryness in my throat. I stopped at a restaurant to have a drink; there, the television was on. The program was (obviously) celebrity gossips. Almost everybody, including the cashier and waitresses, were paying attention to the screen. On the screen, there was a beautiful lady that recently had a problem with her “husband” in our neighbor country. Her name was Manohara. The beautiful lady who once was no body, no one, nothing as if she didn’t existed, is now public’s attention. Up ‘till now, she’s still hot news material. After being virtualized, she is now: actual.

By not leaving anywhere, we can go anywhere through the communication devices today. The phenomenon happening far-far away, which we are not related in whatsoever way -historically, socially, culturally, even emotionally-, is now few minutes away. Through the media, everything is public (and live). Livened up to then live in the media’s public’s mind. At the same time, something and someone that is objectively seen around us gets to be unseen; and is nothing because it is not exposed.

Virtual displacement is the exhibition title of Moh. RusnotoSusanto.A graduate student of Yogyakarta – Indonesian Arts Institute, who enjoys playing around with his computer, the Internet connection and browsing anywhere to see whatever catches his eyes. He started with the idea of the newly changed lifestyle in our society, with the situations where people in it has been injected with images –brands- by the media; and about the changing pattern of a wider society’s culture living their daily life’s and doing their activities through digital communication devices that brought them in to virtual spaces, moreover, to the private domains that used to be a taboo.

His artworks drew wide spaces with neatly designed buildings, structured, as concrete buildings in a dessert, with highly précised installations and space design. He built an all-surreal situation. No trees, in one of his artworks there is some form of a broken tree root that have turned into a living space. Everything’s so neat, structured, measured, as if there’s no wind blow that’s unpredicted. No living thing’s pulse, what’s left is mathematics and preciseness. There’s no proof of any living human in Rusnoto’s world. Where are they? Where are the birds? Where are angkringan [traditional small restaurants in Jogja streets, -trans.] where people count with fingers and hands, not electronic calculators?

Hopefully, what Rusnoto offers is only a representation of the situation that he’s predicted might happen if virtual displacement happens. Hopefully, everything he drew only exist in his imaginations; not idealized or really happening. In specific, hopefully, such situation only happens in paintings not in real life where precision and measurements are jamming human’s satisfaction and comfort. Hopefully, someday someone could build a café where people can sit, relax and talk around in the virtual areas that Rusnoto drew.

Happy actualizing the virtual in this exhibition!

M. DwiMarianto Director, Graduate School of Yogyakarta-Indonesian Art Institute