Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

m ilitary, plus lriward at the artist and his cu lture, perhaps revealing the current state of change and confusion that is obviously very strong in modern lnponesia. In conclusion we decided that Indonesian art is very much like the nation , in that it's undergoing great changes. But while the debates that we held here over art were very congenial and positive and even exciting, we all strongly wish the same could be said for the nation . 7.6 Multimed ia Art Asia Pacific (MAAP99) Beth Jackson (reporting for Chair, Paul Brown) The partnering MAAP (Multi Med ia Art Asia-Pacific) Conference yesterday was entitled 'Collapsing Geographies' and we were discussing the Virtual Trienn ial and Screen Culture Programs of the Asia-Pacific Triennial which have been partnered with the MAAP Festival. The second session of the Conference that I've been asked to report on was entitled 'Old Regimes/New Currencies' and focused mainly on the Internet as both an art form and an art practice and a means of social exchange and activity. Issues of access were raised by Brenda L. Croft who is the Curator of I ndigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Western Austral ia, and she made the point that the issue is not whether access to new technolog ies empowers the individual or communities by negating the need for the m iddle person , be that in business or bureaucracy. If you are unable to access the facilities or tools required then promised global freedom, virtual or not, becomes a moot point. She then went on to make the point 'Connections among Ind igenous Australian communities were made initially through song ceremonies and language and their associated visual representations. That was and remains for many of us our way of transmitting information : that was/is our Internet.' The speaker N iranjan Rajah from the Critical Studies Department at the University of Malaysia, Sarawak made the point that the Asian practice of recitation is the primordial form of multimedia. S im ilar to Brenda, the speakers were very concerned that they make their own claim for cultural traditions on the Internet and it's seen to be a natural b i rthright to the wh ite westerners (multimedia). Niranjan then went on to speak quite passionately about the Internet not simply as an art form but its use as a social tool and a veh icle for re-mapping new geograph ies. He mentioned a couple of web sites that he is developing with in his university, one called Postscript -http://people.goplay.com.postscript - that's an on-line forum for institutional critique in the visual arts and features a paper by N iranjan written after APT2 which was refused publ ication by the Brisbane art journal Eyeline even though they originally commissioned it. He made the point that 'it's not only despotic governments of the developing world that control the dissem ination of information'. Another website is http://start.cgirealm.com/seart which is an interactive resource for and database of electron ic art in the Southeast Asian region . Amanda McDonald Crowley went on to say that grassroots networks in the region are very important, and Raja's site is a good example of that. From the earlier morning session the projects 'Double Happiness' (produced by the Arterial Group Project) the 'Contact' p roject, which was a Perth/Bandung exchange project, and the MAAP '99 networks project which are all part of the Virtual Triennial program from the MAAP site, are very good examples of bottom-up initiatives in getting access and cultural in itiatives on the I nternet. Amanda then expressed her disappointment in the functionality of the APT3 website in the Gallery and she l ikened this to printing the catalogue and then sending out the pictures to be pasted in later. 8.1 : Screen Cu lture Chair Laleen Jayamanne s : · · e someone has given me the l icence to be not overly-diplomatic, may I say that the S · �en Culture session didn't work as well, not due to the fault of any of the speakers but the very nature of the category. The screen cultures that we have available to us - video, cinema, 1 38 r