Sophia Natasha Wei

The digital age impacts art-making, heralding a new art form called “new media art”, a term which gained trendy currency in the mid-1990s. And “performance art” sometimes falls under this category. However, as a practicising performance artist for the last couple of years and having observed several performances by local and international artists, I question the fit of performance art in the category of new media art, especially in terms of the local context.

On the world map of art history, the trend of electronically sophisticated performance art pieces stretches from performative video installations of the late 60s, which instructively challenged the artist-viewer relationship, to the now fashionable experimental artworks in the rage.

Today, the projector becomes integral to the realizing of many performance art pieces. In essence it seems fair to say the images from the projector enhances the quality of a performance piece, but does the projector’s presence really warrant the performance’s license as a new media art? What are the intentions of the projector/ projected images as a tool in a live art? Is the knowledge of new media too skin-deep to begin with? Perhaps then, new media art and performance art in the local context should be considered two separate forms since they do not necessarily weld together in harmony.

Before we attack the relationship between new media art and performance art, let us define new media art. According to Douglas Davis, a contemporary American artist, educator and author, “new media” is the “perfect term to envelop the edgy results of interdisciplinary art in the new century, which leaves the Bauhaus tools buried under their revered dust”.¹

The definition for “new media” remains uncertain and its credibility as a label for a new genre of art is debatable. “New media” can be said to be the latest digital media associated with the worldwide web, computer graphics and animation, interactive and robotic technologies. Some familiar hardwares are the television or video player or memory holding computer-related gadgets like cd and dvd-roms. New media differentiates itself by its radical move from traditional forms of art which utilise “obsolete” analog technology. Nowadays, new media technologies are commonly used in performance art to reconstruct the relationship between space, audience and the performer’s body.

From the start, technology arrives invasively in a series of explosions and tested artistic intuition. As Edward T. Had explains in The Silent Language: “Today man has developed extensions for practically everything he used to do with his body. In fact, all man-made material things can be treated as extensions of what man once did with his body or some specialized part of his body. Having outlived ourselves in new materials, we have to behold ourselves anew. And we then become what we behold.”²

Hence the non-descript artist is crucially a version of social change in this technologically obsessed society. The authorial image of the artist slowly habituates itself to the challenges of new pressures imposed by technology.

Vito Acconci, retrieved 2nd July 2007 from http://www.thebrooklynrail.org/arts/may04/images/AcconciPortrait.jpg

As mentioned above, the trend of electronically sophisticated performance art pieces stretches from performative video installations of the late 60s. An example is Vito Acconci’s video installation Command Performance (1974); the viewer’s decency was disturbed through language provocation when he/she was placed above Acconci’s head projected by the video monitor. With the camera upon his back, the viewer listened to his chanting hallucination of a “dancing bear” in his performance. Acconci’s performance piece is unquestionably one that had integrated new media seamlessly, exploiting technology to his advantage.

Driftnet, retrieved 2nd July 2007 from http://www.farm.sg/index.php/radio/article/driftnet/

Driftnet, retrieved 3rd July 2007 from http://www.theatreworks.org.sg/singapore/driftnet/

But that was then; what about today? Consider these two local experimental art pieces that I personally viewed. Not only do they play an instrumental role in changing the artscape of Singapore, they have also determined for themselves a new existence. While live performative elements are included, critical scrutiny enables one to distinguish these experimental (new media) art pieces and performance art as two separate artist concepts.

On the 29 - 31 March 2007, at 72-13, TheatreWorks presented Driftnet, a “social experiment” by Choy Ka Fai. My experience at Driftnet was utterly sensory and I was viscerally consumed by the digits and words sprinting across few big canvas screens hung high up in the auditorium. Rizman performed the role of a man’s doppelganger in the Internet globe while the screens revealed Google landscape geography. I was only brought to focus when Rizman became hyperactive in front of the lap top with a webcam attached. Simultaneously, the backdrop of texts on different blogs was typed out in “real” time.

To me, the combination of the performance in the foreground that exhausts the human body expels the same energy as the backdrop screens. This performance employed LED and muscle sensory device to interconnect with the performer’s body movements. So much that they had conflated and become united into one great performance. It was no ordinary performance. I wonder why I felt so different after watching Driftnet. Was it because I am a sucker for big screen TV and explosion of the senses, or was it that some issues addressed by performance artists are often morbid and heavy-spirited? Somehow, at the end of the show, gathering responses from some of the audience, they had enjoyed the experimentation; but none commented that it was a good performance (even when Rizman had taken centre stage), although most whom I spoke to said they thought the whole thing was good art.

Diaspora poster, retrieved 4th July 2007 from http://www.ka5.info/blog/2006/09/diaspora.html

“Diaspora” by Ong Ken Seng, presented from the 18th to 21st September 2006 at The Esplanade Concert Hall, was another experimental artwork with an extravagant display of new technologies. Judging from the reputations of the artists involved and the performance itself, one would think it would be a great work of experimental excitement and curiosity, and a new media concoction. Featuring artists like Koh Boon Pin, Janice Koh, Lim Kay Tong, Nora Samosir, Rindu Malam (Gambang Kromong Orchestra), “Diaspora” is in sum a gala of exhaustive humanity and human tenacity, characterised by innovation and diversity studded with performative, audio, visual elements. In that work, there were live performers like Zai Kuning who played sea nomad songs, adding a nostalgic touch that pulls the audience’s heartstrings.

In assessing “Driftnet” and “Diaspora” and the local performances I have seen, the only communality shared between new media and performance art is the lack of permanence. Evidently, it is unfair to classify “Driftnet” and “Diaspora” as performance pieces. Rather, they are new media art works that have responded to convulsive changes brought about into the art scene by technology. Advanced forms of media display that create interactions with imageries are devised at an ever-increasing pace in this world. It appears that artists are continually riding on the bicycle, exploring their potential by producing works employing them.

In the later part of this essay, I will examine how technology has necessitated a new type of thinking in performance art nowadays. The addition of the projector to a performance piece — is it just to pander to the sensation of being “new”? It is worthy to note that “newness”, however, has a certain lifespan. Some of its lustre will either accumulate or dissipate with the advance of time.

Since its heydays, performance is the very nature of human consciousness with the human body as a visible spectacle. Human beings participating in performances have one thing in common which is the incontrovertible and irreducible human body. Performance artists like Yoko Ono and Chris Burden in the 60s, among others, proclaimed the body as the main locus of ideas about art. The human body was of various intellectual, emotional and visceral functions. While it sometimes breathes as the material for ritual, living sculpture and performed photography, it can also be an apparatus for transformation for the work of new artists before the stylistic media twists of the 80s.

In Cut Piece, the powdered up Yoko Ono kneeled down in a Japanese woman’s traditional position. Members of the audience went in full swing with a pair of scissors to cut off her clothes. This was first performed in May 1964 in Kyoto. (This and the following three images are taken from RoseLee Goldberg (1998), Performance: Live Art since the 60s.)

In Trans-fixed, Burden’s body was crucified to a Volkswagen. When it can be interpreted as human sacrifice to the pool of automobiles, the extreme provocative manner of it emphasized the bare reality of live performance. Because it lives vividly in the memory of many till today, it is an iconic image that seems to transcend the act itself.

Jill Orr’s dream-like performances make visceral connections between her body and the Australian landscape.

Relation in Space, Venice Biennale. Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s durational work involved the collision of two naked bodies, and was followed the next year with Relation in Time for seventeen hours the artists sat back to back, their long hair tied together.

The above examples celebrate the importance of the human body in live performance. The inclusion of technology makes perceptible margins of performance fuzzier by oozing into boundaries and very often, results in the diluting of the essence of the body.

* * * * *

Returning to local performance, let’s look at artist Juliana Yasin’s piece Live Art in Studio 19 (2005), where she performs with a video work with 4 split images of her white painted face projected behind. This is another of her methods to critique the reality of Muslim women, a woman’s right to her own body. Her work reflects that duality of being a woman and a Muslim, which could be linked with her another piece titled, The Veil, where she cloaked herself entirely in black behind Islamic masks from Dubai, to critique the subjugation of women (this work was done without projections).

Interestingly, the audience who participated in her Live Art in Studio 19 performance were male counterparts, and indeed it must have been a fresh experience for them to experience being covered facially and assuming another identity in this socio-exchange. By engaging the audience into her work and her body in the latter half of the performance, it was obvious the audience had by then forgotten the purpose of the projected images that split her identity earlier on.

In unadorned fashion and honest humor, Gilles Massot in EPISODE 5 (2006) walked us through his performance in story-telling style, with a projector screen of powerpoint slides that located us in his travels. As a further illustration, he brought airflown water from his trip to makes the performance come whole. His idea was to use the two major rivers, the Ganga and the Mekong, as symbolic running threads linking his trips around Asia, and to give a focus, or an overall view, of the body of works.

Gilles’s performance was a history lesson to awaken one to how Singapore had lost contact with its immediate historical, geographical and cultural hinterland — Riau and the two rivers, the Ganga and the Mekong, metaphorically meet via the intersection of their respective oceans in the Straits of Singapore, between Singapore and Bintan. This gives a geographical background to what Singapore is culturally: the meeting point between India and China. His performance sponges in a very physical interpretation of these ideas in order to reactivate the contact of Singapore with its hinterland and build on a wider and more open perception of its presence in the regional context. And it would not be effective without the use of projected images of geographical maps.

Performance artist Andree Weschler’s socially-oriented performances often concern race, gender and politics of culture, which move from specific communities to a formal performance piece. Her per-formative identity in different contexts is at the core of her works. She approaches her concepts with a certain liberalism — an openness to multiple interpretations. The tension between identity and socially constructed images register the viewer’s sympathies with a peculiar kind of narcissism, leaving to the audience to effectively commission the work. This can be seen in her performance The Princess and the Toad, which was part of Future of Imagination 2, held in Singapore in 2004.

Photos by Genevieve Chua

Andree had initially wanted to use disjointed sounds as a background to her performance. But it was unrealised in the end because of technical problems. As she says: “since the Ugly Frog, I try to avoid technology and details. I have very conflictual relationships with my own performances.” From then onwards, twitching with uncertainty, she endeavours to concentrate more on the human body in her performances rather than dabbling in technology because it can be emotionally undermining when it fails in the end. But she agrees that most performance artists strive to use technology in their works to achieve a stronger visual effect, though one can lose control of it at times. But that is part of the unpredictability of performances — regardless of the dependency on technology.

In my first public solo performance in Stopover 2005 in Frontroom gallery, titled Victimised, I attempted to question the relation of my morbid and dark dreams to the contrasting state of peace and happiness in my life. While expressing the conflict of my conscious and sub-conscious states, I presented to the audience my desire to pause time to facilitate thought, as I find it hard to think about such things when I am involved carrying out my daily routines.

Photos by Juliana Yasin

Using a projected image of myself and synchronising my own body’s actions with these images, I constructed a performance that offered the audience a view of my subconscious state and conscious state in a single frozen frame. But from feedback that I heard, some viewrs felt that the text in the projected image and the shadow cast by the projector caused distractions to the performance.

The tug-of-war relationship between technology and performance art in local performances would suggest a reassessment of the relationship between performance art and new media art. In my view, which I’ve attempted to articulate in this essay, it’s crucial to investigate the development process of the art work in inclusive terms that integrate performative and media considerations. This may be a minority viewpoint, however. Without the use of technology, some artists may feel their performances may lack visual appeal. Yet with technology, it fetters performances to being controlled by technical mishaps or the shallow understanding of digital media.

A contemporary perspective on the live-body/ live-art work unites the psychological with the perceptual, conceptual with the practical, thought with action. The open-ended definition of performance in the art world has provided the license for the artists to explore different materials to execute a piece of performance, linking them with interactive ideas and ideals. As artists assume the hard-knock attitude to confront the old traditions, it is plausible that they take calculated risks in experimentations to foster a sense of ownership in one’s performances and to constantly seek to improve and refine.

At the same time, I suppose my concluding remark is not that new media art and performance art, in the local context at least, should remain two separate forms, but that what’s required is much more critical analysis of their relationship.

* * * * *

This issue of The Substation Magazine features contributions by Sabrina Koh, Urich Lau, and myself. Sabrina explores the artist’s need for a private space; whereas Urich takes a look at websites of Singaporean artists and some other international portals, and examines what they do for artists in their professional practice and implementation. On my part, I’ve contributed the above editorial on the relationship between new media art and performance art in Singapore, as well as a diary of the Tupada Action & Media Art festival, which took place in April 2007 in the Philippines.

After her Diploma in Interior Design (2002) studies with Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Sabrina Koh Li-lin crossed over to pursue Bachelor of Arts (Hons) Fine Art with Contemporary Writing (2005) which was generously supported by the Lee Foundation. Currently, Sabrina is pursuing a Masters in Contemporary Practice from University of Huddersfield, UK and is a recipient of Kuam Im Thong Hood Cho Temple (NAFA) scholarship. She uses texts and the human body, as her main mode of expression. She is interested in the meditative questioning of paradox, and aspires to discover a realm beyond conventional answers through writing, performance, photography and video installation. Sabrina has published a range of writings, from topics of interior design and architecture to poetry, and is currently a part-time lecturer at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.

Born in 1975, Urich Lau Wai-Yuen has been working and exhibiting since 1995. His work has been shown locally and abroad including Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, Japan, China and Belgrade. He works with the media of photography, print, video and installation. His art practice also extends to curatorship and organisation for exhibitions and projects, including Episode 5: 12-Hour Performance, Sound and Video Festival and Displacement Project: Bandung-Singapore 2006. He holds a Master of Fine Art degree from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and works as a part-time art lecturer at Lasalle College of the Arts and the National Institute of Education.

As for myself, one could say that Sophia Natasha Wei is a practicing artist who, for the past five years, has been engaged mainly in three-dimensional work. I’m currently pursuing a degree in Art Education, Secondary Level, at NIE, after having graduated from Lasalle College of the Arts with a diploma in Jewelry and Metalsmithing in 2004. I would consider myself to be a flexible artist, versatile in various forms of art making, including jewelry making, mixed media installations and performance art. I’ve been doing performance art both locally and overseas — my work often addresses the human condition and attempts to reach the audience on an intimate level. I’m an active member of The Artists’ Village which serves as a sturdy platform for my collaborations and involvement in the local art scene, and it’s my conviction to create art that penetrates the heart of the community, engages the public. I’m also interested in merging the visual language of my own practice in my art teaching career.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to making this issue of The Substation Magazine possible.

1. Quoted from Delahunt, M. (1996-2007) Artlex on new Media, see http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/n/newmedia.html [↩]
2. Quoted from Marshall, M. (1997) Media research: technology, art, communication, p 105. [↩]