Dear Beryl and List,

I'm an artist and educator living and working in the Philippines. I've been on
the list since last year and have found the shared knowledge and experiences
here very helpful. Although I am primarily a new media artist, I find myself
taking up curating concerns, since new media curating and art practice is very
new where I'm coming from. Right now I'm trying to work out two projects: (1)
an exhibition of algorithmic music; and (2) Digital Media Festival 2002
(DMF2002). DMF is an initiative I put together since 2000 and past events are
archived at http://digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph/dmf2001/ and
http://digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph/dmf2k/

For ths year, "collaboration" is also the keyword in much of the writing and
projects I'm doing, and it's interesting that collaboration issues are being
taken up in several online discussion groups and publications such as Switch
and Rhizome. I've just finished guest editing the May and June 2002 issues of
the Leonardo Electronic Almanac and in the May issue, I used the ancient
Philippine myth of The Divided Child to discuss collaborative processes and
issues. I include an excerpt of that feature below perhaps also for those
interested in what some Philippine new media artists are currently doing.

For DMF2002, I've been reaching out to collaborate, link-up, with other
festivals, projects, events on-line and off-line. I'd like this year's DMF to
focus on networked projects. Currently, there are some fifty students enrolled
in three digital media elective classes I'm teaching here at the University of
the Philippines, and they're working on pieces for Tabor Festival (Czech
Republic) with the theme of "Violence" and Javamuseum.org's "Fundamental
Patterns, Peripheral Basics." The students are doing "Mudras against Violence"
for the Tabor Fest, and "Sacrificial Spaces - the Mandala, Yantra and Cosmic
Diagrams" (tentative title) for Javamuseum.org. An essay and exhibition of
works will be available later online thru
http://digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph/digiteer/index.html

One digital media elective class is focused on Visual Language and we're making
visual poetry and works that explore the written image. I have instructed the
students to research on and use the extinct Philippine script called "baybayin"
in their work (baybayin fonts are available for the computer). I hope the
projects of this class to link-up, participate in the 3 Mostra Interpoesia (3rd
Interpoetry Exhibition) in Sao Paulo, Brazil this October 2002.

I've also sent out a call for mail artists to send works to be digitally re-
purposed in a project tentatively called "The Resurrection." Next month,
students will begin working on "The Hidden War", a study on the effects of
militarization and the presence of US troops in the province of Sulu in
Mindanao, south of the Philippines. The works will consist of "banner ads" in
collaboration with Brandon Barr's "Banner Art Collective" project.

DMF2002, like the past two DMF's, will be held in the first week of October. As
there are plans to integrate DMF next year with the annual Fine Arts Week held
every February, I've been thinking of having a smaller scale DMF this year
consisting only of online exhibitions mentioned above, a small physical
exhibition at the Corredor Gallery here at the College of Fine Arts, and a
festival CD-ROM. The usual workshops, artists' talks, video art screenings and
live streaming video coverage on the DMF website will be held February next
year with the annual Fine Arts Week (and possibly also the Asian Arts Festival
will link-up with Fine Arts Week).

I'd like to invite members of this list: DMF is still open for
collaboration/link-up with other festivals, projects, events. Let's discuss
possibilities, perhaps backchannel thru [log in to unmask]

As for the exhibition of algorithmic music, this is still very raw (the works
are finished but curating is the problem). I have finished 26 pieces of music
using various genetic algorithms and have been keenly folowing up on the
discussion on the list couple months ago. Issues and problems became clear to
me but resolving them is yet to be done. How does one present 26 (or even 15 or
10) pieces of algorithmic music in an exhibition with limited space? Not very
keen on either setting up listening stations where exhibition goers don
headphones or coming up with a performance programme, I still wanted to work on
the idea of the exhibition goer using a tactile non-machinic (non-computer
hardware) interface in controlling the volume and playback of the music. I'm
still working this out possibly with motion sensors and with non-digital
materials that I'm especially fond of: light and glass. I was hoping to have
the exhibition this year, with an invitation from a museum here in Manila. When
this materializes, although too late for the discussion on curating for
soundworks, I will let the list know what has transpired.

And finally, a bit off-topic as I am reminded of Beryl's posting on Leeds, I'm
looking for a university, institute, center for the fine arts and new media
where I can pursue post-doctoral research/studies; with my background as an
Asian artist working with new media and with such topics as pre-colonial
cultures and religion, selecting the appropriate place for post-doc has been
quite difficult. I'd really appreciate any leads, recommendations.

Thanks and warm regards,
Fatima Lasay



---
FEATURE
< The Myth of the Divided Child > by Fatima Lasay <[log in to unmask]>

In Philippine Ifugao culture, there is a myth that speaks of the "divided
child," the offspring of parents from the skyworld and the middleworld. Born
and raised in the Benguet Province, the day finally comes when this child,
named Ovug, is beckoned to the skyworld. The people of Benguet refuse to give
up the child, and so the child's father, the god Dumagid, takes a knife and
divides the child into equal parts straight down the middle - one part for the
heavens and the other for the earth. Both parts are also to receive new life to
account for the voices of lightning in the sky and thunder rolling across the
earth. This magnificent light and sound display of whirling fire and sharp
thunder is the orchestration of the divided child, to the delight of the ear
and eye.

This is the myth and tradition by which I see the process of collaboration and
the role of the artist as a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural worker - as
Ovug, the divided child. There is a critical metempsychosis, the splitting and
transmigration of souls, in Ovug, as he is conceived from both sky and earth
and is split bodily into two separate beings. Similarly, in the artist's
movement from individual to collaborator, the identity is divided and whatever
constitutes a personality is transfigured or relinquished. Furthermore, both
entities must, like thunder and lightning, act as a single symposium of light
and sound.

But true to the complexities of the collaborative process and cross-
disciplinary practice in the arts, the myth of the divided child does not begin
and end in a mere "severe and multiply" affair. On his first return to the
skyworld, Dumagid was forced to bring along his wife, Dugai, and leave their
child as security for their return. It meant to surrender Ovug and to sacrifice
Dugai as no human can bear the path to the skyworld. Creative collaboration can
also be so goal-blind as to make that uncalculated risk that delivers and
consumes the eros and exigency in the creative process; cross-study in the arts
may mean threading unfamiliar terrain (or the extra-terra) and a surrender of
inherited powers.

In conversations with visual artist Noell El Farol, I came to realize that the
courageous Dugai, who takes the perilous path with Dumagid skyward, figures
prominently in El Farol's undertaking of an archeological sound recording of
ancient burial sites. Unblinking, Noell told me how he seeks to distill the
incorporeal presences in prehistoric gravesites into an installation work yet
to be unearthed, entitled "Hukay." Himself engaged in archeological studies,
Noell works in collaboration with experts in the field. "Hukay" is an
expedition, through prehistoric archeological studies, into eliciting
conversations, channeling signals, between the living and the dead. In "Hukay,"
an artifact is not a fossilized bone of ancient traditions, but a re-living and
re-creation of what has been distilled and passed on; it is almost Dugai
resurrected.

According to the Ifugao myth, Dumagid met his future wife while on a solitary
walk in the forest. For the cross-practitioner, one is likely to meet new
strategies of merging diverse disciplines while treading on transcendental
ground and allowing one's self to be "carried in by love." The eventual
marriage of music and math took place for Rowena Guevara when she decided to go
into digital signal processing. I had tossed signals with Guevara, currently
based at University of California at Berkeley's ICSI Speech Group, to talk
about her research interests. When she returns to the University of the
Philippines, she will be, like the adventurous Dumagid, ready to jumpstart a
speech research program at the DSP Lab and, like the expectant Dugai, eager
again to balance complexity and controllability in making music with technology.

Of course, in the myth there is the ghastly phenomenon of Dumagid cutting his
own child in half. In 1979, visual artist Al Manrique was assigned to document
depressed areas of Samar, Leyte and the urban squatters of Cebu. When I met him
three years ago, Manrique had embarked on the digitization of negatives that
comprise 20 years of photography. He had also started work on his "Latay"
series of digital images. In one composition, I saw his beheaded image of a
plantation worker. I visit Manrique occasionally at his office, for coffee,
dinner, to chat and to get insights on what it was like being an artist and
advocate working in the Marcos era, over 30 years ago, with refrigerator-sized
computers. In his painting, prints and digital works, Manrique has used the
human body as record of and commentary on socio-political realities.
In "Latay," like Dumagid, who willingly divides the body to let one half dwell
in the skyworld and the other, the earth, Manrique takes on the open source
model of authorship as he invites others to join him in the "digital soiree of
creating art beyond documents." Developed and stored under the most inevitably
unforgiving conditions, his hundreds of negatives, documents of an era, now beg
to be restored, a process which may take him another lifetime to accomplish.
Unless, of course, Ovug divided is re-animated in the spirit of collaboration.

In this issue, we open the magical ear and eye as we sit down with these three
Filipino artists, who cross sky and middle worlds and divide bodies in their
work. As we go outside the electronic monastery, there are no bells and
whistles, only thunder and lightning where the soul rejoices under the divided
child's chorus of signals.

In the following issue of LEA, under the baton of literary artist and
collaborator Joel Weishaus, we continue to look into the processes of
collaboration that use the Internet as artistic and curatorial domain.

From:
Leonardo Electronic Almanac    volume 10, number 5,    may 2002
LEA PUBLISHING & SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION
Editorial Address: Leonardo, 425 Market St., Second Floor, San Francisco, CA
94105 USA E-mail: <[log in to unmask]>





--
Fatima Lasay | [log in to unmask]
Digital Media Philippines http://digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph/
TeleFax: 632-434-8222 | 632-434-7981 | Mobile: 63-917-9134351
Art+Technology+Culture http://digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph/digiteer/
SyntaxError http://www.mp3.com/artists/374/fatima_lasay.html
Breathemusic http://www.mp3.com/breathemusic/


> Date:    Mon, 29 Jul 2002 08:12:26 +0000
> From:    Beryl Graham <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: News, and a job opportunity (Pavilion,Leeds)
>
> Dear List,
>
> Please find below some brief details of an opportunity at Leeds, UK.   I'm
> =
> also pleased to say that Amanda McDonald Crowley will be 'guesting' on the
> =
> list and suggesting some themes for discussion during August.=20
>
> Happy debating, and another gentle reminder that this list is for the
> debat=
> e of new media curating issues.
>
> yours,
>
> Beryl