Tembi contemporary Gallery, Yogyakarta

Visits to artists encouraged me to formulate better and further the concept of VIRTUAL FOUNTAINS and what networked performance means. It also showed me that if the project is based on contribution and collaboration, it needed to be done in stages. So Scotia and I made an installation performance at Tembi contemporary Gallery, followed by an artist talk and few days later I gave a workshop (next post).

The installation performance was closely connected to the gallery’s two ponds. Beautiful art space!  Plastic bags full of water hung over the ponds (people use them here for drinking). Two of them contained a goldfish.  There were 2 simultaneous projections on the walls behind the ponds:

– video of village people, grouped by age, drinking, mixed with images of waterfalls (from plenty to scarcity), ending on an image of drought
– animated loop of Scotia and I drinking from plastic bottles, using internet platform Upstage, with participation of Marlena Corcoran as a remote performer in Munich, performing/responding to me in real time. When the water diminished in the other projection, a wall of plastic bottles gradually covered the frame.

A soundtrack built up, consisting of a common ‘choosing’ rhyme (‘I love him, I love him not’ in 3 languages: Bahasa Indonesian, English and French) layered in crescendo and gave rhythm to Scotia for developing a movement variation inspired by water usage and then, piercing the bags (with same idea of plucking petals from a daisy) creating waterfalls from each into the ponds. This continued until only the bags with the fish remained. At this point, 2 fish appeared on UpStage saying ‘I love the world, I love it not’ and developed a short ‘on-line performance’. Scotia released the fish into the ponds and piled up all plastic bags. The cartoonesque fish on UpStage then introduced my artist talk about VIRTUAL FOUNTAINS. – photos by Elly Mangunsong –