Blog written by Patricia Zimmermann, codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival and professor of cinema, Ithaca College

“Gossip moves faster than the internet,” observed Gustaff Harriman Iskandar, arts, writer, curator and founder of Common Room and the Bandung Center for New Media Arts in Indonesia.

Gustaff was presenting about the new media practices of Common Room on the Open Space Panel “ The Contingent Spaces of Performance, Performativity and Soundscapes" at the International Communication Association (ICA) conference last week in Singapore.

“Gossip is important,” Gustaff observes.  “It is part of oral culture, and oral culture is very important in Indonesia.”

Common Room is an initiative and a civil society practice in Bandung, Indonesia, designed to convene people, new media technologies, and conversations to make public space and interactive conversation accessible.  It produces exhibitions, discussions, workshops, screenings, operating within what Gustaff called “contingent spaces and contested realities.”  A central concern of Common Room is how to make networks—both virtual and real—work. 

Founded in 2003, Common Room contends that conversations matter. Gustaff identified this practice as “the politics of listening":  to facilitate space to recognize different situations and different realities through discussion.  “In Common Room, we try to be invisible to facilitate the needs of people who enter conversations.  Small interventions make everything happen by itself,” Gustaff said. As a result, Common Room floats in between institutions and communities, a forum for oral histories.

Resolutely locally situated, Common Room works in mapping practices, projects that make connections between civic empowerment, environmental sustainability, and urban ecology.  The members of Common Room see themselves as artists initiating ideas and activities as political gestures based on dialogue and listening to people to facilitate their needs. 

Against what Gustaff called “historical dementia,”  urban distress, gentrification, and “wild capitalism” in Indonesia, Common Room advocates for open commons, smart mobs, gift economies, knowledge, creativity and freedom. Gustaff contends that “wild capitalism” is rampant in Indonesia, where transnational corporations in the oil, logging and mineral extraction businesses operate without rules and regulations.

Although the democratic reforms and social revolution of reformasi in 1998  loosened up censorship, many Indonesian activists and artists have noted the enactment of a systematic process of forgetting and state-sponsored amnesia, where the nation erases history by changing names of buildings, streets, places.  For example, in 2008, 11 people were killed in a concert hall in Bandung. The building was renamed. 

At ICA,  Common Room created a live installation based on the web 2.0 notion of the “meet up”  in the Suntec Conference Center to bring the academics assembled into a collaborative Indonesian space. With mats, computers, microphones and live streaming, their site-specific live, interactive performance functioned as a meet up in the middle of the conference.  Common Room activated direct audience engagement, encouraging connections across national borders and arts/scholarly practices.

Flanked by the conference rooms and then new media art installations, Common Room put straw mats on risers in the hallway.  One of the mats was white and shiny—it was woven out of recycled toothpaste tubes.  Laptops adorned with stickers sat on low teak tables.  

Common Room members Reina Wulansari, an arts exhibitor, Addy Handy, a writer and death metal band vocalist, and Gustaff sat cross legged on the risers throughout the conference.  They interviewed the academics who ambled by to rest on the platform, and then streamed the interviews over the internet.

I asked Gustaff what the academics were chatting about with him.  “Ghosts,” he said.  “And a lot of introspection about spirituality.”  I was struck by the contrast between these interviews and the social science-oriented, quantitative methodology, power points on media research that dominated the conference.

“Practitioners are switching from working as artists to functioning more as facilitators,”  explained Gustaff.  Common Room energizes public engagements. It’s not designed for personal work, but positioned as an institution that creates open platforms in real space. 

“In Indonesia at the moment, arts culture is very contingent” Gustaff  said.  “Because there is an absence of state power in the arts and an absence of an institutional apparatus for the arts, artists and facilitators must make their own way.”  Working commercially to make a living, Gustaff, Addy and Reina collaborate on Common Room initiatives to convene people around ideas.  Common Room is actually located in a house in Bandung. “Creativity is a sign of poverty and not wealth,” asserted Gustaff.

During the three days of ICA, many academics—mostly from the so-called west--sat on the Common Room risers, fixated on their laptops with their presentation powerpoints, their backs facing Gustaff, Reina and Addy. The hallway offered no place to sit as conferees waited for panels to end. As a result, the academics used the risers as a sort of academic lounge. 

On Thursday, I noticed that a white American woman in a brown suit (rather hot for the tropics) and a  white European man in a blue sport coat and khaki pants (also heavy for the tropics) closed up their laptops and turned their bodies into the risers.  Open Space interns and other Open Space artists sprawled across the risers, reclining into conversations.

Reina sat cross legged across from them, holding a microphone and recording their conversation for live streaming.  I heard numerous papers on cross cultural communication and I read many power points on differences in media systems.  But none of these papers stayed with me as long as this image of Common Room members from Indonesia sharing conversation with academics.

This interaction evoked  the power of moving away from the professionalized solipsism of obsessive laptop usage  and edging towards re- positioning new technologies as contingent public spaces and open platforms.  This performative gesture of collaborative conversations across differences recalibrates new technologies like live streaming as necessary and urgent open spaces. 

And for me, this image of  "western" academics suited up in professional outfits that were out of sync with the climate here chatting with Reina and Gustaff materialized Common Room’s politics of listening. Gradually, the powerpoints and the netbooks are closed, and unofficial conversations open up.

Blog written by Patricia Zimmermann, Shaw Foundation Professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore,  and co-director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

A pounding rock beat mingled with the sinuous repetitions of Javanese gamelan drew me across the green plains and extreme,mind-numbing humidity enveloping the 10th century Prambanam Hindu temple complex.

I was in Yogyakarta, in Indonesia, about a two-hour flight south of Singapore, for a long weekend.  Stewart and I flew the budget airline, Air Asia, then stood in immigration, sweating and thirsty, for over an hour to secure a tourist visa and get finger printed.  The largest muslim country in the world, Indonesia’s size and complexity is staggering, with over 17,000 islands and 500 languages and dialects. Java has active volcanoes and rice paddies. 

We hired a driver, loaded up on bottled water to stay hydrated in the heat, and set off to see the two major temples, the 9th century Buddhist temple of Borobudur, the largest Buddhist stupa in the world, and Prambanan, a Hindu temple rediscovered in 1811 by surveyors working for Thomas Raffles, a key figure in Singapore’s (colonialist) history as well.

Yogyakarta, nicknamed Jogja by locals and Southeast Asians, has functioned as an arts hub for centuries, before the concept creative economy wormed into international arts policy as a plan for recovery. Art is not something precious, confined to museums and exalted for its unique individualist expression. 

In Jogja, art infiltrates and mingles with daily life, where the line between handicraft and fine art, between amateur and professional, between performance and audience, evaporates.  In this context, it makes sense that some of the most innovative contemporary Southeast Asian art and multimedia has emanated from Jogja since the reformasi democratic movement in 1998.

Wayang kulit, shows of shadow puppets accompanied by gamelan, abound at different times in the Kraton, at art institutes, at restaurants. It’s  a psychedelic experience to absorb all the brown and blue patterns of batik pouring out of the shops along Jalan Malioboro.  We took a becak, the ubiquitous bicycle-powered taxi unique to Jogja, to the Purawisata Theatre to see the Ramayana ballet accompanied by a full gamelan orchestra, with Vishnu, Sita, and Hanuman adorned in complex batik patterns overlaid on top of each other, golden crowns, and highly expressionist, mask-like make-up.

I have always been drawn to the meditative, trance-like repetitions of gamelan. It’s a music that has influenced minimalist composers like Steve Reich, and post-minimalists like the composers involved in Bang on a Can with its complex percussive rhythms, polyphonic structures, and pentatonic scales. Softer and slower than Balinese gamelam, Javanese gamelan, as our Prambanan guide Edys explained, is not explosive music.  Its harmonies are designed to calm the soul. They express the tolerance of Javanese culture. 

So I was surprised to hear gamelan combined with a rock and roll drumming at Prambanan.  Edys walked us over to the pavillon where a gamelan band played.  Six male dancers moved in the center of the circle. There were no tourists in the circle of people except us. Edys commented that very few Americans travel to Indonesia.  Although Indonesia is a huge country, Singapore, a speck in comparison, attracts nearly double the number of tourists. I asked Edys if he thought American tourists avoided Indonesia because of misconceptions about terrorism. "Terrorism?" he responded. "No, not terrorism. They stay away because of provincialism."

Edys said that the gathering was a ritual celebration meant to induce trance in the dancers.  A sinden, a female singer, chanted over the celem pung, saron demung, rebab, dedug, gong ageng, the percussive instruments of gamelan. A young man in a Nirvana (the rock band) t-shirt ripped out beats on a western drum set. 

Intense, enveloping, mesmerizing, the combination of  “western” rock style drumming with the gamelan was compelling and intoxicating. A lot of academics I know might analyze this cultural mix as an example of either hybridization or colonialization, but for me, being swept up by the sound, the heat, the humidity, the temples, it felt like neither.  It was music that washed away separations between mind and body.  It was inviting.

Edys, who shared it was his spiritual calling to be a tour guide to the Hindu temples' history, offered some insight.  He observed that western ballet and dance involves flying, leaving the earth, while Javanese dance embraces the earth, grounding all movements in the lower body.  More ecological and human-centered, with the center of the universe not the gods but the people, he claimed. Edys was worried we wouldn’t appreciate the gamelan.  Western music, he said, moves forward with melody. Gamelan, he countered, invited the listener in to a space that did not move forward but around, defined by rhythm. 

This principle of tolerance in Javanese culture infiltrated the soundscape of  Prambanan  Hindu temple.  As Edys recounted the story of the Ramayana imbedded in the intricate reliefs of the Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva temples, the late afternoon chants of the muezzin wafted from a nearby mosque.  It made me think, hybridity seems like too facile a concept to describe the complex heterogeneity of sounds  and experience here, which, in some ways, replicated the intricate patterns of batik.

The night before we flew out, we went to a restaurant on the outskirts of town recommended by the bellman at our hotel.  When we arrived, the hostess asked us what kind of music we liked.  We were confused.  We craved some gado gado, the famous Indonesian steamed vegetable salad with spicy peanut sauce.

She said, we have different music in different pavilions so you can decide where you want your spirit to be while you eat.  “Do you want classical, traditional or country?” she inquired.  I asked, “which country?”, figuring, I don’t want to be a cultural imperialist and assume country music means Johnny Cash here in Southeast Asia.

She replied with one word: country.  We picked traditional—it was a gamelan orchestra.  Later, on the way to the bathroom, I peaked into the “country” open air pavillon. 

With their stand up bass, guitars, and drums, the band played something I faintly recognized (unlike my colleague Tom over on the Mongolian Spaces blog, I have never really connected with  American country music, even though Singaporean taxi drivers seem to play it constantly).  After peeling back all the complex rhythms I discerned the melody, buried in the back: Take Me Home Country Roads.  Unlike gamelan, which is played sitting down, this band stood up, wearing brown batik shirts. But the intricate polyrhythms and the soothing sound was Javanese gamelan.