Made for YIVF #4 - Yogyakarta International Video Festival
An interactive videoinstallation consisting of: videoprojection, microphone, computer.
Actor: Bagus ”timbil” Budiarto, programming in Pure Data: Andreas ”ucok” Siagian

Inter-action on both a formal and another level. What is this level? Is it the Dutch colonial
past of Indonesia and a current renegotiation of this past? Is it the languages that are tought,
intertwined, used and transformed? The distance to initiative, streching over a known
line towards another. Place of contact beyond knowledge. Yours.

We see a projected video image of an indonesian man, somehow muted, doing yoga poses, praying, smoking or wandering around landscapes of a temple, a river and a ”beringin” tree. He only looks at us, but he is not communicating. Or cannot.

But if the spectator interacts with the video-installation, by speaking into the microphone, the image suddently changes, and the same man appears in a former Dutch colonial neighbourhood in Yogyakarta. He tells us a brief sentence to us in english:

 ”People abroad is always saying that Indonesia is beautiful, but I don´t know what they think about Indonesian people”(in english).

If the person speaking into the microphone raises her voice, the man begins to speak javanese, and asks us a question, for instance:

 ”What is your religion?”(in javanese).

 The questions and sentences change in random order, from ways to encounter a stranger, to observations.