The Multiple eXposure Project is a multimedia, multi/trans/inter-disciplinary artistic practice and research-based initiative that explores the many layers of image-making, participatory photography, visual ethnography, and performative encounter(s) between the image and the spectator; the subject and the viewer. As what the name of the project implies, this endeavor is profoundly interested in the notions of the “multiple” and the “exposure” both in their literal and symbolic sense.
Firstly, The Multiple eXposure Project seeks to examine the multiple potentials of image-making or photography (digital and analogue; still and moving) as a medium, a performance, and an instrument of social engagement and (ex)change, and the overlapping of it with other disciplines. As part of its exploration, this project involves a series of visual, photographic or lens-based workshops in collaboration with non-profit, grassroots volunteer groups. The concept of the multiple is also applied under the framework of collaborative work – of bring together multiple individuals with multiple philosophies into a plurality of shared experiences.
Secondly, The Multiple eXposure Project is equally drawn to the idea of “exposure” (subjection, experience, vulnerability, coverage, documentation, and so on) in the process of socially-engaged image-making that exposes what needs to be exposed; clarifies the obscure; and concerns itself with a gamut of critical questions and discursive issues of representation.
Through image-making, we aim to expose and get exposed.
Public Interrogation: Outside the White Cube (December 1-31, 2015)
Public Interrogation:
Outside the White Cube
Organized by The Multiple eXposure Project
www.themultipleexposureproject.co.nr
Location: Public Spaces, Metro Manila, Philippines
Date: December 1-31, 2015
December 1-2 (8pm-10pm): EDSA Avenue cor. Kamuning Rd. Quezon City
December 5 (7pm-9pm): Ayala-Paseo Pedestrian Underpass, Makati City
December 13 (6pm-7pm): Alabang-Montillano Footbridge, Muntinlupa
Public Interrogation:
Outside the White Cube is an alternative, traveling, curatorial project that features image-based works across different disciplines and media by emerging artists whose works discuss the notion of the “public” and its complexities.
What is public? What counts as public? The “public” is a multi-layered concept defined differently depending on how the term is used and framed. It is a notion devoid of singularity and is, grammatically speaking, a terrain of contradictions. As a noun and an adjective, the public constitutes the people, masses or community, and suggests anything that is staged, accessed, or seen out in the “open.” The public can also be used as a verb to describe something one does, as in make public or publicize, suggesting the movement or shift from the inside (private) to the outside (public). Paradoxically, however, the same term also points to the limits of such openness and movement. Given that it simultaneously refers to something “involving and provided by the government”, the public is always at risk of becoming merely an apparatus of the sovereign state and its institutions, thus making the flow of its production, distribution, and consumption partial and counterproductive.
Public Interrogation:
Outside the White Cube seeks to re-frame the practice of curating and spectating images outside the exclusionary, institutional borders of the “white cube” or gallery space. Public spaces are used as an exhibition site to stimulate a mode of spectator experience that revolves around displacement of the passersby (public) from their “habitus” by interrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic. We alter a familiar public space and transform it into an unusual, dialogic site for image projection and exhibition, taking advantage of its accessibility and site-specificity in order to redefine the ways the spectators look at and engage with images. Adopting “guerilla urbanism” as a curatorial strategy, we make sense of the immediacy of the “public” and reflect upon its context, meanings, and intersections with representation, place, and discourse. In so doing, we intervene and reformat aspects of the urban landscapes and emphasize the “counter-spectacle” in art viewing and appreciation. This project also underlines the inherent ephemerality of an open-to-the-public display in relation to time and space. As a “traveling” exhibition which heavily depends on projection technology and public space as its “frame” or “canvas", this project celebrates the momentary nature of image-viewing, consumption, and mobility in the metropolis at a time of constant flux and transition.
Video Arts
Borders - Anne Murray (USA)
The Separation Loop - Leyla Rodriguez (Germany)
Gnomonicity - Amitesh Grover (India)
36&71 - Anthony Stephenson (USA)
Sully - Marbella Carlos (Canada)
You See Davis - Rembrandt Quiballo (Philippines, USA)
Untitled (Sleeping People in a Train) - Hannah Reber (Germany)
Into the labyrinth - Geordy Zodidat Alexis (France)
The Safest of Hands - Clint Sleeper (USA)
Hunt/Find - Dani Salvadori (UK)
Leaving My Skin - Ellen Wetmore (UK)
Presence of Absence - Matt Lee (India)
Untitled – Mohammad Namazi (UK, Iran)
Still Images / Photographs
Right Time Right Place - Robert Rutoed (Austria)
Peripheral Strangers - Julie Dawn Dennis (UK)
De Staat (The State) - Maarten Tromp (Netherlands)
Ruinophilia - Anna Garrett (UK)
Circling the Square - Arturo Soto (Mexico)
The Spectator, the Viewer, the Observer and the Perceiver –
Francine LeClercq (USA)
Magic Rooms - Carlos Collado (Spain)
Date of Consumption - Lita Poliakova
Street Photography - John Robert Luna (Philippines)
Walls - Elena Efeoglou (Greece)
Fitting Room – Megan Mace (South Africa)
Street art you can take home (for free) - Lorenzo Bordonaro (Portugal)
Victim – Solomon Eko (Nigeria)
Performance Videos / Public Interventions
Balloon Performance - Louise Winter (UK)
Somarts Mural Dance - Johanna Poethig (USA)
Unpatentable Multitouch Aerobics - Liat Berdugo (USA)
Disclaimer at Manchester Art Gallery - Laura Gower (UK)
Sustaintability – Dani Lamorte and Veronica Bleaus (USA)
Animations / Digital
Job Interview - Dénes Ruzsa and Fruzsina Spitzer (Hungary)
In Between - Sofia Makridou, Theodora Prassa (Greece)
Decadence of Nature - Olga Guse (Russia)
AsianGirl N40°42'54.488" W73°59'30.313" - Victoria Elle, Rocky Li, and Jennifer Mehigan (USA)
Get Featured in our Blog!
We are currently expanding the content of our blog and we would like to feature multidisciplinary/multimedia artists, photographers, image-makers, visual artists, performers, and so on, their portfolio, artistic practice, and research interests. The feature section serves as a virtual, archival gallery and a platform for free promotion. This call is open to all artists – individuals or groups; amateur or professional – anywhere in the world.
If you think your works are relevant to The Multiple eXposure Project, send your artist statement, sample of your portfolio, photos, videos, press releases, and other related materials to themultipleexposureproject@gmail.com.
Moving Still: The Multiple eXposure Project Zine 2.0
The sophomore issue of The Multiple eXposure Project zine has been uploaded! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE.
New media and video artists included in the publication are as follows:
Jessica Buie /
Liat Berdugo /
Laura Hyunjhee Kim /
Nicola Hands /
Tony Radin Jacobs /
(c) merry /
Talia Link /
Justin Zachary /
Adrian Errico /
Matteo Pasin /
Jean-Michel Rolland /
Manasak Khlongchainan /
Boris Contarin /
Hüseyin Çife /
Suman Kabiraj /
Patrick Moser /
Francesca Fini /
Aaron Oldenburg /
Benjamin Grosser/
You Qi /
Dénes Ruzsa /
Fruzsina Spitzer /
Fran et Jim /
Amelia Johannes /
Heidi C. Neubauer-Winterburn /
Jess, Lau Ching Ma /
Scott F. Hall /
Eleni Manolaraki /
Elise Frost
Harrison Banfield
Jack Rees /
Daehwan Cho /
Wu Siou Ming /
Masako Ono /
Bárbara Oettinger
I
n this sophomore issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine,“Moving Still”, we feature a heterogeneous breed of new media and video artists whose experimental and provocative works emphasize the potency of “videos” or “moving images” in the exploration and expansion of self-representation in the discursive flow of transmission and mediation – from the screen to the spectator; and the perceptive to the conceptual.
Selected artists here make use of the “screen” as medium and performance space. By displaying, curating, and performing in front of the screen, self-image-formation is enacted while relying on playful encounter with unknown spectators in order to weave different webs of interpretation. In this regard, the screen operates as an intermediary in the artist’s performance that brings connections to identities, personal narratives, history, everyday politics, and imaginaries.
The symbiotic relationship between the screen and the subject cultivates the construction of an image or spectacle that is consumed – temporally and spatially - in a doubling of intermediation. They deflect and reflect a plethora of shifting, hybrid pretexts about ourselves within the digital ecology where the delineating lines between the public and the private; the human and the mechanical; and the material and the virtual boundaries become blurred.
Given their hyperreal structure, these video performances, visual interventions, and recorded choreographies trigger a mode of mediated encounter that heavily manipulates moments of reality – of space and time. Intimacy and presence are concomitantly altered as these pieces can be incessantly scrutinized by the gaze of many anonymous viewers floating in the digital currents, allowing us to re-locate the individual and re-think about the concept of selfhood more fluidly.
Self-as-Subject: The Multiple eXposure Project Zine 1.0
We are pleased to announce that the very first issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine is now accessible online! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE. Feel free to share!
Below is the list of contributors (artists and writers) included in the publication:
J.D. Doria /
Dr. Sayfan Giulia Borghini /
Aldobranti /
Olga Sidilkovskaya /
Ana Rita Matias /
Anne Paternotte /
Rudi Rapf /
Leigh Anthony Dehaney /
Laura Knapp /
Jennifer van Exel /
Derya Edem /
Arushee Agrawal /
Utami Dewi Godjali /
Çağlar Uzun /
Mahmoud Khattab /
Noel Villa /
Dawn Woolley /
Teresa Ascencao /
Kalliope Amorphous /
Katrina Stamatopoulos /
Gaspard Noël /
Florian Tenk /
Petra Brnardic /
Sana Ghobbeh /
Alonso Tapia-Benitez /
Libby Kay Hicks /
Agent X /
Rina Dweck /
Yoko Haraoka /
Claire Manning /
Pietro Catarinella /
Anne Beck /
Gabriel Orlowski /
Ralph Klewitz /
Anthony Hall /
Alessandro Martorelli /
Robin Gerris /
Carol Radsprecher /
Veronica Hassell /
Daniela Olejnikov /
Jayson Carter /
Nathaniel St. Amour /
Jonathan Armistead /
Piotr Boćkowski
"Who are you?” “Who am I?” “Who do I think I am?” “What am I made of?” There is nothing simple about such inquiries as they pose a number of phenomenological and ontological issues.
To ask yourself or someone about self-definition is to deal with its vicissitudes and fluidities, oscillating between the ego and the alter ego; the naturalistic (Hume) and the metaphysical (Kant); and the reflexive perception of one’s body and the relational introspection with the “Other.” The self is, arguably and fundamentally, a complicated subject matter. It is an ever-evolving object, a corporeal being, an affective body, a precarious entity, a discursive phenomenon, and so forth.
Divided into three interrelated chapters, this zine features oeuvres by artists and writers from different localities around the world and, as what its theme implies, is an exploration of the “self” and its manifold permutations – its presence, identity, representation, liminality, and (dis)embodiment - in this day and age of digitality, hypermobility, and hyperreality.
In Chapter 1, The Self as I/Other, authors reflect on the dialectics between the ego and the alter ego and the multitude of ways the “self-as-subject” is defined by both internal and external contingencies, or philosophically speaking, by the binaries – “I” vs. “not-I.” Many of these selected pieces are visibly entangled with the act of self-mirroring, which is inherently reflective and performative: it involves the constitution of subjectivities based on visual imaginary reflected on the mirror that does not necessarily resemble the complex structures of the material body. What I highlight here is the notion of self-perception (internal) in relation to one’s experiences and the (external) world. As Anthony Giddens puts it, “A person's identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor - important though this is - in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual's biography…cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing 'story' about the self.” (54).
In Chapter 2, The Fetishized Self, we see interconnected self-representations that examine the convergence of idiosyncratic fantasies with the phantasmagoria as an offshoot of the fetishized commodity. When I refer to the term, phantasmagoria, I emphasize the volatile strings of imaginations through which the public and the private dimension of identity becomes obscured, blurring the demarcating lines between reality and fantasy. This section functions as a provocation of the fetishization of self and the centrality of the individual as authority. Through role-playing, the self, as a fetish object imbued with power and discourse, becomes an agency displaying and interrogating the politics of gender, sexuality, identity, and bodily desire.
Finally, in Chapter 3, The Fragmented Self, the fragmentation of identity framed within the digital, virtual, or hyperreal context is explored. Featured works here represent the various modes the anonymity, simulation, multiplicity, and control in data superhighway allow the transformation of the self into fragmented, hybrid subjects. The concept of “self-fragmentation” also revolves around the nature of post-modernism: the absence of absolute truth and the presence of disembodied self.
Bibliography:
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.
Featured Artists
Click on the image to view the post.
Secondhand Wonderland: Hyperreality in Siem Reap, Cambodia
In today’s global travel market, Angkor Wat is often depicted as that rarity, an exotic treasure, the seventh wonder of the ancient world. Over the past few years, tourism has dramatically exploded in Angkor Wat, many thanks to Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider films, and Siem Reap has turned into one of the liveliest cities in Cambodia, becoming this pretentiously first-world, tourist haven ideal for leisure and recreation.
Hundreds of hotels (many of them luxurious five-star palaces), restaurants, spas, guesthouses, art galleries, internet cafes and bookstores have sprung up around Siem Reap, catering to the needs of foreign tourists. With an annual increase of 20% year-on-year more than 2 million tourists have arrived in Siem Reap to see the temples of Angkor in 2013. [1]
Yet amidst these images of economic progress hides an overwhelming irony. It is absurd and disturbing that while Cambodians struggle for survival, tourists feast on extravagant buffets in five-star hotels, shop in decadent craft stores and enjoy full-body massage and facials, Cambodians living in Siem Reap, in reality, remain to be exceedingly poor. It is common to see beggars in the streets and elders selling goods and pirated books at roadside stands.
It is in this economic, social and, most notably, political context of Cambodia that this paper revolves around. Anchored on the author’s travel experiences in Cambodia, this essay looks into the clear and obscure; absurd and disturbing images of (hyper)reality in Siem Reap, one of Cambodia’s main cultural assets where the famous Angkor Wat Archeological Park is located. It also examines how this “contested” tourist space has become, borrowing from Umberto Eco’s articulation, “an allegory of consumer society and a place of absolute iconism” (48) as well as a cultural wonder that serves the consumers’ (Westerners, in general) needs for entertainment.
Having said that, the author’s standpoints are influenced mainly by Umberto Eco’s discourse on hyperreality and Theodor Adorno’s views about the culture industry, but with a little twist. Unlike the two Western theorists, the author positions himself as a subjective third-world citizen entering another third world domain.
Spectacle of Ironies
There is no better way to describe Siem Reap but a vast spectacle. In fact, the journey of getting there, if you happen to travel by land and cross the Poipet border from Aranyaphratet, Thailand, is memorable and shocking for the appearance and impression it gives to its visitors. Take for instance the immigration department at the border. This space is like a microcosm of a typical third-world tourist consumer society – a market full of buyers and sellers, negotiations and transactions here and there. It is not unusual to see fixers around. Corruption seems to be a serious and legitimate business. You can easily negotiate your way out of the border with immigration officials who are more than willing to put stamps on your passport in exchange of grease money. What’s even more astonishing is that people around don’t care at all, as if nothing’s happening.
Riding tuktuk on a rocky road
Once you have crossed the checkpoint, confounding scenes of contradiction are going to greet you. Along the bustling street full of underprivileged Cambodians exchanging trades and traversing the Poipet border, you can spot two huge casinos: Golden Crown Casino and Poipet Casino Resort. The “national highway” from Poipet to Siem Reap is also not even asphalted. The main roads are a rocky, crater-marked collection of dust and dirt. However, as you approach the city of Siem Reap, the road condition drastically improves with no transition at all. From scenes of backwardness, you will be greeted by astonishing images of progress. Glitzy five-star hotels, some of them copied from Angkor Wat structures, are erected throughout the city. Flashing lights and huge billboards adorn the streets, and a long stretch of restaurants and spas will feast your eyes.
Both strange and disturbing, the city of Siem Reap has a Las Vegas feel to it, mimicking a first-world tourist destination. For those who want to relax or get entertained, there’s a wide variety of options to choose from. You can either go to a theater that presents “traditional” Cambodian dance; visit a museum, a cultural village and art galleries; or go to a casino or golf country club. Apparently, these superficial developments are designed to gratify the desires of foreign visitors who are all in search for authentic touristic experience. The reinforcement of hyperreality in Siem Reap’s tourism industry creates “a form of liminal and heightened experience, of seeking an experience of authenticity outside the structure of mundane, ordinary, alienated work life” (MacLeod, par. 8). It is shaped by globalized dreams, images and fantasies. The “package holiday” democratized by Western countries is a corollary of this phenomenon.
Angkor Wat, Authentic What?
As a bankable, exotic tourist destination, the same old tricks of capitalism or culture industry are blatant in Siem Reap. Getting around the city requires a lot of spending. Before you can enter the Angkor Wat, foreign visitors are required to pay for entrance fee. The prices of ticket vary on how many days you plan to visit the Angkor area: $20 for one day; $40 for 3 days or $60 for one week.
Depending on your budget, bus tour packages are being offered in many travel agencies. Local tour guides who can speak major languages (English, Spanish, French, etc.) can be hired usually for $20 per day, while motorbikes and tuktuks can be arranged through guesthouses for single or multiple days. Inside the Angkor Wat, horse carriages and even elephants are also available for tourists to ride on. In this respect, Siem Reap, similar to parks like Disneyland, becomes an “an allegory of the consumer society, a place of absolute iconism… place of total passivity. Its visitors must agree to behave like robots” (Eco 48). This means that you can “only” enjoy the beauty and attraction of the entire city if you spend money. Tourism in Siem Reap, in the first place, signifies consumerism.
Elephant for hire
So as expected, many of the travel agencies and hotels in Siem Reap capitalize on Angkor Wat’s prestige and historical value. They offer tour packages for visitors who want to have an “authentic” travel experience and genuine feel for the destination. The famous Angkor Village Hotel and Resort, for instance, boasts that what they provide to travelers are “exotic Indochinese ambiance and architecture built in “true” Khmer tradition.” That assertion, of course, is highly debatable. Is there really anything “true” or “authentic” about this hotel? None at all. Everything is absolutely fake: man-made gardens, wooden walkways, Lotus ponds and airconditioned rooms decorated with Cambodian arts and crafts.
The presentation of Khmer dance in Angkor Village’s Apsara Theater is also superficial. For one thing, the traditional dance is taken out from its original context. Dancers, singers and musicians perform in an airconditioned theater in front of foreign viewers who know nothing about the meaning of the dance’s hand gestures and functions.
Musicians playing at Amazon Angkor Restaurant
Tourists posing with Apsara dancers
Even the authenticity of a tourism-driven cultural heritage like Angkor Wat is contentious because, while most of structures in Angkor Wat remain to be “authentic,” there have been restoration and preservation efforts that already changed some of its original elements. There is also “nothing” authentic about Cambodian tourism officers who clad in traditional dresses welcoming guests; souvenir shops selling replica and sculpture of Angkor Wat and Bayoun; spas offering “oriental” massage; and restaurants serving “authentic” Khmer food. Roaming around Siem Reap, hence, is like a pilgrimage filled with images of hyperrality or, as Umberto Eco puts it, the world of the “absolute fake,” in which fakeness is not just meant to imitate reality, but there’s an accompanying desire to enhance it. In this case, “absolute unreality is offered as real presence” (49).
In the newly-constructed Angkor National Museum, for example, guests are given the chance to take on a “journey back in time from the creation to the highest point of civilization…enchanced by a realistic atmosphere.” [2] This so-called “realistic atmosphere” means replicating Angkor Wat’s elements in both its interior and exterior. The building is a pastiche and bricolage, putting together under one roof the most “essential” Angkor features like honeycomb towers, standstone walls and plenty of architectural references such as bas reliefs, Apsaras and other elements from Angkor Wat’s past heritage. The wide collection of sculptural artifacts is juxtaposed with interactive exhibits using high-tech displays and video screens to provide visitors a deeper knowledge of customs and traditions of the ancient Khmer empire. Without a doubt, this museum no longer pretends it is imitating reality, but “within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced” (Eco 43).
Angkor National Museum
Designed like a cultural mall of some sorts, the Angkor National Museum also offers other amenities. At the first floor is a Souvenir Shop that sells “genuine” Cambodian arts and crafts and other gift items. There is also a Coffee Shop which serves coffee and snacks. Visitors can visit the spa to relax while deciding on whether to have traditional Cambodian or international cuisine at the delectable restaurants located in the complex. A “Travel Discovery Center” is strategically built inside where visitors can choose a range of tour packages.
Not faraway from this museum is the Cambodian Cultural Village, which brings together all the miniatures of famous heritage buildings, customs and practices of different ethnic minorities in Cambodia. There are full scale models of different Cambodian architectural types, including various styles of huts, hill tribe houses, pagodas and temples. There’s even a Wax Museum that features people, scenes and figures from Khmer culture and history, and a manmade Floating and Fishing Village that imitates the houses of Cambodians living along Tonle Sap Lake. On top of that, tourists, as they roam around the park, can watch traditional dance performances, rituals, wedding ceremony show, circus, acrobat, elephant shows and many others.
The falsehood of this park, bluntly put, is enjoyed in a situation of “fullness” or horror vacui, where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred (Eco 8). Inside such a postmodern landscape, the surface and even quantity of touristic experiences seem to have exceeded profundity and quality. Everything about Cambodian culture is displayed in this made-up village so there is no longer need to visit the “real” space for an exotic experience. A hyperreal experience of Cambodian culture in the park is equally enjoyable.
The Culture Industry of Hyperreality
Clearly, in Siem Reap’s culture industry (Angkor Wat being its main “cultural asset”), it is the “experience” that’s being sold. In order to sell the place and generate income even better, the power of media and technology is reinforced, in which the Cambodian culture is being commodified as uniform as a whole and in every part. It is no wonder why, in Lonely Planet and other international travel guides and magazines, Siem Reap is always portrayed as a charming, mysterious, exotic (and other “othering” terms) tourist destination. Brochures and pocket guides, which act as advertising tools, are given to visitors for free. Mass-(re)production of art and cultural goods such as paintings and replicas is also quite rampant in Siem Reap. Angkor Wat-inspired souvenirs are sold in front of temples. You can also purchase pirated books and DVDs about Angkor Wat and the history of Cambodia.
Caucasian tourist in Ta Phrom ruins
A group of tourists with their tour guide in Angkor Wat
Such mass reproduction of goods renders the acquisition and experience of luxury and mobility available to a larger audience. By purchasing a particular good, the consumer buys a souvenir of their experience of desire for another culture or lifestyle. According to Theodor Adorno, “the irreconcilable elements of culture...are subordinated to one end and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry. It consists of repetition. That its characteristic innovations are never anything more than improvements of mass reproduction is not external to the system” (136).
As a consequence, Angkor Wat is reduced to being an “object” rather than a “subject.” And this transformation is not a natural occurrence but a product of a centralized power of global tourism corporations and media companies. It should be taken into account that most of, if not all, five-star hotels, restaurants, spas and other businesses in Siem Reap are owned by foreign investors. Oddly, the Angkor National Museum is operated by a Thai company, whereas the Angkor Village is owned and designed by a French architect. It is not Cambodians but rather multinational corporations and global tourism industry players that control the production and distribution of cultural goods and benefit a lot from the income and popularity of Siem Reap as a tourist haven.
Thus, if there’s anything Siem Reap teaches us, it is the contradictions and challenges facing many heritage tourism landscapes in third world countries. That while the influx of foreign tourists generates billions of dollars to Cambodia’s economy, it only transforms Angkor Wat into a mere masterpiece of the past; an illusion of the present; a secondhand wonderland alienating its own people who still struggle for survival.
That’s what you call hyperreality to the nth level.
Adorno, Theodor. The culture industry: selected essays on mass culture. London: Routledge, 2001. Eco, Umberto. Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality. London: Vintage, 1998.
MacLeod, Scott. "Gazing at the Box: Tourism in the Context of the Internet and Globalization.” 2001. 14 September 2014. <http://scottmacleod.com/anth250v.htm>
The Multiple eXposure Project is run by a small group of image-makers, visual artists, and researchers coming from different backgrounds, with a wide range of interests.
profile
Please be patient, this page is under construction.
The Multiple eXposure Project incorporates theory and practice in image-making and publishes zine and scholarly articles, essays, stories on photography and visual narratives.
Collaboration with individuals and groups coming from different disciplines and backgrounds is of utmost importance at The Multiple eXposure Project especially in the workshops, exhibitions, and other projects. We underscore the potency of shared, ethical, participatory artistic process and accordingly of collaborative authorship by incorporating dialogical, performative interaction into image-making, bridging the gaps between the subject and the medium.
We curate our works in physical and digital configuration, applying methodologies on photo curation (of still and moving images) that are wide-ranging, alternative, experimental, and non-paradigmatic. To be specific, we delve into the concepts of photo curation, not just as praxis of selection or organization of images, or an archival method, but as a social intervention.
One of the crucial components of The Multiple eXposure Project is its practical initiative framed within the context of volunteerism, participation, and engagement. We believe in the collective power and benefits of sharing one’s skills and expertise with those who need them. We provide free photographic workshops, in cooperation with non-profit organizations, which are aimed at empowering marginalized individuals through photography or image-making.
PUBLICATION
The sophomore issue of The Multiple eXposure Project zine has been uploaded! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE.
Description: In this sophomore issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine,“Moving Still”, we feature a heterogeneous breed of new media and video artists whose experimental and provocative works emphasize the potency of “videos” or “moving images” in the exploration and expansion of self-representation in the discursive flow of transmission and mediation – from the screen to the spectator; and the perceptive to the conceptual.
New media and video artists included in the publication are as follows:
Jessica Buie /
Liat Berdugo /
Laura Hyunjhee Kim /
Nicola Hands /
Tony Radin Jacobs /
(c) merry /
Talia Link /
Justin Zachary /
Adrian Errico /
Matteo Pasin /
Jean-Michel Rolland /
Manasak Khlongchainan /
Boris Contarin /
Hüseyin Çife /
Suman Kabiraj /
Patrick Moser /
Francesca Fini /
Aaron Oldenburg /
Benjamin Grosser/
You Qi /
Dénes Ruzsa /
Fruzsina Spitzer /
Fran et Jim /
Amelia Johannes /
Heidi C. Neubauer-Winterburn /
Jess, Lau Ching Ma /
Scott F. Hall /
Eleni Manolaraki /
Elise Frost
Harrison Banfield
Jack Rees /
Daehwan Cho /
Wu Siou Ming /
Masako Ono /
Bárbara Oettinger
The first issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine is now accessible online! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE. Feel free to share!
Description: Divided into three interrelated chapters, this zine features oeuvres by artists and writers from different localities around the world and, as what its theme implies, is an exploration of the “self” and its manifold permutations – its presence, identity, representation, liminality, and (dis)embodiment - in this day and age of digitality, hypermobility, and hyperreality.
Featured artists and writers in the zine are as follows:
J.D. Doria /
Dr. Sayfan Giulia Borghini /
Aldobranti /
Olga Sidilkovskaya /
Ana Rita Matias /
Anne Paternotte /
Rudi Rapf /
Leigh Anthony Dehaney /
Laura Knapp /
Jennifer van Exel /
Derya Edem /
Arushee Agrawal /
Utami Dewi Godjali /
Çağlar Uzun /
Mahmoud Khattab /
Noel Villa /
Dawn Woolley /
Teresa Ascencao /
Kalliope Amorphous /
Katrina Stamatopoulos /
Gaspard Noël /
Florian Tenk /
Petra Brnardic /
Sana Ghobbeh /
Alonso Tapia-Benitez /
Libby Kay Hicks /
Agent X /
Rina Dweck /
Yoko Haraoka /
Claire Manning /
Pietro Catarinella /
Anne Beck /
Gabriel Orlowski /
Ralph Klewitz /
Anthony Hall /
Alessandro Martorelli /
Robin Gerris /
Carol Radsprecher /
Veronica Hassell /
Daniela Olejnikov /
Jayson Carter /
Nathaniel St. Amour /
Jonathan Armistead /
Piotr Boćkowski
Workshops
Excerpts from digital and analogue photography workshops at Koseli School, a center for slum and street children in Kathmandu, Nepal (January 2015). These participatory workshops incorporated photography with "playing" and performance.
Visual Intervention
Speech Acts and the Politics of Repetition SeriesDescription: This series explores the repetitive nature and patterns of speech acts and ritualized rhetorics of some of the world’s powerful and controversial figures by incorporating twice-recorded video footages with open-source background music.
Through the process of repetition, new meanings of the moving images and spoken texts are simultaneously (re)created. Specific words are on purpose repeated to generate a multitude of views and reviews and to deconstruct the stability of language. As a mode of visual intervention, these absurdly distorted and edited images/videos are also meant to make a dialogue with, distract, entertain, annoy, and disturb the viewers on the other side of the screen, while highlighting the intersections and contradictions between reality and absurdity; speech and power of the speaker.
Feel free to re-play and re-share!
#1 >>> Obama: You Kinda Screwed Up My Ending But That's Okay.
Video, animated gif, and stills created by Sherwin Altarez Mapanoo
Background music courtesy of einzimmersound
DIGITAL ART
Urban DomesticationDescription: An attempt to represent the psychological state of the subject who was performing to exist (and persist) as a corporate animal in the harsh and precarious dog-eat-dog world of the urban jungle.
Note: Point or click on the image to view its original version.
Climbing Up The Walls (and Ladders)
Paths to Nowhere | Horror Vacui
Secondhand Wonderland: Hyperreality in Siem Reap, Cambodia
In today’s global travel market, Angkor Wat is often depicted as that rarity, an exotic treasure, the seventh wonder of the ancient world. Over the past few years, tourism has dramatically exploded in Angkor Wat, many thanks to Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider films, and Siem Reap has turned into one of the liveliest cities in Cambodia, becoming this pretentiously first-world, tourist haven ideal for leisure and recreation.
Hundreds of hotels (many of them luxurious five-star palaces), restaurants, spas, guesthouses, art galleries, internet cafes and bookstores have sprung up around Siem Reap, catering to the needs of foreign tourists. With an annual increase of 20% year-on-year more than 2 million tourists have arrived in Siem Reap to see the temples of Angkor in 2013. [1]
Yet amidst these images of economic progress hides an overwhelming irony. It is absurd and disturbing that while Cambodians struggle for survival, tourists feast on extravagant buffets in five-star hotels, shop in decadent craft stores and enjoy full-body massage and facials, Cambodians living in Siem Reap, in reality, remain to be exceedingly poor. It is common to see beggars in the streets and elders selling goods and pirated books at roadside stands.
It is in this economic, social and, most notably, political context of Cambodia that this paper revolves around. Anchored on the author’s travel experiences in Cambodia, this essay looks into the clear and obscure; absurd and disturbing images of (hyper)reality in Siem Reap, one of Cambodia’s main cultural assets where the famous Angkor Wat Archeological Park is located. It also examines how this “contested” tourist space has become, borrowing from Umberto Eco’s articulation, “an allegory of consumer society and a place of absolute iconism” (48) as well as a cultural wonder that serves the consumers’ (Westerners, in general) needs for entertainment.
Having said that, the author’s standpoints are influenced mainly by Umberto Eco’s discourse on hyperreality and Theodor Adorno’s views about the culture industry, but with a little twist. Unlike the two Western theorists, the author positions himself as a subjective third-world citizen entering another third world domain.
Spectacle of Ironies
There is no better way to describe Siem Reap but a vast spectacle. In fact, the journey of getting there, if you happen to travel by land and cross the Poipet border from Aranyaphratet, Thailand, is memorable and shocking for the appearance and impression it gives to its visitors. Take for instance the immigration department at the border. This space is like a microcosm of a typical third-world tourist consumer society – a market full of buyers and sellers, negotiations and transactions here and there. It is not unusual to see fixers around. Corruption seems to be a serious and legitimate business. You can easily negotiate your way out of the border with immigration officials who are more than willing to put stamps on your passport in exchange of grease money. What’s even more astonishing is that people around don’t care at all, as if nothing’s happening.
Riding tuktuk on a rocky road
Once you have crossed the checkpoint, confounding scenes of contradiction are going to greet you. Along the bustling street full of underprivileged Cambodians exchanging trades and traversing the Poipet border, you can spot two huge casinos: Golden Crown Casino and Poipet Casino Resort. The “national highway” from Poipet to Siem Reap is also not even asphalted. The main roads are a rocky, crater-marked collection of dust and dirt. However, as you approach the city of Siem Reap, the road condition drastically improves with no transition at all. From scenes of backwardness, you will be greeted by astonishing images of progress. Glitzy five-star hotels, some of them copied from Angkor Wat structures, are erected throughout the city. Flashing lights and huge billboards adorn the streets, and a long stretch of restaurants and spas will feast your eyes.
Both strange and disturbing, the city of Siem Reap has a Las Vegas feel to it, mimicking a first-world tourist destination. For those who want to relax or get entertained, there’s a wide variety of options to choose from. You can either go to a theater that presents “traditional” Cambodian dance; visit a museum, a cultural village and art galleries; or go to a casino or golf country club. Apparently, these superficial developments are designed to gratify the desires of foreign visitors who are all in search for authentic touristic experience. The reinforcement of hyperreality in Siem Reap’s tourism industry creates “a form of liminal and heightened experience, of seeking an experience of authenticity outside the structure of mundane, ordinary, alienated work life” (MacLeod, par. 8). It is shaped by globalized dreams, images and fantasies. The “package holiday” democratized by Western countries is a corollary of this phenomenon.
Angkor Wat, Authentic What?
As a bankable, exotic tourist destination, the same old tricks of capitalism or culture industry are blatant in Siem Reap. Getting around the city requires a lot of spending. Before you can enter the Angkor Wat, foreign visitors are required to pay for entrance fee. The prices of ticket vary on how many days you plan to visit the Angkor area: $20 for one day; $40 for 3 days or $60 for one week.
Depending on your budget, bus tour packages are being offered in many travel agencies. Local tour guides who can speak major languages (English, Spanish, French, etc.) can be hired usually for $20 per day, while motorbikes and tuktuks can be arranged through guesthouses for single or multiple days. Inside the Angkor Wat, horse carriages and even elephants are also available for tourists to ride on. In this respect, Siem Reap, similar to parks like Disneyland, becomes an “an allegory of the consumer society, a place of absolute iconism… place of total passivity. Its visitors must agree to behave like robots” (Eco 48). This means that you can “only” enjoy the beauty and attraction of the entire city if you spend money. Tourism in Siem Reap, in the first place, signifies consumerism.
Elephant for hire
So as expected, many of the travel agencies and hotels in Siem Reap capitalize on Angkor Wat’s prestige and historical value. They offer tour packages for visitors who want to have an “authentic” travel experience and genuine feel for the destination. The famous Angkor Village Hotel and Resort, for instance, boasts that what they provide to travelers are “exotic Indochinese ambiance and architecture built in “true” Khmer tradition.” That assertion, of course, is highly debatable. Is there really anything “true” or “authentic” about this hotel? None at all. Everything is absolutely fake: man-made gardens, wooden walkways, Lotus ponds and airconditioned rooms decorated with Cambodian arts and crafts.
The presentation of Khmer dance in Angkor Village’s Apsara Theater is also superficial. For one thing, the traditional dance is taken out from its original context. Dancers, singers and musicians perform in an airconditioned theater in front of foreign viewers who know nothing about the meaning of the dance’s hand gestures and functions.
Musicians playing at Amazon Angkor Restaurant
Tourists posing with Apsara dancers
Even the authenticity of a tourism-driven cultural heritage like Angkor Wat is contentious because, while most of structures in Angkor Wat remain to be “authentic,” there have been restoration and preservation efforts that already changed some of its original elements. There is also “nothing” authentic about Cambodian tourism officers who clad in traditional dresses welcoming guests; souvenir shops selling replica and sculpture of Angkor Wat and Bayoun; spas offering “oriental” massage; and restaurants serving “authentic” Khmer food. Roaming around Siem Reap, hence, is like a pilgrimage filled with images of hyperrality or, as Umberto Eco puts it, the world of the “absolute fake,” in which fakeness is not just meant to imitate reality, but there’s an accompanying desire to enhance it. In this case, “absolute unreality is offered as real presence” (49).
In the newly-constructed Angkor National Museum, for example, guests are given the chance to take on a “journey back in time from the creation to the highest point of civilization…enchanced by a realistic atmosphere.” [2] This so-called “realistic atmosphere” means replicating Angkor Wat’s elements in both its interior and exterior. The building is a pastiche and bricolage, putting together under one roof the most “essential” Angkor features like honeycomb towers, standstone walls and plenty of architectural references such as bas reliefs, Apsaras and other elements from Angkor Wat’s past heritage. The wide collection of sculptural artifacts is juxtaposed with interactive exhibits using high-tech displays and video screens to provide visitors a deeper knowledge of customs and traditions of the ancient Khmer empire. Without a doubt, this museum no longer pretends it is imitating reality, but “within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced” (Eco 43).
Angkor National Museum
Designed like a cultural mall of some sorts, the Angkor National Museum also offers other amenities. At the first floor is a Souvenir Shop that sells “genuine” Cambodian arts and crafts and other gift items. There is also a Coffee Shop which serves coffee and snacks. Visitors can visit the spa to relax while deciding on whether to have traditional Cambodian or international cuisine at the delectable restaurants located in the complex. A “Travel Discovery Center” is strategically built inside where visitors can choose a range of tour packages.
Not faraway from this museum is the Cambodian Cultural Village, which brings together all the miniatures of famous heritage buildings, customs and practices of different ethnic minorities in Cambodia. There are full scale models of different Cambodian architectural types, including various styles of huts, hill tribe houses, pagodas and temples. There’s even a Wax Museum that features people, scenes and figures from Khmer culture and history, and a manmade Floating and Fishing Village that imitates the houses of Cambodians living along Tonle Sap Lake. On top of that, tourists, as they roam around the park, can watch traditional dance performances, rituals, wedding ceremony show, circus, acrobat, elephant shows and many others.
The falsehood of this park, bluntly put, is enjoyed in a situation of “fullness” or horror vacui, where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred (Eco 8). Inside such a postmodern landscape, the surface and even quantity of touristic experiences seem to have exceeded profundity and quality. Everything about Cambodian culture is displayed in this made-up village so there is no longer need to visit the “real” space for an exotic experience. A hyperreal experience of Cambodian culture in the park is equally enjoyable.
The Culture Industry of Hyperreality
Clearly, in Siem Reap’s culture industry (Angkor Wat being its main “cultural asset”), it is the “experience” that’s being sold. In order to sell the place and generate income even better, the power of media and technology is reinforced, in which the Cambodian culture is being commodified as uniform as a whole and in every part. It is no wonder why, in Lonely Planet and other international travel guides and magazines, Siem Reap is always portrayed as a charming, mysterious, exotic (and other “othering” terms) tourist destination. Brochures and pocket guides, which act as advertising tools, are given to visitors for free. Mass-(re)production of art and cultural goods such as paintings and replicas is also quite rampant in Siem Reap. Angkor Wat-inspired souvenirs are sold in front of temples. You can also purchase pirated books and DVDs about Angkor Wat and the history of Cambodia.
Caucasian tourist in Ta Phrom ruins
A group of tourists with their tour guide in Angkor Wat
Such mass reproduction of goods renders the acquisition and experience of luxury and mobility available to a larger audience. By purchasing a particular good, the consumer buys a souvenir of their experience of desire for another culture or lifestyle. According to Theodor Adorno, “the irreconcilable elements of culture...are subordinated to one end and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry. It consists of repetition. That its characteristic innovations are never anything more than improvements of mass reproduction is not external to the system” (136).
As a consequence, Angkor Wat is reduced to being an “object” rather than a “subject.” And this transformation is not a natural occurrence but a product of a centralized power of global tourism corporations and media companies. It should be taken into account that most of, if not all, five-star hotels, restaurants, spas and other businesses in Siem Reap are owned by foreign investors. Oddly, the Angkor National Museum is operated by a Thai company, whereas the Angkor Village is owned and designed by a French architect. It is not Cambodians but rather multinational corporations and global tourism industry players that control the production and distribution of cultural goods and benefit a lot from the income and popularity of Siem Reap as a tourist haven.
Thus, if there’s anything Siem Reap teaches us, it is the contradictions and challenges facing many heritage tourism landscapes in third world countries. That while the influx of foreign tourists generates billions of dollars to Cambodia’s economy, it only transforms Angkor Wat into a mere masterpiece of the past; an illusion of the present; a secondhand wonderland alienating its own people who still struggle for survival.
That’s what you call hyperreality to the nth level.
Adorno, Theodor. The culture industry: selected essays on mass culture. London: Routledge, 2001. Eco, Umberto. Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality. London: Vintage, 1998.
MacLeod, Scott. "Gazing at the Box: Tourism in the Context of the Internet and Globalization.” 2001. 14 September 2014. <http://scottmacleod.com/anth250v.htm>
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The Multiple eXposure Project is a multimedia, multi/trans/inter-disciplinary artistic practice and research-based initiative that explores the many layers of image-making, participatory photography, visual ethnography, and performative encounter(s) between the image and the spectator; the subject and the viewer. As what the name of the project implies, this endeavor is profoundly interested in the notions of the “multiple” and the “exposure” both in their literal and symbolic sense.
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