Exhibition View: Your Connection Was Interrupted, Asana Bina Seni, Taman Budaya Yogyakarta

Bising-Bising Media Bodong (Sound of Hoax)
Installation, video, and audio

Variable Dimensions

2020

Two decades after the New Order government, when the public could access information about anything while lying down, control of the media was carried out more progressively. Not only censoring, ‘they’ created a counter media to build opinions and distort the facts from what happened, which of course was done to protect ‘their’ interests.

I discovered this practice while surfing the internet while looking for information about Papua’ s socio-political and cultural conditions. I found several untrusted news portals, which present data with the same point of view: ignoring human rights violations, covering up violence by the military, reporting all things that are good about the military, cornering anti-state groups, and making readers think that the state is doing what is best for the Papuan people. Information from these fake news portals makes it difficult for people to know and understand what is happening in Papua, like the sound of a noisy exhaust that disturbs your sleep.

I made Bising-Bising Media Bodong by transforming the news headline image into a sound that came out randomly through software. I arranged it into a piece of pattern and disturbing noise music, as I felt when trying to understand what was happening in Papua.

Exhibition Review by Dewan Kesenian Jakarta