TechnoEnvironments - Imaging TechnoEnvironments in Southeast Asia
Type
Single PanelSchedule
Session 5Thu 11:00-12:30 Room 0.19
Convener
- Arndt Graf Goethe University of Frankfurt
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- Instalasi Tumbuh (Installation of Growth) and Tamain Syair (Garden of Poems) by Tisna Sanjaya and Jeprut: Artistic reflections on New Order Technoenvironments in the 1990s Amanda Rath Goethe University Frankfurt
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Mediated TechnoEnvironments in Indonesia. Reimagining embodied knowledge and embodied practice in technological environments
Patrick Keilbart Goethe University Frankfurt
Indonesia’s response to the digital era entails both opportunities and challenges and shows how the state and the society alike navigate through policies and implementations. Mediatization is affecting more and more areas of life, and Indonesian netizens negotiate and develop everyday practices based on their socio-cultural background and imaginaries that are part of discourses of cultural modernization. These processes of negotiation and development of practices are particularly marked in the context of embodied knowledge and embodied practice. This paper investigates such processes based on two case studies, organic agriculture and martial arts, both representing long-established practices and bodies of knowledge in Indonesia. Both farmers’ and martial artists’ embodied practices and embodied knowledge are reimagined and given new meaning in Indonesia’s emerging mediated TechnoEnvironments.
- Science Fiction, Vision 2020, Industry4WRD: Technological imaginaries in Malaysia Arndt Graf Goethe University of Frankfurt
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The Social Entaglements: The Indonesian Tsunami Warning System
Irina Rafliana German Development Institute
The Indian Ocean 2004 tsunami had changed the social fabric of many epistemic communities in the domain of knowledge, science and technology, and this also includes communities at risks in coastal areas in Indonesia. As a non-indigenous system, the Indonesian Tsunami Warning System (InaTEWS) had influenced, and at the same time influenced by, the way tsunamis are imagined. Technologies and digitalization grew to become entangled in the everyday rituals and practices for the past almost two decades.
This research observes the changes in the use of digital technologies and warning system infrastructures to reduce tsunami risks, in form of seismic monitoring software, decision support system, media running texts, digital warning broadcast system, social media, mobile applications, sirens and so on. Through multi-sited ethnography, the research seeks to redescribe InaTEWS through the interconnectedness of different cross-locals, actors, emotions, machines through the substantial roles of earthquake and tsunamis waves in taking agencies, as a unique and dynamic assemblage. By using STS lens, the research is aiming at explaining the power asymmetries and frictions related with such digital changes through the materialization of tsunami and its embedded risks, and how these asymmetries influence the way InaTEWS performs.
The field work is supported by DAAD, GFZ and also DIE-PRODIGEES project on digitalization for global common goods.
Abstract
In Southeast Asia, imagining TechnoEnvironments has been part of discourses of cultural modernization that can be traced back at least to the 1970s, for instance to science-fiction literature in Indonesia and the Malay world, but also non-fictional discourses on mechanization and automation. Technical imaginaries have since also been translated into national strategies to enter the “4th industrial revolution”, such as “Malaysia 4wrd” (building on “Horison 2020” / “Wawasan 2020”), “Thailand 4.0” or “Making Indonesia 4.0”. These political visions and strategies are widely embraced as future-oriented development plans. But we also find critical perspectives on (imagined) effects of modernization, mechanization, and mediatization in a variety of artistic examinations, contributing to public discourses and imaginaries on living conditions in TechnoEnvironments. These, in turn, are widely circulated and communicated via new media technologies, creating ever more mediatized TechnoEnvironments in Southeast Asia.
In this panel, we analyze the diverse imaginaries of TechnoEnvironments as part of discourses and future orientations in Southeast Asia. This includes different actors and drivers in the creation and pluralization of creative, argumentative, and narrative discourses but also the content and form of imaginaries, which are also subject to change in emerging TechnoEnvironments. The panel seeks to investigate these interrelated thematic areas from various disciplinary perspectives within Southeast Asian Studies.