After quite some time, I’m thinking of approaching the issue of self-expression through space–creating a place for voices from Indonesia–via multimedia. I’m always interested in a different medium and one of the drives for me going to London is to learn different ways of producing media beside still and film. I’ll need to look for the academic support–but I had a talk with my cousin who’s a communication officer for the government and she’s very frustrated as our government still using a traditional approach to convey messages to the public. For example, my cousin is responsible to create a campaign for kids and teenager to snack fruits at school and at home. But instead of using fun visualization and familiar language with the target, they stick to a conventional, full of text campaign that no one will even bother to read. From there I was thinking of making an interactive media or website to make fashion and its discourse ‘easy’ and find to digest. So I ask my cousin to help me in some ways on journalism, as I trust her ability and if this is something that I’ll continue in the future it would be beneficial to have a partner that in the same interest.
So I contacted another friend back home to help me with website development, design and editorial. I told friends and collaborators from my past projects about the idea and asked for their hands so I got a good team in Indonesia. I plan on finishing the concept in May/June so the team can start the preparation before or right after I arrived in Jakarta.
A lot of ideas came to my mind, I want to highlight Indonesian who rarely but deserve to be in the spotlight. I want to reinterpret Indonesian folklores to contemporary media like editorial, fashion films or VR. I want to make a section on the website full of traditional clothes with fun editing (e.g. Yu-gi-Oh!, pokemon or Cardcaptor Sakura power cards) with interactive settings so reading the history of the clothing won’t be boring. I want to make documentation on big fashion event and identity, but more through the social and psychological approach. The discourse that I want to talk about will be around body, identity, subculture and representation.
So I did some research about the interactive website on Awwwards.com (an awards website for design, creativity, and innovation on the internet) to discover unique interactive websites that I can probably base on (and trust me this website is hella fun!! I played many games, read stories and stuff from on the websites listed).
This was a fun research and intermezzo in one place. I’m happy 🙂
Beside of website, I’m thinking of holding an exhibition in Jakarta to present the work as I’m trying to make it into different mediums so I think it would be better to set up the proper way to enjoy them. This will be a lot of work and I need more collaborators/partners to work with, as well as experts to make sure that I’m doing it the right way without appropriating the culture (as traditional attire often sacred to certain culture) and Kirk from DLL to help me with the pathway–what to learn, which one first, etc. Meanwhile, I’m also going to cooking the concept more.