Browsing Virtual Galleries

Arsip DGI: Priyanto Sunarto, Poster “Pameran Gambar Cetak Saring”, 1975

By Anissa S. Febrina, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta, Thursday, September 17, 2009

You have the masterpieces, you are overwhelmed with art and you want to share them all with the world.

But with money and space always a consideration, what is the best place to store them?

Think digital – build your gallery or museum in the ultimate space: cyberspace.

On the Internet, anyone can browse the pictures and learn about art with a click of a mouse. It is perhaps the future of art archiving – not really a replacement, and more than a supplement, but rather a complement to existing or planned physical museums and galleries.

Seasoned graphic designer Hanny Kardinata is one of the artists carrying this vision.

His dream of an Indonesian Graphic Design Museum (MGDI), for which he has already picked out a physical site in South Jakarta’s Ciganjur, had to be delayed as he gets together the means and resources.

In the meantime, he is building his museum online, on a website he set up in 2007 from his home in Tangerang’s Bintaro.

“I want to build a museum where young people can learn about the history of Indonesian graphic design. They have only ever been introduced to the international history of the subject,” Han explained.

“Choosing to go online helps provide access for a lot more people to gain information on what Indonesian graphic design is all about – its history and development,” said Han, adding that it was initially a form of temporary storage, which later grew to be a complement to the planned physical museum.

Unexpectedly – and rather unconventionally – the online archive is now practically a museum, hosting digitized graphic design works from Indonesia from the 1930s through to today. You enter by simply typing the address in your browser; you can then explore a wealth of graphic design works.

It makes it convenient too: There is no need to travel any distance to view an old stamp from the 1940s bearing the image of one of the earliest pieces of Indonesian graphic design work, or to take a look at the work of senior graphic artists such as A.D. Pirous or Prijanto Sunarto.

Arsip DGI: Priyanto Sunarto, Illustration “Empat Kerbau”, 1969

Anyone researching a specific subject can also browse a wealth of academic papers and theses open for all. And unlike researching in a library, it is possible to engage in an online discussion with fellow students, lecturers and even practitioners in the field.

Indeed, Han seems to be on track to putting Indonesian graphic design on the global map, as his virtual museum also getting plenty of hits from browsers abroad.

“One of the strategies is to include an archive on the history of international graphic design,” he added.

So far, the virtual museum has been built using the free blog service WordPress. Han’s initial resources were his own archive; the collection later expanded to contain more and more digitized old works, as well as extra material submitted by contributors.

The online archive also features a who’s who of the Indonesian graphic design world, through the personal pages of designers from the 1970s to today.

Han and his team are considering developing it into an independent website to be launched early next year at the latest, partly so it can host entries for next year’s Indonesian Graphic Design Award.

“Online submissions will be added to the blog while the physical item will be added to the collection of the future physical museum,” Han explained. “In the future, the expansion of the collection will be done more systematically and not rely solely on me.”

Despite the success of the online archive, the original dream of the physical gallery, to be built at painter Arifien Neif’s Chandari Creative Cluster, lives on. Once completed, MDGI will be the world’s second museum dedicated to graphic design; so far, the only other one is the Netherlands’ Breda.

Arsip DGI: Tjahjono Abdi, Brochure “Laras Antar Bangsa”, 1982

While MDGI is striving to move from online to offline, the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA) is working in reverse.

A non-profit cultural organization that opened a documentation center and library for visual art in Yogyakarta since 1995, the institution recently launched its online archive through its Multimedia Data Exhibition at Central Jakarta’s National Gallery.

“We have been trying to digitalize our archive since 2008 in a bid to preserve the collection,” IVAA executive director Farah Wardani said.

The strong earthquake that hit Yogyakarta in 2006 sparked concerns over the fate of the IVAA collection and led to its managers thinking of building a new archiving platform system online.

Working with a grant from Hivos and the Ford Foundation, IVAA, which focuses on contemporary visual art, wants to do more than just digitalize its collection.

“As soon as the digitalization process of our own archive is completed next year, we will open ourselves to contributors – of course with extra editing and selecting on our part,” Farah explained, adding that it would probably develop into a Wiki-like platform.

Currently, with the help of 10 other full-time employees and some volunteers, Farah is classifying the current archive into multimedia, identity, creative industry, youth, public and alternative space.

The online collection ranges from scanned versions of old research reports and theses on contemporary visual art, images of artworks, recordings of past exhibitions, discussions and interviews with artists, as well as collections of video art.

“It is important to compile all the existing works and disseminate them to the public so more people can build more works based on them,” Farah said.

Another initiative worth mentioning is the Indonesian Virtual Museum. Rein in your imagination – it is not yet, as the name suggests, a website where you can actually have the experience of visiting a museum through fancy 3D videos and simulations. But it is just as informative nonetheless.

Compiling images and data from various sources, the initiative, also supported by Hivos, wants to introduce history through the online medium. Aside from a sort-of curated theme-based collection ranging from the story of legendary spy Matahari to national figures such as Mohammad Hatta and Ong Hok Ham, the site also hosts online exhibitions on local topics such as the history of Jakarta’s Jatinegara.

Managed by only three people, the virtual museum has yet to develop into a place people can visit for a full Indonesian history archive. Despite their present shortcomings, MDGI, IVAA and the Indonesian Virtual Museum are proof that maintaining existence in the virtual world helps preserve historical works in general, and in the art world in particular.

Such initiatives could well develop into something like the more advanced one already developed in Germany. No, there is no need to fly to Europe to browse the collection of the virtual museum of modernism nrw.

On entering the website, visitors are taken to a compilation of 392 works by 276 artists in 14 museums spread across 10 locations in Germany’s North-Rhine Westphalian.

The website aims to be more than just a virtual storage room of modern art from the museums’ collections. It takes visitors to its four rooms, where they can browse by artist or by works.

The virtual museum of modernism nrw invites its visitors to stroll through exhibition rooms, and the museum platform nrw allows visitors to explore and research the region’s collections of international modern art.

With a platform developed by NRW KULTURsekretariat, art historians, archivists, web developers and designers as well as photographers and graphic designers, the website allows art lovers to explore its rich collection in a unique way.

Browse as you will works by Magritte to Matisse, Baumeister to Basquiat. And as each page opens, you can add them to your own personal collection.

Well, of course, not to be hung on your wall or to decorate your home. But from there, one can build and organize specific texts and images of the selected works as digital files.

If you crave the real thing, the website provides further information on where the original work is kept, complete with information on how to plan your actual visit.

So, when time or money prevents you from experiencing art in the conventional way, just remember, some of it is accessible with just a click of your mouse.

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Some online art archives and museums:

Indonesian Visual Art Archive
http://www.ivaa-online.org

Indonesian Graphic Design Museum
http://dgi.or.id

Indonesian Virtual Museum
http://www.museumvirtualindonesia.com

North-Rhine Westphalia museum’s platform nrw http://www.nrw-museum.de

Sumber: The Jakarta Post » Browsing virtual galleries

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