Presented at Mini-Summit on New Media Art Policy and Practice, organized by the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF) and the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA).

Before I begin, I would like to state that although I will be speaking about cultural policy and practice in Southeast Asia, I will be speaking from the Philippine perspective, and from the perspective of a country in the developing South. However, the ideas that I will be presenting today, have, I believe, a broader significance on the global process of policy making and development in the arts.

I will also be speaking from the perspective of a practising artist who regards art as a language, and language as the medium by which concepts are internalized and externalized.

It is therefore from the aesthetic position that I have analyzed the issues which I think are relevant to our meeting, and also from the aesthetic position that I have developed the ideas which I hope will challenge, empower and inspire us to imagine and enable a more equitable, just and truly creative society.

Let me begin with an analysis of culture and arts policy-making in Southeast Asia and its relation to the international dynamics. I have here three basic conditions under which policy and action has been shaped in the name of culture:

• First, is the use of culture as a tool in the implementation of the nation state and the state-centered culture in creating rules of cultural exclusion;
• Second, is political exclusion through the use of culture and cultural cooperation as Laundromat for dirty politics at national and international levels;
• And third, is the cultural integration of new media technologies and the so-called "network society" through media education, so that the processes of social appropriation, integration and acceptance will appear simply to be "social", creating conceptual and historical exclusion.

You may have noticed that I speak in terms of exclusions. I would like to explain.

Electronic and digital media and surveillance systems are endemic in advanced capitalist countries such as Singapore, the US and Western Europe. The persistence of the interconnected world system highlights the exploitative effects of these systems which are not endemic and are in fact disruptive of imperatives and needs in the developing world. A safe space for community and grassroots self-determination is shrinking as the richest capitalist countries of the world continue to advocate for so-called "digital inclusion" and the "network society." What genuine social change entails is not "access" or "networks" or "inclusion" in such narrow terms, but rather inclusion enacted as empowerment in cultural, political, conceptual and historical terms. Hence, a recognition and problematisation of the systems and rules of exclusion, of privileging, both locally and globally.

I would now like to expand on these three basic conditions under which policy and action has been shaped in the name of culture.

First, on cultural exclusion through nationhood.

Here, the cultural role of the state is emphasized as many countries in Southeast Asia emerge from colonial domination. With culture seen as important in establishing nationhood, many cultural agencies and their counterparts were established almost immediately following the declaration of independence, while Thailand is an exception as a country that was not colonized, but the creation of a government agency for culture in Thailand was in response to a new independence after the system of absolute monarchy was overthrown.

The naming of culture within a government agency also highlights the socio-political approach to culture as well as shifts of placement within the nationhood agenda. Malaysia placed culture with youth and sports, and then shifted to arts and tourism. Singapore placed culture within community development and later within information and the arts.Vietnam placed culture along information and sport and later separated sport from culture.

These placements have implications in terms of funding and development priorities by the state. Overall, we see that culture has largely been state-directed and the implications of its place within the overall national agenda may be summed as such:

• First, culture has an educative role in forming national identity;
• Second, culture is often synonymous with arts and heritage conservation. In the Philippines, there is a special committee under the state agency for culture and arts for minority cultures, and in Indonesia, cultural values are included in heritage;
• Third, culture is linked with arts industries or creative industries and has become integral to tourism, commodification and display;
• Fourth, culture has also been socially defined in terms of public entertainment, community leisure activity, sports and youth activities;
• And fifth, state cultural agencies often act as patrons bestowing project funds and rewards to the artistic community.

The power of the state in directing culture and its position as patron of culture and the arts is largely responsible for the systematic exclusion of all forms of cultural practices that engender difficult aesthetic decisions and those that challenge biases that are in favor of established "nationhood" aesthetic values whether these be western, international or traditional values.

One effect is that artists become unwilling to take risks or change which might upset funding opportunities. Thus, artistic and cultural frameworks for policy and action have often focused on advertising, publication and promos, constructing buildings and monuments, protecting cultural properties, and mounting display exhibitions.

A very recent example of this is my experience with the National Commission for Culture and the Arts' National Committee on Visual Arts.

I was invited to work with the previous committee in 2006 to transform a project called "Websining" from a "digital art contest" into a country-wide platform for dialogue and creation around social, political and aesthetic issues in digital and computer art. In 2007, I proposed to include Software Art in the contest category and to hold self-organized dialogues among artists, activists and cultural workers outside Metro Manila.

In 2008, the old national committee was on its last term and this third year was a very crucial year in the process of the project's transformation. However, this was destroyed by the new incoming committee chairman who constantly criticized the project implementation and threatened to blacklist us in the grant-giving agency.

The new committee chairman insisted on a change in the concept and implementation of the project to suit their idea of "promos and showcases", adhering to their "publicity" interpretation of the "art in public spaces" theme dictated by the grant-giving agency. Instead of the intensive reflection, dialogues and group creation we originally proposed in 4 regions across the country, they wanted an exhibition of digital art at a huge shopping mall in Metro Manila and a series of digital art workshops.

The project was terminated at a meeting called by the national commission where it became clear that the new committee was not interested in the project as we have been invited to conceive it but only in controlling the funds.

The success and eventual failure of this project presented the problem of government structures, policy and funding on one hand, and on the other hand, the creative context, the way people within the national committees think about the creative practices. The difference between the old and the new national committees was so glaring, and while all committees are composed of artist practitioners and cultural workers, there is no doubt that even practising artists can take on the parochial and sort-sighted mind-set often attributed only to bureaucrats.

It is our intention to continue this project as we have conceived it even without funding. Nevertheless, centralized patronage systems and a state-centered culture have resulted in the exclusion of valuable cultural practices that lie outside the conservative nationhood agenda.

I would now like to dwell on the second form of exclusion, political exclusion thru culture, whereby culture and cultural cooperation is used as Laundromat for dirty politics at national and international levels.

I speak of this exclusion within the context of the perceived urgency of countries to move towards "modernization" to become a fully qualified member of the so-called "international community."

The Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement was signed by the Philippine President and the Japanese Prime Minister on the eve of the Asia-Europe Meeting or ASEM 6 in Helsinki. The treaty reduces if not totally eliminates tariffs on industrial and agricultural products, covers issues on investment, competition policy, and government procurement. Most alarmingly, the treaty turns the Philippines into a dumping ground of Japan's waste products, reducing down to 0% tariff rates on clinical waste, municipal waste, sewage sludge, pharmaceutical waste and wastes from chemical and allied industries. Behind the gloss of cultural and other public events at ASEM 6, the signing of this mega-treaty was made without the knowledge, scrutiny and participation of the Filipino people.

The state-centered agenda towards "modernization" and "cooperation" must bear greater scrutiny by all, including artists, as the state is being controlled by private, often foreign, corporate interests or by foreign governments. The effects are various exclusions that have resulted in extreme and rapid social dislocations and the disintegration of established systems of social justice.

In 1999, Pasuk Phongpaichit, professor of economics from Thailand, described four biases embedded in the state-centered culture: the concept of ethnicity in the implementation of the nation-state; the dominance of the capital city; the growth of male gender bias; and the enthusiasm to become "modern". She explains,

"People who find themselves at the ‘wrong’ end of these axes have often suffered from forms of civil disability, political disenfranchisement, social exclusion and cultural suppression. The extreme case are the women in hill people communities. Often they are still denied citizenship and civic rights. Their access to education and other forms of social capital is poor. In many cases they are forced either by economic necessity or slave-like exploitation to enter the lower levels of the sex industry, from which they emerge as the group with the highest susceptibility to HIV-AIDS. In other cases, they have been museumised as tourist attractions. This is cultural exclusion in a peculiarly fierce form."

I see this fierce peculiarity as a form of political exclusion. When cultural events regard economic, political and security issues as boring, and encourage artists to just have fun with new technologies or just enjoy expressing themselves, then we deny people their exercise of power and political commitment.

State cultural agencies also create political exclusion by appearing to encourage political activism among artists. For example, the Philippine National Commission for Culture and the Arts launched the digital arts contest in 2005 under a series of themes: environment, fiscal crisis, poverty alleviation and corruption, while concerned artists and cultural workers protest against the continuing state control, corruption and manipulation of the central culture agency itself.

Culture, cultural cooperation and creative expression, when it is used as an escape from political commitment, is a form of political exclusion, a privileging of culture to neutralize our participation in the political agenda, as if culture were an entity removed from the political life of society. This is how policy for culture and arts has been shaped in past decades, and this needs to change.

And finally, I go to the third condition, the conceptual and historical exclusion produced by a broad media education that seeks to uncritically integrate new media technologies of communication into the cultural life of the world population.

We can trace the origins of this conceptual-historical exclusion through two documents created under the UNESCO: one is the Grunwald Declaration on Media Education in 1982, and the other, its follow-up, is the Paris Agenda or the 12 Recommendations for Media Education in 2007. Both documents, if scrutinized carefully, actually attempt to define "media" and "communication" as a propaganda system and to install a watertight system of educational conditioning which gives no real space for any kind of autonomous and decentralized creative communication.

In these recommendations for media education, the technical history and conceptualization of media technology within the genealogy of control systems is neutralized by focus on its social use and integration almost without question.

This is a form of conceptual and historical exclusion, as the Grumwald Declaration states in a horribly disempowering way, "Rather than condemn or endorse the undoubted power of the media, we need to accept their significant impact and penetration throughout the world as an established fact, and also appreciate their importance as an element of culture in today’s world", while the Paris Agenda reflects a control freak's manual, appearing to support cultural diversity, but actually contradicting this diversity by its specification of various forms of monitoring systems, coordinated actions, promotion of best practices, investigations on the role and behavior of people in media education, all under an extremely paternalistic framework of education.

This framework is in effect a centralized propaganda system, whereby media and communication is used to project on a mass audience certain ideas considered desirable by the experts, authorities and stakeholders responsible for their transmission.

This centralized propaganda system has been used by the Philippines' lead agency for culture by sponsoring a culture summit in 2005 with the theme "The Power of Arts and Media Education in Breaking the Cycle of Corruption and Poverty," with resource speakers from a government primarily responsible for corruption and poverty in the country.

In contrast to propaganda, communication in an artistic context is an open-ended exchange - conversations - of mental images between individuals.Nowhere in the Grunwald and Paris documents is communication proposed in this light, and nowhere in the Grunwald and Paris documents is critical dialogue proposed between those that have been identified as stakeholders and those that are outside of this stakeholdering system.

But this media education agenda will be pushed at IGF in India in 2008, thru Alliance of Civilizations in Istanbul in 2009, thru more media conferences in Finland and New York, and thru the European Media Education Charter to be extended internationally.

International agencies that produce conventions, declarations, recommendations and agendas are extremely influential, occupying the top of the policy and practice hierarchy, setting standards of "modern values" and "best practices" by which the state and its citizens may be conditioned to aspire for. This hierarchy of policy development must be challenged.

A way forward: aesthetics

At a recent forum on gender advocacy and networking, Anita Gurumurthy from Bangalore spoke of a process where there are shifting points of determinability, where political scoping and positioning as per scenario is in action.

For me, this is aesthetics in action.

Here, I see aesthetics not in terms of superficial cannons of beauty but rather in terms of an internal means of equilibrium or balance in response to the changing environment. Aesthetics is a dynamic process of scoping and positioning, and not a fixed lexicon of best practices, monitoring systems, desirable outcomes and coordinated actions. Such a dynamic understanding of aesthetics and its recognition within all systems of policy and action, ensures the place of self-determination in the realization of genuine cultural diversity.

In the articulation of an alternate development in Thailand, criticisms raged against the existing government machinery and the state-based culture. What I wish to emphasize here is Thailand's concept of "rights" as strategy for undermining forms of dominance built into state-based culture. This concept of rights, according to Professor Phongpaichit, which includes the cultural right to defy modernization, is significantly different from the western versions.

Under aesthetics, we have an internal system of rules that respond differently to different conditions. This is why the concept of "rights" in Thailand is different from the concept of "rights" in the west. We need more safe spaces and freedoms to articulate more of these differences, to challenge the biases of a state-centered culture and the biases of the global agenda.

Civil society itself also needs to realize aesthetics in action. In international discourse, civil society has become the tool by which the exclusions I mentioned have been propagated in even the most remote communities they have penetrated. Civil society must challenge the discourse of stakeholdering, transparency, accountability and efficiency insofar as they are all still based on centralized systems of control. Aesthetics functions only with increased decentralization and autonomy in communities.

Within such a vision of aesthetics, there can be no global agenda or universal system of patronage for the arts simply because both the definition of art, the role it is intended to play within the community and the way it should be funded are an integral part of the aesthetic dialogue within the community itself.

Aesthetics gives back power to the community, to that delicate but durable bond that grows among people who discover that their core identities intersect with those of others in different ways.

This is my case, and my challenge. Thank you. Maraming salamat sa inyong lahat.

Fatima Lasay
korakora.org
fats@korakora.org
digiteer@ispx.com.ph