Three art installations aim to promote non-digital interaction among city-dwellers, writes Aneeta Sundararaj
ARTISTS Matthieu Mertens, Callen Tham and Kyle E Yon Kyle have two things in common. Firstly, all three are artists. Secondly, they are using their craft to ignite creativity among city folk.
The idea they have is very simple: They want people in the city to move past the screens of their smartphones and engage in face-to-face conversations that could spark creative ideas. To do that, the trio have now combined their craftsmanship in Shape Your City, a campaign by Heineken to inspire city dwellers to express themselves through non-digital interaction.
The installations were first displayed at Hin Bus Depot in Penang on July 30 and have now made their way to various locations in Kuala Lumpur.
DISTORTED VIEW
The aim of such a programme is to create functional installations to help breathe life into unexpected and often neglected spaces in the city. A case in point is a breathtaking installation called Koleidoscope by Themancalleduncle, whose real name is Callen Tham. The installation comprises rotatable mirrored panels. When you rotate these panels, you distort the image that’s reflected and get a new point of view of our urban surroundings.
“It’s an abstract way of looking at a city,” says the 49-year-old native of Sabah, adding: “I want people to look at that and then come up with their own interpretation.”
Although this piece suggests that Tham is a serious man, a glimpse into his history reveals something altogether different. For one, he’s a self-made man, having left Sabah for Kuala Lumpur straight after school. Seeing and seizing all the opportunities that came his way, he worked hard and today, owns and manages three companies. Very early on, he learnt a big lesson about prioritising what was important and says, tongue-in-cheek: “Don’t buy a girl a pizza on the first date. At almost RM50 per meal, there’s very little left when you have only RM100 in your pocket.”
INCREMENTAL HOUSING
Developing another perspective to how things are seen is also a skill that Kyle E Yon Kyle has mastered. Born in Malacca, Kyle says that as a child, whenever he was asked what he’d like to be when he grew up, his answer was “artist”.
Convinced by the adults around him that artists are often poor, he was asked to make an “Asian decision” and choose a profession instead. At the time, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport was also being built. Duly inspired by this structure, he decided to become an architect.
However, it wasn’t all smooth-sailing for Kyle at architecture school in Melbourne, Australia. As part of his training, he tells the story of the time he was required to design a ski resort, which had to have a unique feature — a golden flagpole. When Kyle asked for a budget within which to work, his client was insulted and asked Kyle how he questioned him about a budget. Perplexed by this involuntary affront to the rich man’s ego, Kyle also realised that, in future, he wanted only to work on designs and properties that focused on the need for incremental housing without destroying social structures that are in play.
What, precisely, does that mean, though? To illustrate, Kyle shares about the time he worked on aboriginal housing. The clients had a simple enough request: A stove. When one was installed, to his surprise, the clients switched on all four hobs and put a kangaroo on top of it.
“They used it as they would a cooking pit in the ground,” he says, once our laughter dies down. Eventually, Kyle modified the design and created an outdoor kitchen where there was a space in the ground to build a proper pit.
In the years since this lightbulb moment, Kyle’s completed his post-graduate qualifications in architecture and learnt other lessons with the foremost being, to recognise what is sometimes not obvious. He smiles and explains this curious statement: “I was teaching in a local college recently and showed my students a photo of a carpark. I asked them to describe what they saw. They saw a ground that was not tarred. Too many cars. None saw the security guard sitting in a plastic chair in the hot sun. We don’t notice them because they’re foreign workers. We choose not to see it.”
SYNTH CITY
That same need to promote non-digital connections is also what’s driving Biji-Biji Initiative’s piece called Synth City Table. Using the idea of the bar as the central collective hub, the challenge German-French engineer Matthieu Mertens and his teammates faced, was to create an environment that inspires conversations and forges new connections among Heineken’s consumers.
In a practical sense, when you approach Synth City Table and touch parts of it, you will trigger various touch-sensors. This will generate light and sound, which encourages guests to interact and connect with one another. “It’s a collective jam session,” explains Mertens.
DUALITY
Today, all the lessons this landscape architect has learnt can be crystallised into the following question: How can we adapt to the brief that changes? It’s the foremost question Kyle asks whenever he creates a design. One answer is the two-piece installation he designed and created for the Shape Your City campaign. It’s made from shipping pallets and called Palletpixels by Pow Ideas.
The idea is for city dwellers to understand the duality of life in a city like Kuala Lumpur.
“On the one hand, you have something as fascinating as Chow Kit,” says the 30-year-old. “It’s the seedier side of the city but one that has the most interesting market and very good food. On the other hand, you have something like KLCC Park. But you’re not allowed to do this and that. It’s the Yin and Yang of a society.”
Keeping that in mind, the black version of the installation represents the dark and gritty aspects of urban dwelling. On the other hand, you have the white version of the installation, which represents a clean and pristine interpretation of the city.
Describing this two-piece installation as being “very instagrammable”, Tham interjects to point out the non-digital aspect of it. Reinforcing this point, Kyle says: “This is to make people more tactile. We hear a lot, we see a lot. But we don’t feel our city. Touch is a choice, it has texture to it.”
As Mertens concludes: “We want people to talk about our pieces. We want them to experience them and then say to their friends, ‘Eh, come. Join us. Let’s play.’”