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: FIRST DAY COVER for KARYA SENI ARCA AWAM - 2021 : THE (UP)ENDING OF THE DIGITAL WORLD: WAWASAN 2020 AND THE MILLENNIUM BUG : AT THE DAWN OF A NEW MILLENNIUM, OUR SPAN OF CONTROL IS ALMOST LIMITLESS : THE CONTRADICTIONS OF POSTCOLONIAL STATEHOOD : MALAYA-1 : MEGA 2020 : LINEAR NOISE : THE ARCHIVE

A.H SENSIBLE ︎ The imaginary horizon which both surrounds and passes through the Observer's eye.

G.H The horizon which touches the Earth at the Observer's position.

MEGAPROSTHESIS ▪︎ CHIN KAR YERN

The megaprosthesis is designed to reproduce the form and function of a removed large segment of the city. Slow but substantial improvements in the design and surgical implementation of these devices have advanced the capacity to restore the city's functional abilities. The essential challenges in national reconstruction using endoprostheses include modularity, early stability, biocompatibility,biomechanical compatibility, and durable fixation; these can, ideally, be overcome by osseointegration of the interface and adapting to the physiological condition. The history of national megaprostheses presents unique concepts distinct from those related to other extremities, and improvements that have been made over the past decades will guide the development of new futures.
C.H RATIONAL ︎ The plane which passes through the centre of the Earth.

G.H LOCAL ︎ The visible boundary between Earth and sky, notable intrusions such as trees, mountains, and buildings.

G.H APPARENT ︎ The apparent boundary between Earth and sky, a distant line with no intrusions.

Wawasan 2020 was Malaysia’s horizon. Announced in 1991 by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, it served as a prescription for a young nation caught in the rancour of its teenage years. Wawasan 2020, like other promises of development in Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, was the vehicle to bring Malaysia into the future – it promised to deliver a mature, unified, developed, and prosperous nation by the year 2020.

Wawasan 2020 was the culmination of Mahathir’s policies – the New Economic Policy for a just economics, the Look East policy in Asian excellence – with the added sparkle of the new ideology of Bangsa Malaysia. To this end, Wawasan 2020 was translated to the masses – children sang songs and made drawings, artists were mobilised to picture the future, stores were named in its honour. In concrete, Wawasan 2020 also left its footprint in infrastructure and transport. In the more fanciful (yet, also, totally serious) versions of this development fever, by 2020, Malaysia would have a highway leading to the rest of the Asian land continent, communication satellites, submarine fibre-optic cables and even flying cars. It would be the centre of a new world, defined by its connection to everywhere else.

After 2020, why Wawasan 2020, yet again? The cultural products of Wawasan 2020 have been spun to exhaustion, what is there left to say?

Let us instead consider Wawasan 2020 as representation. Wawasan 2020 is – to borrow the phrase from architectural historian Reinhold Martin – a cipher, “encod[ing] a virtual universe of production and consumption, as well as a material unit, a piece of the universe that helps to keep it going.” It both is, and represents, the new. It matters insofar as it is able to stand in for a bevvy of contradictory ideas in the hopes of capturing significance, including the adjective word-soup of its description, the leftist ideals, the neo-liberal realities. The Vision is both the vehicle and its movement, but also, it doesn’t really matter.

If we read Wawasan 2020 as cipher and as representation, then we must read Wawasan 2020 as laden with a call to form. Beyond marking epochal futurity and new temporalities, it took on solid mediums to circulate and exist in the world. We see this in the proliferation of speeches, seminars, websites, books, art, architecture, infrastructure etc; the list does not end. In some ways, to exist in relation to Malaysia in the 1990s to 2000s was to exist in relation to Wawasan 2020, whether through allusion, explicit citation or even denial. To understand the stakes of Wawasan 2020, we must simultaneously acknowledge its relation to the state and decontextualise its state-centeredness. We must reject the monolith, and instead pluralise the ways of visioning the utopic plan offered.

It is with this provocation that we invite you to participate in wawasan.directory: a project to reimagine the possibilities and potentialities of Wawasan 2020 and make disciplinary and formal agendas anew. wawasan.directory brings together artists, architects, designers, musicians and writers to create speculative histories and alternative futures. To tell a story of Wawasan 2020 is to engage in disjuncture, anachronism and lateness. Between fiction and fact, we occupy the space of conjecture, opinion and memory: this is the tide of the Wawasan dream.

CONTRIBUTORS

AMANDA GAYLE (@am.gayle) is a graphic designer - slash - artist who makes books, posters, and ‘pieces’ (beware of disintegration).

CHIN KAR YERN is a researcher/writer with an interest in postcolonial history and errantry, sound production, and game design. He graduated from Williams College. He aspires to design a game about running a food stall.

CHUAH CHONG YAN (b. 1992, Malaysia) is a multidisciplinary artist currently working in Kuala Lumpur. With a background in architecture, he is interested in the intersection between the physical environment in which we live, and the fictional worlds that he creates, challenging perceptions of space, reality and experience.

DENISE LAI is currently loading. Should her budding career in the art world fail to take off, she has - not one - but two extremely lucrative backup plans of being a contemporary dancer or a bespoke jewellery maker @objectvitamin

ELLEN LEE is a writer in Kuala Lumpur who mostly writes on culture and society. She “blogs” at yoellenlee.com.

HIRENDREN (@hirashe) is a visual artist based in Kuala Lumpur. Inspired by the ambiguity of reality, the self-taught artist develops a practice that articulates the relationship between his personal reality, memory, and dreamscape through imagery. His craft lies in the editing process — collaging disparate elements until a story begins to unfold.

IZAT ARIF is an artist based in Kuala Lumpur who does not operate at the intersection of two or more different fields because that would be too much work. www.izatarif.com is not working at the moment, but you may visit his instagram @izatarifsb for updates on his personal life and work.

JEFFERI HAMZAH SENDUT holds a law degree from St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and a Master of Laws degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include international dispute settlement and international human rights law. All views expressed are entirely his own.

LIM SHEAU YUN is a Penangite princess, writer, architect, historian, curator, and publisher. Since her move to KL, Sheau has established herself as an arts writer-cum-talent agent. Her strategy: a critical eye for peoples and places, a killer key lime pie, and an ability to turn a 5-minute conversation into a 2000 word research essay. Find her forging worlds of possibility @sheauthings and @cl0ud.onl.

NADIA NASARUDDIN is the archivist at Malaysia Design Archive. She actively avoids talking to strangers everyday. But you can tempt her with small sesh about mumblecore, the 90’s, archiving in SEA, close reading of jiwang lyrics, collages, protest visuals, breadtags, appetising eggplant recipes, digital archives, and contemporary collecting practices.

NISRINA AULIA — a graphic designer who is interested in stuff: graphic design (mostly prints), art, socio-cultural, and their intersection.

ONG KAR JIN is a technology researcher and policy busybody. His spiritual homeland is Melaka, and his aspirational homeland is ancient Rome. An avid reader of the Financial Times, he parades stock tips not financial advice as cultural criticism.

PANG (@neverprof) is a visual artist from Melaka. Inspired by change of mediums in media, the self-taught artist adapts techniques from various mediums and composes them as one with the play of [mixed media].

PHILIP is a contemporary artist based in Malaysia. His fascination with the mundane heavily influences the process of his work, which attempts to capture the terrestrial elements of nature through the form of rhythmic repetition and simulated chaos. Engaging with graphics and visual art through a multidisciplinary lens, he aims to capture the ephemeral aspects of reality that can never be fully realised...

VICTORIA YAM is a Music Producer and Composer based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She is prominently known for her two distinct electronic music projects, VIKTORIA and rEmPiT g0dDe$$ with genres traversing the realms of industrial club music to deconstructed sounds. Most recently, she has been involved in producing film scores for State of Motion exhibition by Asian Film Archive & MONSOON’21 by Foreground Pictures.

Y.L.S. is the persona of a modern office worker too caught up in the stultified atmosphere of our corporatized society. His work, in a global coalition of workers’ associations, explores the fissures and cracks in the edifice of capitalism, and maintains them for the coming insurrection of humanity.

ZHI WEE (b. 1998, Malacca) is a creative technologist examining the symbiotic relationship between man and machine. She is currently pursuing her master's degree at the Architectural Association, London bringing forward her interest through designing spatial systems.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the kindness and knowledge from the following people:

DENNIS ONG

EZRENA MARWAN

HUAT LIM

JAC SM KEE

JOMO KWAME SUNDARAM

KEN YEANG

MARK TEH and "THE COMPLETE FUTURES OF MALAYSIA" Team

SIMON SOON

FIRST DAY COVER for KARYA SENI ARCA AWAM - 2021 • IZAT ARIF and ELLEN LEE