Ho Tzu Nyen
Since 2012, Ho Tzu Nyen has been working on The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, an ongoing meta-project driven by the heterogeneity of the region known as “Southeast Asia” – an area that has never been unified by language, religion or political power. Taking the form of an “Abécédaire” of the region, the project sets out to re-imagine alternative delineations of the regions through a series of biographies, concepts and motifs, embodied in figures such as tigers, gongs, double agents. This resulted in a number of projects focused on particular terms within the Dictionary, such as “G for Ghost / Ghostwriter / Gene Z. Hanrahan” or “T for Tiger”. These projects were manifested across different mediums and disciplines such as theatrical performances (Ten Thousand Tigers, 2014 and The Mysterious Lai Teck, 2018), musical concerts (The Song of the Brokenhearted Tiger, 2013), video installations (One or Several Tigers, 2017), found footage films (The Nameless, 2015 and The Name, 2015) virtual reality experiences (R for Resonance, 2018). In 2017, Ho Tzu Nyen presented CDOSEA, an attempt to think and work through the Dictionary as a whole, by creating a system that generates relationalities and resonances between all the terms gathered in the project. The CDOSEA is an audio-visual “Abécédaire” made up of materials detourned from online sources and recomposed in endless variations, in “real-time” by algorithms created in collaboration with Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lütgert (0 x 2620). Described as a platform facilitating ongoing research, a matrix for generating future projects and an oracular montage machine, the CDOSEA is available for free access at https://cdosea.org. In this presentation, Ho Tzu Nyen will share some of the processes and strategies from this multi-part project, while focusing on a number of terms from the Dictionary that might in themselves, already be “ intermedia” and “inter-asia”. Akin to an organism, The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA) is part of an ongoing project that grows, generates and provides critical insight into the pluralistic definitions of the territories under this nomenclature.