Akal akalan

The expression akal-akalan (from the root, ‘akal’ meaning ‘mind’, ‘intellect’ or ‘sense’ in Bahasa Indonesia) has a rich range of meanings including cunning, trickery and resourcefulness in Indonesian culture. The term has also come to be associated with the creative material and practical solutions to ‘work around’ and manipulate complicated everyday situationsand challenges. In this exhibition, we present akal-akalan asthe cultural ingenuity of reprogramming to execute one’s own programme; tricking and tactically recrafting technologies, things and situations to serve one’s own ends. Such cultural strategies for engaging and appropriating technologies are also found in different guises in Asia – the cultures of creative hacking and copying reflected in shanzai and the pragmatic compromises of chabuduo in China, the exuberant hyperfunctionality of Japanese devices called chindogu, the makeshift contraptions of jugaad in India, the random commingling of heterogenous things to make sense and make do as chapalang in Singapore, the resourceful and frugal solutions of diskarte in the Philippines, and the hacking and creative retooling of menggodam in Malaysia. In each of these contexts, creative reconfigu-ring and vernacular appropriation not only point to culturally located ways of making but in fact, posit strategies for short-circuiting the closures and exclusionary logic of hardware, systems, and infrastructures, especially those inherited from outside these cultures. The cultural inventiveness of such practices has developed in relation to a wider contestation over making in the last half century – who makes and how one makes and how that which is made is valued – evident in the intersecting histories of open source and maker movements and hacker and DIY cultures. The exhibition locates itself in this milieu of making bringing together artists from the Southeast Asia to speculate on the radical potential of cultural practices like akal-akalan to unsettle and point to alternative ways of imagining our relationship to the ‘technological’.