雅加達事件簿
The Book of Events: Jarkata

Jakarta Event Book is a series of works based on surface Earth imagery captured by space satellites with telemetric technologies. This project combines various elements such as historical archives, telemetric imagery, maps, and geographic journal, constructing a series of global cultural geographical graph/journal that transcends history, platforms, and media, in an attempt to open up our various explorations with cutting-edge human technology.

This series is based on Itinerario, a book published in 1595 by the Dutch cartographer Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563-1611), who worked for the Portuguese East India Company. Linschoten's book contains the documentation of a lot of sailors' stories and local legends, and the sea monsters that appear in the book's interstitial maps, which are among the most important elements of the Jakarta Event Book

The main methodology of Jakarta Event Book is the "re-writing" of world history and, arguably, the virgin voyage of an "age of re-discovery." Using the coordinates of Jakarta, the Asian headquarters of the Dutch East India Company, the artists attempted to create a virtual landscape using extraterrestrial telemetry imaging technology, building an important scene in the construction of their global theatre.

Through a pseudo-historical narrative, Chiu and Guillemot have created a documentary that attempts to re-cognate, connect, and become a possible narrative in fragmentary historical events; they have used the virtual space of the first-person perspective to create dialogues between art and history through the virtual world, converting the original historical text into the art space.

Using satellite telemetry, the artist combines real-time earth imagery obtained by global monitoring with cutting-edge space technology and a composite multi-time series layer build with digital 3D point-cloud techniques. From the ancient maps in Itinerario to telemetric images of modern technology, the artists construct a new surface for the earth by combining layers of asynchronous maps with the intention of re-stitching spatial-temporal rifts. The artists' creative narratives, constructed by bridging the breakages in time and space with various maps, are all self-reflexive creations of technology text in the form of "rewriting" the text.

The world of technology built on electronic techniques is interconnected, and the "Global village" created by the aggregation of techniques is the ultimate image of the present world. However, in the exhibition room, the oceans—the “negative space” of the globe-are reversed and become like a golden rice field, reflecting on the relationship between human and ocean, and further relates to the dialectics of human and real/virtual space.