Bahasa Tromarama
Founded by Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans and Ruddy Hatumena, Tromarama is one of Indonesia’s most productive, consistent and innovative new media art collectives. Exploring the relationship between virtual and physical worlds, their work consists of short stop-motion animations with moving objects that interact with each other and their environments. The work is unique for reflecting on animation as an artistic form of mediation and also positioning it within the context of Indonesian art history. While Tromarama relies on video and computer technology, it also crosses the boundaries of many other art genres. Its engagement with graphic design and printmaking along with abstract and abstract expressionist styles is a continuation of some of the main traditions of art teaching and creation at the Arts Academy of the Bandung Institute of Technology, where the artists met.
In works such as Quandary 2016, the artists’ labour, precision, patience and aesthetic talent in arranging objects, recording them and editing the visuals in tune with sound can be clearly felt. The viewer is presented with two screens: one mounted high on the wall, the other mounted close to the floor. Everyday objects—balls, toys, a plastic bottle—seem to fall from a table in one screen to the floor in the other. However, our expectations of time, space and continuity are disturbed by the artists’ manipulations of the objects and duration. There is no direct human presence in the video; the objects themselves take centre stage, and function as indices or traces of absent human beings. The videos tell us that these ordinary, often overlooked items themselves in fact ‘animate’ people in their daily habits.
In general, Tromarama’s animated objects have a humanised and humorous character. However, they may also refer to a rather bleak future in which objects operate completely autonomously from human beings. In Intercourse 2015 an electric fan on one screen seems to be moving light objects—napkins, the pages of a telephone directory—on another screen. Although our expectations are interrupted in a humorous way, the work could be referring to a more sinister scenario in which human beings have lost control over their highly mediated environments. By blurring the lines between physical and virtual realities, Tromarama present a hyperreal world in a playful way to test and possibly change the perceptions and expectations of viewers about their digital technology-dominated lives.
Dr Edwin Jurriëns
