Melbourne-based artist Rel Pham’s TEMPLE, 2022–23, is an installation exploring, recontextualising, and evaluating the contemporary digital experience using Caodaist, Buddhist, and Taoist concepts and structures. Here, he speaks more about the work featured in Melbourne Now.
Abundance has success.
The king attains abundance.
Be not sad.
Be like the sun at midday.
A quote from Book of Changes (I Ching)
Book of Changes (I Ching) – a Chinese divination text dating to the late ninth century BCE, penned to underpin a society where a million hands worked in tandem. In Rel Pham’s TEMPLE, 2022–23, they scroll in hypercolour neon, edicts for a different society, a digital one, where lords and rulers are traded for influencers and celebrities, winning the hearts and likes of millions of online strangers and, sometimes, leading them astray.
Melbourne-based artist Rel Pham’s TEMPLE, 2022–23, is an installation exploring, recontextualising, and evaluating the contemporary digital experience using Caodaist, Buddhist, and Taoist concepts and structures. Here, he speaks more about the work featured in Melbourne Now.
‘The Book of Changes was a fairly basic guide for people going through trials and tribulations, outlining how they should act. In this particular hexagram (The Book of Changes is arranged into sixty-four hexagrams like the one above – a figure composed of six stacked horizontal lines, where each line is yang or yin), we’re told not everyone can rule, but if they do, they should illuminate their subjects like the sun at midday’, Pham explains. 1
‘Fast forward thousands of years and people can now reach massive peaks of power or be exposed to the overwhelming influence of another online. We saw it with all that alt-right stuff in the United States and we watched it spiral out of control in real time with the January 6 [2021] United States Capitol Attack.’
This intersection of ancient culture and technology is one aspect of Pham’s latest installation, which appears at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia as part of Melbourne Now. Like so much of our digital reality, TEMPLE is difficult to synthesise in a handful of words. A large-scale shrine sits in the centre of a black room. Illuminated in a palette that references Vietnamese Caodaism and the motifs of Melbourne’s Chinatown, it vibrates with the choir of some 640 fans intensifying into an inferno. The noise envelops you, reverberating against a soundtrack, developed in collaboration with sound artist Shaun Connor, of old Asian instruments, callbacks from video games and the chimes of forgotten computer hardware. This is the respiratory system of the internet – a reminder that the dream world projected from behind our glass screens has hidden consequences, or as Pham explains:
‘We understand that the internet is an ever-expanding world built over the one we inhabit, but we don’t necessarily understand how. What is the activation object or the magic box that connects point A and point B? Where are the computer parts lined up on mass to create server farms and data centres? How about the monolithic cryptocurrency mines that consume thousands of kilowatts of electricity?’
‘Our personal devices are so sleek, so minimal, so unassuming that we forget the incredible quantities of fuel (fossil, emotional and intellectual) required to keep them whirring.’
It’s a concept Pham explored in Electric Dirge, a moving image and animation work he presented at the 4A Centre for Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2021, and one that might remind readers of the work of American artist Trevor Paglen. Paglen, known for capturing the cat’s cradle of undersea cables that make the internet possible, is a source of inspiration for the Melbourne-based artist, alongside the unorthodox approach to animation expressed by Hong Kong–born artist Wong Ping and Danish director Nicholas Refn’s use of neon electric sets and lighting ‘Paglen was quick to point out that many of the new cables follow similar paths to the old telegraph and telephone lines. In the same way, the assembly of fans in TEMPLE alludes to our modern world’s reliance on machines that consume the resources of the world they power,’ says Pham.
‘We have gone paperless, and yet we must still plunder the earth of its precious metals to make batteries.’ But TEMPLE is much more than a commentary on climate change and consumption. When you step through one of the four arches illuminated by LED ticker tape, a mapped animation of water rippling underfoot, you may feel horror, awe, bewilderment or fascination. Pham is reluctant to lead the visitor. Instead, he seeks to distill a fraction of our lived experience online into something we can feel – manifesting the virtual in the physical, rearranging computer parts into the traditional form of Asian architecture and religious iconography. For a true sense of the latter, we have to travel to the very heart of the installation.
Beyond the spinning fans and LED letters to the neon shrine at its very core. Here, the bagua –a Taoist cypher for translating reality – works with the eight Natures (Heaven, Lake, Fire, Thunder, Wind, Water, Mountain and Ground). Referred to as the eight Trigrams, each symbol consists of three lines, each of which is broken (yin) or unbroken (yang). Pham has translated these lines into 1/0 binary code: ‘0’ corresponding to the yin and ‘1’ to the yang, a historic ‘computer’ reinvented as a digital display.
‘The act of logging on is a decentralised act of congregation, of entering a temple of worship, academy of atelier’, he continues. ‘It is a journey, procession, crusade or pilgrimage; for knowledge, affirmations, conflict or self actualisation.’ ‘It reminds me of being in a video game, essentially walking through a level in a 3D space, with just the sound and lights hypnotising you into almost dreamlike state.’ If all of that is hard to envision, it’s because Pham has deliberately sought to champion the individual over the universal. While the impact of the digital world, whether it be the measurable mining of lithium or the immeasurable effects of hate speech and online vitriol, reverberates throughout society, there is no one-size-fits-all response to the internet.
Our digital footprints are the shadow cast by our physical selves and the feedback loop in between and like our shadow, intensely personal and unique. ‘A visitor will see TEMPLE as an activation of contemplation/worship. Technology recontextualized as if it were more than an innocuous tool that exists outside of human culture,’ concludes Pham.
‘But how it manifests is entirely up to them, to their relationship with their own digital reality and that feedback, as well as the costs of it all right here in the physical world.
Elisa Scarton is Senior Editorial Coordinator, Audience Engagement
This article was first published in NGV Magazine, Issue 39, Mar–Apr 2023.
Note
All quotes from an email interview between the author and artist Rel Pham, 1 February 2023.