The title The global village is taken from a book by Marshall McLuhan from 1968. I am researching the island of Bali as a global node of mediation. I am doing this through photography, focusing mostly on already existing images in public space.
Bali is an island where the effects of globalization are clearly visible. With this project, I depict and ask questions about the globalized information society. The project is about Bali, but at the same time about the world we all live in and share, but not in equal matters. The situation is far from fair. Bali is a small island where several of the world’s richest investors own land. Over time, more and more gated communities and fenced areas have been developed and built on the island. At the same time with those barriers and walls, there are ideas of freedom, liberalism, and boundlessness getting expressed and fabricated on Bali in a neo-liberal manner.
When I organize a material of very many pictures that forms the basis of the project The Global Village - Bali, I use a program that does not operate perfectly all the time: the program freezes and the screen glitches. When I on one occasion could read Massage written in one of these glitches, I made a screenshot. Although I have read Marshall McLuhan, it was this picture that taught me that the title of McLuhan’s best-known book is The Medium is The Massage, not The Medium is The Message, which is his theoretical thesis and one of McLuhan's most famous statements. Although I know that the program malfunction, I continue to use it to generate more glitches. The glitches are of importance since they show the interface of the images that is otherwise hidden in the illusion of the photographs. It is similar to when I photograph pictures and the viewer becomes aware of the surfaces of the images, the scratches and the materiality. They are not see-through images.
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