Tirai

Description

Tirai (Curtain) is a web visual novel and sound installation, conceived as a digital memorial site. The reader will follow fragments of three stories that are set against the backdrop of the Japanese Occupation in Indonesia (1942-1945): a Japanese student pilot that is ordered to do a suicide mission, a Dutch woman who sings in a choir inside a concentration camp, and an Indonesian poet that is torn between his artistic expression and the hardship of a wartime. What will we reveal as we follow their stories behind the “curtain” of a historical stage, performing in one period of humanity’s tragic play?

The web as a medium provides a canvas on which these stories can be unfolded. Instead of the traditional memorial such as monument or museum, the browser and the webpages become a monument or a shrine one can visit to contemplate independent of time and space: a new spiritual refugee in the digital age.

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Tirai is commisioned for the Web Sound Art Festival 2024.

Tirai can be accessed here.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful on the mentorship given by Olia Lialina, Kris Meeusen and Marko Ciciliani that shapes this work to its completion. I am also grateful for the help of Ghaliz Filkhair Haris in researching visual materials and producing the required digital collage.