Accessible Digital Education: The pioneering work of Tyler James Bangkok.
Tyler is a Digital Collage and Public Artist living and working in Bangkok. Creating political landscapes through the lens of queer fantasy, Tyler’s style is formed through his own experiences as a Gay American Artist and his queer representation of reality. Using various digital applications and programming to create interactive art workshops with the Asian community, Tyler’s practice is educational and accessible as well as chaotic yet peculiar. Tyler is also an exhibiting artist at Round Lemon’s ‘WORM’ Exhibition.
Before we get into talking about your practice, I’m really intrigued to find out why you moved from the US to Asia. Was it a decision made primarily to provide opportunity for your art practice or for another reason?
As a queer kid growing up in rural Minnesota in a city of 11,000, I always felt suffocated and like there was something off balance about the USA even as a child. I always remember thinking the “American values” we are taught in school don’t really apply to many minorities. When I was 15, I lived in Japan for a few months after getting a scholarship and really fell in love with many aspects of Eastern culture.
Learning about Taoism really changed my perspective and always made me search out the opposites. Many things about coming to terms with opposites and knowing that life cannot only be one note or one thing. For example, you can’t understand happiness without really knowing true sadness and so it should be expected. As I read and learned more, I could better understand those feelings off balance that I had felt as a child in the USA.
During university, I started the new media digital graffiti group ‘Minneapolis Art on Wheels’, where we had projectors mounted on bikes and were doing pop up projects to reclaim public space. And while that project was great, I ultimately felt like there was something missing in my understanding of the world and what actions I was taking in Minnesota.
I had always known I would leave the USA. 24 years was enough and I needed to have more perspectives and experiences and explore all that lies beyond the safe bubble that Minnesota represents. And I had kinda always known I would be heading back to Asia but have travelled and lived in Every continent during my decade abroad through art projects, travelling and dating.
Please tell us more about the community projects you’ve done In Asia and how they have impacted local residents.
Right now we are in lockdown with no vaccines and the economy is terrible. So all projects and focus have been shifted to helping donate 100 meals a day to a local charity group Scholars of Sustenance. My Thai boyfriend organized the fundraising and I found the group helping to deliver meals to those workers out of work now and lacking support from the government. This has become the mini project in this time where many low-level workers need help with basic food and shelter.
During normal times I have a pop-up program called Move_Make_Create where I offer tech access, tech learning and tech skills and the creation of community engagement events. I enter charity schools in Bangkok's largest slums where the schools do not have technology, technology teachers, or art teachers. The first school I ever went to, I asked, “So who is your art teacher?” The woman flatly responded “oh, she died last year and we have no funding to pay anyone so we don’t have a teacher now.”.
The lack of access to quality education and tech resources between the developing world and industrialized countries is HUGE, and it’s a huge issue.
The goals of my workshops are to get students introduced to the leading creative tools for new media and also learning how to create and thinking about creating with technology.
Another major aspect of Move_Make_Create_ is to serve as a collage maker in society. This means I look to seek out groups and charities working with communities that lack access or do not use certain public resources now, and then try to create new programs or connections to give new access and new experiences to disadvantaged communities.
Finally, I have partnered with local galleries, local media companies and Chulalongkorn University to be part of the larger trend and push for the modernization of Thailand. As many universities don’t really offer all the kinds of courses I had access to in university in the USA, I have worked to develop programs, events and workshops to introduce new technology and new experiences to the larger public.
{Agencies from the Industrialised world seeking thoughtful commissions to help community artists and their actions in the developing world}
Commissioned works for the UK Music Video Awards @studiothomson for @ukmva 2021 campaign
The more I look at your work, the more I see it as a type of pioneering ‘digital dada’. Do you have any particular influences that inform your style?
My work comes from the notion of a “collage lifestyle.” I feel like all things, art included, need to be seen with intersectional points of view. Thus, I always want to use collage as a way to bring various ideas or objects together to show their context, clash or how they work together.
I am deeply inspired by the Situationist International and their constant critique of capitalism, control, and creative and social agency in society. Their concept of detournement, or flipping images of pop culture to show the reality behind the facade of what they represent is vital to my practice. Also, I firmly believe in the powers of collage in manifesting and creating “chaos magic.” Which is simply that when an artist creates a collage where they are expressing their fantasy and exploring the juxtaposition of images, which means they are sending out that fantasy vision or reimagined version of into the world to affect others and reality how it may.
You have an incredible body of work on your Instagram where you seem to queer reality into abstract digital loops. How do you keep this amazing momentum of creating and expanding your queer fantasy to this boundless level?
As I navigated the world and experienced the oppression of various people in various places, I found myself becoming more worldly, but I also found myself starting to see the reality of things clearly. Seeing the conditions of life between rich and poor countries and the quality of life of minorities in many “modern” countries, it often enrages me or makes me feel so hopeless. And the only thing left to do with those feelings is to create and let chaos magic take over. I find that the more I create, the more opportunity comes to me and the more chances to impact the world with my values and my desires for a better future.
A tornado, a pigs head, a hairy bag and landfill site are just some of the elements in your work ‘America makes prodigious mistakes, but at least she isn’t standing still’. Please could you tell us about the contextual significance of this work in more depth? How does it portray your own relationship to your home country?
Every time I come back to Minnesota, which is sometimes several times a year, I have started to feel more and more alienated by my home country. And I think it reached ultimate alienation with Trump, Qanon, and the Capitol attack.
From factory farming to the fashion industry, the USA has pushed for development, but it has become obvious that the push has been very toxic and not working for the environment or for most people. Then looking at the medical industry which is for profit and the current trends of diet and health of American people, as a vegan I just can’t sometimes.
For this work, I imagined the childish notion of what I thought America was when I was very young and thought how far different that has become.
While I still love the USA for it’s loud movements like kickstarting the modern queer movement, I have looked at the many toxic aspects of society and the brainwashing that exists, and it makes it so hard to think about returning to live there and it has become like a strange place both in my mind and my memory.
How do you source your found imagery?
Going back to the Situationist International, another one of their techniques for creative connections and networking and inspiration was dérive, or the drift. Now using my phone and computer I use social media algorithms, advertising algorithms and just the content people and companies are sharing in general to lead me into strange areas of the internet.
I will grab one ad, and then maybe want to grab another image related to that so I will Google search that, and then that leads into another avenue of exploration. I often will find myself reading science articles while finding the image of one graph nice and then maybe the add on that page will have me jumping somewhere new to grab something else.
I try to keep this process open and I gather a huge amount of files and try to find connections with the things I am finding. And also think about how they can be combined in different ways to tell different stories or create different little realities.
What comes first – the sound or the imagery? How do you make informed decisions about what sounds pair with your work?
Imagery always comes first. Sound is more like the icing on the cake to create the emotion I am looking for. During university sound art and sound exploration was a big part of my “time and interactivity” focus so I always feel without sound my work is not really complete.
Again, I play with detournement and the flipping of pop culture. I am greatly inspired now by what is happening in the “hyperpop” area and I actually consider my work a type of hyperpop or neo pop art.
Do you have any upcoming projects you’d like to tell us about?
Currently I have my four first NFT for sale through a local gallery’s Foundation account as a way to raise money for continued food donation in Bangkok and the long-term tech access/tech learning project in the slum community. You can check it out here: https://foundation.app/@Joyman
Coming in the fall, I am the lead artist for a “new media art” workshop that will be given to 100 Thai art teachers with the goal of giving them some new projects and things to do with their students to get them creating with new media. I am really excited about this as this will be my largest workshop ever and it is really cool to think about how I will be able to influence 100 teachers to learn and go on to spread more ideas and actions to their students.
