Member Spotlight: Mac Andre Arboleda
Interview Recorded September 4, 2024
NMC
I’m JLS Gangwisch with the New Media Caucus here today with Mac Andre Arboleda. Mac, would you tell us a bit about yourself? Where are you currently located?
Mac Andre Arboleda
Sure. I’m currently located in Berlin, finishing this Masters program that I’m doing called the Media Arts Cultures. I’m under an Erasmus Mundus scholarship. This program has taken us to so many different countries. I started my first semester in Austria, then I moved to Denmark, I did my internship in Germany, my third semester in Poland and somehow I found myself here in Berlin even though my fourth semester is technically in Singapore.
NMC
What can you tell us about your work right now? Who you are creatively?
Mac Andre Arboleda
I describe myself as a person working, exploring what I call the sickness of the Internet through research and dialogue, art and text, organizing and publishing. I’ve made projects that have appeared as memes, zines, and screens, NFDS. I’ve organized art festivals and built some organizations on digital rights.
I used to be the founding president of this organization called the UP Internet freedom Network. I was also Co-founder of the Artists for Digital Rights Network, which is a network of artists from Asia Pacific. A lot of my works deal with or look at the capacities and incapacities of digital life. These are the concerns that I think about and think through in my work.
NMC
What does the term New Media mean to you?
Mac Andre Arboleda
I’m studying media arts, but that is very difficult for me to answer only because I feel like new media does not allow itself so much distinction on a personal or subjective sort of experience. Of course, academics would have, you know, at least a definition of what new media means. But at least in the work that I’m doing and thinking through, I think of new media as a kind of subjectivity that is made through or after regimes of computation and digitality.
For me, at least in the work that I do, especially dealing with topics like surveillance and these broader sort of tech systems mean for me, I take a lot of inspiration from the scholar and theorist Jonathan Beller, who theorizes around what he calls the “world computer.” I try to think of media as essentially the world where human beings and sort of any, anything in planetary life has also become sort of a new media in a way. And this is how I think through it, what I’m working towards and against, if that makes sense.
NMC
You recently received the 2024 Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award through the New Media Caucus. What does that award mean to you?
Mac Andre Arboleda
This award is great. I think it’s it’s an honor to receive it, especially coming from the Philippines, whereI literally applied to this master’s program because I didn’t feel like there was a lot of opportunities or resources for media arts. You know, the Philippines was once called the social media capital of the world, and for us to make or be in the conversation of media art is at least a very important thing for me to, to see. There’s a lot of really interesting work and initiatives happening from my country. To get this award is just a simple sort of accomplishment for a lot of the things that’s already being done, and I’m very grateful for that.
NMC
Are you working on any current projects that you’d like to tell us about in more detail?
Mac Andre Arboleda
I’m currently writing my master’s thesis, advised by Dr. Jonathan Gander from the LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore. And I’m writing about composing this idea of a divine image, which is a critique of the digital image life under surveillance capitalism. The title is Divining the Image. I’m looking for a kind of imaging and imagination that goes beyond digitality, or rather this colonization of time, space, imagination, discourse after Jonathan Beller, and I’m looking at writing three things that are debatably media art. This is something that I will write about in my thesis. One of them is Marian apparitions that are documented in the Philippines, people who claim to have seen the Virgin Mary. The second is the I Love You virus, which is the infamous virus that came out in the 2000s. It was in the 2000s. This was made by a Filipino hacker named Onel de Guzman. This was a virus that brought billions of damages all around the world from a malware where you receive an e-mail saying this is a love letter for you, then once you open it replaces a lot of files in your computer. And the third is an art project called Sunset Garden, for which I wrote text for. It’s by artists Czar Kristof and Zeus Pascone. Tthey basically collected grinder profile pictures that used the sunset as their profile pictures, and then made like a social art project out of that.
A lot of my projects are essentially thinking through what does mediation and media art mean nowadays? I’m really interested in going beyond the screen.
NMC
Where can we follow your work? What’s the best way to keep up to date?
Mac Andre Arboleda
My website is https://sickinternet.me/. This is where a lot of my work is published. And you can find all my socials there.