Media Arts in the Global Souths

Traditional artistic and cultural sound practices in South Asia have a tenuous relationship with modernist media such as sound recording, photography, film, and radio exported from the colonial West. In the realm of sound practices, for example, recording technology’s invasion of South Asia and many parts of the colonized Global Souths had a mutating effect on traditional practices and indigenous technologies (e.g., pre-colonial instruments and tuning systems). From the earliest days of sound recording, modernist technologies shared a fraught relationship with pre-colonial South Asian cultures: local practitioners strongly resisted against their voices and sounds being recorded. Their contention and collective resistance to media imperialism and colonization was first recognized in the early-1970s when so-called developing countries began to criticize the dominance developed countries still held over their media and use of media technologies, a continuation of the control used to quantify and surveil colonial subjects.

And yet, a cultural melange has also had mutually beneficial aspects: the two spheres have become entangled, coalescing, and adjusting to one another, rather than having a binary and temporally linear relationship (e.g., tradition versus modernity, pre-modern versus modern). If we study the introduction of media technologies to the Global Souths, for example in India, modernist media did have a mutating influence, but colonial interventions also created transformative contexts in which inter and cross-cultural confluences could take place, and hybrid forms of art and aesthetic expressions emerged.

Artists constantly redefine the traditional categories of arts and crafts by incorporating emerging technologies into their artworks. Media art, which flourished in the early twentieth century, often depends on new technological components.