What does politics look like if it is not the kind of politics that we are used to: the politics of parliaments and politicians, of individual interests and monetary gains? What does politics look like when it is about imagined futures, novel kinds of aesthetics, and includes both humans, spirits, and ecological specters?
Java-Futurism is a study of a politics of the otherwise as it emerges in the aesthetic practices of experimental music and noise projects in Indonesia. Many of these are multi-media projects where many types of technological media engage media of the spirit world. They involve for instance narratives of an imagined mythical past that projects onto possible futures, the possibility of an aesthetics of spirit possession, and forms of collaboration that envision new ecologies of artistic practice and community engagement in which the ancestors are also a part. Java-Futurism is a realist politics of the otherwise, a phenomenon that we have studied in Indonesia for decades. To read more, take a look at:
Nils Bubandt. 2014. Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia. London: Routledge.