Len and ABC5 crew for interview, at the back
is her work in the exhibition.

Memorex by Fatima Lasay

It's a corruption of Vannevar Bush's Memex in the seminal essay "As We May Think." The works in the Memorex series articulate old, ancient, historical, dog-eared themes that make a really double-textured contrast with the new digital technology used to produce them. These images are also memory extensions, thus Memorex.

There are six works that document a visit in 1999 to Baclayon, Bohol. Six other works depict selected histories in anatomy, script (the eskaya of Bohol), American capture of Manila, the first Philippine carnival exhibit in 1917, the return of Japanese WW2 "straggler" Hiroo Onoda, and a recent death in the family. Every work in Memorex is a document, a memory augmentation, an informational piece.

The title MACHINELANGUAGE is most apt for this exhibition. The machine, the digital computer and other apparatus used for visualization and communication, speak many languages that may only be brought to life by the human operator. In all its so-called numbing coldness and sterile machine-like percepts, the machine speaks only out of the abundance of the heart.

Four of twelve works in the Memorex Series
Inkjet prints and gold leaf by Fatima Lasay

ENTER The ETHERMORPH

Email from Aliens by Aileen Familara

Too many people on the Net are sending out endearments to people they hardly know, halfway around the world. This is the arena of online romance, facilitated by websites that cater to singles, sites that hold forth promises of helping you find your soulmate, your only one.

"Email from Aliens" documents the artist's participation in such online quests for love. Online singles sites are communities that have sprung from traditional matchmaking practices, morphing into a supposedly efficient means of bringing people together, with the added advantage of anonymity, while still retaining the potential for dissappointment.

Detail: Email from Aliens, inkjet transfer on organdy
by Aileen Familara

In a world where communication is speedy and far-reaching, questions arise: Human contact still requires a face-to-face, so why should one go online?

At the same time, the artwork also addresses a deeper problem, the phenomenon of mail-order brides. Where the typical seeker is a divorced middle-aged man from the West, and the sought-after is the shy, virginal woman from the East. Online singles sites cater to these stereotypes and perpetuate the practice. And yet the words of the men and women themselves belie their own individual need. One cannot so easily judge it as a social pathology. A lot of people are lonely. If the internet is a way to fill that gap in one's life, then why not write?

Blind Tiger's Gallery Relations Officer Mô Ordoñez and legendary artist-musician Roxlee