OK.Video – Indonesia Media Arts Festival is a media art event initiated by ruangrupa in Indonesia. Since its first edition in 2003, the festival has been committed to observing, recording and studying the development of media technology. OK.Video produces, documents, researches, archives, gives workshops and works as a distributor for Indonesian media art works.
The works of LOG IN 2007 : Videos from the OK. Video Militia 2007 workshops are available here with an introduction by Bellina Erby. Further works are displayed in the window of ruruHaus (Treppenstraße) during the festival period.
In the early 2000s, Indonesia experienced a spectacular cultural boom, in which the aspect of watching became a vital element in society. This had to do with the increasing presence of television in Indonesia: Access to TVRI (Television of Indonesian Republic – the oldest Indonesian public television network), private television, and cable TV acted as bridges between public and private spaces. Given this reach, in the hands of the rulers, television became a tool for controlling the public. These developments caused a lot of apprehension in ruangrupa — a contemporary arts organisation founded in 2000 by a group of artists in Jakarta. Ruangrupa advances artistic ideas in an urban context, as well as within the broader scope of culture, through exhibitions, festivals, art laboratories, workshops, research, and publications. In 2001, they initiated Silent Forces, a first workshop focussing on video as an art medium. This project was an introduction to video art for those involved in art circles in Jakarta. In 2003, ruangrupa organized the first edition of the international biennial video festival, OK.Video, which developed into a playground for young interdisciplinary artists exploring and expanding their visual language, their ways of working and collaboration. In each edition, the festival presents works selected from an open call under a topic that offers social, political and historical perspectives. So far, these topics have been: OK.Video (2003), Sub/Version (2005), Militia (2007), Comedy (2009), Flesh (2011), Deception (2013), The New Order (2015), OK.Food (2017). Since its foundation, the OK.Video Festival has collected more than 2,000 videos that provide a good outline on how video art started and developed in Indonesia. After its last edition in 2017, OK.Video has shifted its focus towards the potential for shared learning and knowledge transfer contained in its video archive.