The visual landscape of Indonesia’s diversity is overwhelmed by images of violence, politics of hate and ethnocentrism. In its Independence Day special issue, 2006, Tempo, one of the biggest news magazine in the country, had the cover title, “Can we live side-by-side?” a question that remains unanswered even. Meanwhile, the media are heavily co-opted by the market or capitalism for commercial purposes. We need public media. In this context, we intend to study: (1) how (audio) visual media could be a public media, playing the role as catalyst to reconstruct subjectivity and inter-subjectivity for developing cross-cultural understanding and (2) how public media could establish a countercurrent as cultural critique for the ongoing process of Indonesia’s multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is a relatively new concept for Indonesia, where the application of multiculturalism is a step into unfamiliar ground (Saifuddin, et. al., 2002). Before 1998, the highly centralized authoritarian New Order Regime enforced mono-culturalism onto the nation’s diverse communities. After this regime’s fall in 1998, the so-called Reformasi (reform) era has brought fundamental political and economic change under a newly emerging democratic system. Decentralization is an important core agenda of Reformasi. These transformational processes unexpectedly created political tension between different identities, ideologies and political powers, which turned into violent conflict that victimized the powerless, especially minorities. Many elite groups commodify religious and ethnic symbols in order to manipulate collective sympathy for their own gain.

The present process is renegotiating the diversity in order to establish a new system for a new Indonesia. The media has a tremendous potential to facilitate this renegotiation process due to its power to cross-culturally transmit images and transcend meaning. To build on this potential, we need to develop the media into a landscape to foster the public sphere as a space for common dialog and to give voice to the minorities – in other words, public media. This would enable the negotiation of new values that suit the context of our contemporary multicultural issues and reconnect the torn communities.

Research-wise, we are planning to focus on the role of digital video in developing the public sphere in the context of Indonesia’s social-cultural renegotiation and reconnection process. I am interested to investigate the process of cross-cultural learning between at least two communities, with one community making self-represented videos (or camera subjective in MacDougall’s term (1998)) that “trans-code” (Hall, 1997) particular stereotype(s) for screening to the other community. This is a process where a community articulates its subjectivity on the medium and the expression is read by the other community to stimulate a process of re-articulating the other subjectivity into their own subjectivity. It is essential to understand the construction of political subject and its articulation into an inter-subjectivity process through the media and how the process may contribute to countering the dominant discourse i.e. the countercurrents as a way to cultural critique (see Willliams, 1977; Abu-Lughod, 1991; Ortner, 2005).

To investigate those intentions, we are going to conduct a program to be implemented by my own NGO, Ragam Media Network, which aimed at developing a more integrative method for designing, producing and facilitating cross-cultural learning with video. We call this method Connexxcreen (“LayarDialog” in Indonesian): a set of techniques that utilizes self-represented video as a catalyst to re-screen the stereotypes produced by mainstream media about a certain community to transcode its meaning in order to connect two or more communities where the relations have been laden by cultural gaps/stereotypes and conflict. This method is a combination of participatory video (Ruby 1991: Ginsburg 1998: Philipsen & Markussen 1995) and cross-cultural education facilitated by video.