Sharman Sinaga’s granddaughter looks bored as her grandfather demonstrates for the camera his favored technique of market liberalization: holding union activists upside down in flooded fields. He mimics their gargles as they choke in the mud. He could hold down two or three at a time he boasts; he seems faintly nostalgic in the dim light and the smoke; his only regret, that his arms and knees aren’t what they used to be.

The orders to hold people upside-down came from the top, he tells us, from Surhato; they came also with support from high on Capitol Hill.

The Globalisation Tapes were made in collaboration with those a little further down the pile, closer to the mud (and the rubber and the oil), closer to the memories of the massacre that cleared the way for Indonesia’s ‘modernisation’.

Using their own forbidden history as a case study, the Indonesian filmmakers trace the development of contemporary globalisation from its roots in colonialism to the present. Through chilling first-hand accounts, hilarious improvised interventions, collective debate and archival collage, The Globalisation Tapes exposes the devastating role of militarism and repression in building the “global economy”, and explores the relationships between trade, third-world debt, and international institutions like the IMF and the World Trade Organization. The film is a densely lyrical and incisive account of how these institutions shape and enforce the corporate world order (and its ‘systems of chaos’).

Plantation workers spontaneously stage a satirical commercial for the pesticide that poisons them; the filmmakers pose as World Bank agents with offers to ‘develop’ local businesses – offers which are both brutal and absurd, yet, tempting, nonetheless. The Globalisation Tapes is a testament to the intelligence, humour, integrity and creativity of its makers and their community.

It is not only inspirational, but also instructive. The film illustrates the kind of training that is needed if unions are to build an international movement to fight corporate globalisation from the grassroots.

The story isn’t told by experts, but by union members from palm oil plantations in Indonesia. This film was made possible by their energy, insight and dedication.

“If we are united in our struggle against worker oppression, united in our search for truth amidst lies, united for a truly participatory democratic economic system, the possibilities are only limited by our courage, our determination, and our capacity to imagine.”

quote from : Su Karman, narrator of The Globalisation Tapes and President of Perbbuni, the Independent Plantation Workers’ Union of Sumatra.

For Vision Machine and its collaborators, the ‘digital’ has not so much been an object of reflection, as a medium of reflection; not so much a focus of inquiry or production, as an instrument that allows the project to bring its objects and its subjects into focus. For the purposes of infiltrative projects, Vision Machine has also created a digital presence as an internet-based start-up reality television station; this presence (though the global media corporation it represents is a fiction) serves as an effective tool of access. The project’s relationship with digital technology has, then, thus far been largely instrumental – the tactical use of relatively inexpensive components that are able to exploit a massively expensive global infrastructure. This summer institute will offer an opportunity to reflect on, and theorise, the manifold implications of this instrumental relationship. In turn, it will open further experimental possibilities for the practice.

For the past three years, Vision Machine has been working in collaboration with villagers, activists and members of the Perbbuni palm plantation union in North Sumatra, and in various infiltrative modes, working with political, military and paramilitary groups in the same region. This work has been at the centre of a sustained investigation into the events that led to the campaign of terror (ostensibly anti-communist) that swept the Indonesian archipelago after October 1965, and in which anywhere between 100,000 and 2,000,000 people were massacred.

Such divergent estimates render attempts to count the dead, to recount their history, and to hold to account the murderers, close to impossible; the task of counting and recounting is fraught with uncertainty. Lies, threatening rumour, and holes, are so much part of this history that the aim of the practice can not be so much to recount a coherent history of terror (even a local history), as to seek a film form that might adequately address and question a history that has itself become an instrument of terrible incoherence, a history that does not seek merely to hide or deny its violence, but that allows it to circulate as a haunting force that suddenly from time to time flares up in an awesome display of force.