ME
Born in Indonesia, Bambang N Karim is a media artist by trade who has worked primarily with digital media for over 12 years. Bambang seeks to explore the boundaries of the digital medium through his favourite theme of identity, women, and the human struggle.
Most recently, Bambang was nominated for a Green Room Award in Projection and/or Video Design category for his work in En Trance produced by Malthouse Theatre/Yumi Umiumare. In 2009, his collaborative work Sakasama, was performed by Yumi Umiumare, at the iDance Festival Hong Kong. His video installation entitled Miss Taken was shown at OzAsia Festival, Adelaide in 2009.
Sponsored by Full Tilt at the Arts Centre, Melbourne, Bambang initiated a collaborative work with Yumi Umiumare and Tony Yap, entitled 3A in 2004. 3A work has become the benchmark of his exploration in combining live performance and the realm of digital technology.
When not practicing art, Bambang – also known with his nickname BB - is one part designer, one part developer, honing his skill by running a web design business bNd Solutions. He deals with numbers of corporate clients as well as artists, such as William Yang, Nigel Helyer, and version 1.0 to name a few.
INFLUENCE
BB loves film and music very much. Most of his visual works were helped a lot through his obsession with film and music. Every now and then he does “a binge film watching” – that is he watches tens of movies over the weekend nonstop.
His “sinful” thing toward art is his love to television – bad TV and so many guilty pleasure pop cultures that enriching his art. To name a view, he loves the works of Robert del Naja of Massive Attack, Jim Morrison of The Doors, and Michael Stipe of REM. He loves Woody Allen’s works, Zhang Yimou, Guiliermo Arriaga, Joe Wright, Jean-Piere Jeunett, Robert Lepage…oh so many, the list can go on and on….and of course his self-proclaimed obsession to the pop culture phenomenon: Madonna
Be Or Not Be is an outlet to showcase the artist’s art work, experiments and activities.
Selecting an interesting and catchy domain name was become the goal but on top of that the artist tried to accommodate the word “be” as it rhymes with his name.
It took times to check different domain name availability and find the right mix of words and letters before finally settling on “BE OR NOT BE.” The name has references to that famous expression, “to be or not to be” of Shakespeare’s work Hamlet. However, the artist does not really know Shakespeare’s work well.
While cooking up the ideas for the site, the artist started to see a big picture of not limiting its function as portfolio site only. So some features were added, including the writings of artist opinion, essay, poetry, review etc in categorical themes found in Mirandised Divine section.
Finally, there is a little room for some dialogue so the artist welcome any comments you want to make about what he is doing with his works and this very own beornotbe.com.
