Multimedia Projects Supporting Environmental and Cultural Conservation
Digital Conservation Facility Laos
Alan Potkin —trained originally as a limnologist specializing in tropical rivers— holds a doctorate in environmental planning (Ph. D., 1989) from U.C. Berkeley. His focus has always been on media applications in cultural and ecological conservation, and on the evolving interactive visualization toolbox for strengthening impact assessment, public participation, and post-facto evaluation. A combat veteran of the Second Indochina War —wherefrom emerged a not-so-hidden agenda towards personally undoing some part of the damage— he was based in Vientiane from 1995 through 2002. While there he founded the Digital Conservation Facility, Laos (DCFL): affiliated since 2003 with both the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois U. (NIU) and the NIU Center for Burma Studies. Dr. Potkin’s recent research has been on the aesthetics of waterfalls hydro power in Sri Lanka; on the 12,000 MW Myitsone cascade project on the Ayeyarwady headwaters in Myanmar’s troubled Kachin State; on museums as essential to pharaonic projects; and on downstream learning —broadly defined— from Mekong Basin actual outcomes.
I worked and traveled extensively throughout the lower Mekong region and from 1995 through 2002 was based in Vientiane, Laos as a freelancer. In partnership with archaeologist/art historian Catherine Raymond, I founded the Digital Conservation Facility Laos (DCFL), devoted both to environmental and cultural conservation; examining ways in which the loss of cultural assets parallels the loss of ecological assets and developing products and methodologies towards braking/breaking that process.
Multimedia projects include the application of the “emerging visualization toolbox” to support ecological characterizations of the Nam Ngum and Xe Set river basins; the Interactive Taxonomic Atlas of Mekong Fishes; and the trilingual e-book version of the Lao Ramayana, illustrated by Thit Panh’s wonderful naïve frescoes at Vat Oup Mong (VOM), which were extensively archived before their demolition in 2000, and in 2010, faithfully replicated in the replacement main image hall at VOM, using a unique digital projection methodology devised by the DCFL.
Presentation prepared for the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium Conference, U. of Arizona, Tucson AZ, USA: 16-18 September 2022
Following the 1975 collapse of the erstwhile Kingdom of Laos, the new revolutionary regime closed down the monasteries and evicted the monks: an unpopular decision that was soon reversed, but conditional on the reestablished sangha staying out of politics and removing “superstition” from Lao Buddhist practice. That epithet came to include, not only relict animist and Tantric elements but also most aspects of Brahmanic culture, including the Phralak-Phralam (PLPL), which was the Lao adaptation of the great Indian Ramayana epic. Following our digitally intermediated replication in 2012 of the demolished Vat Oub Mong PLPL murals, It remains uncertain whether a decade later, the storylines and symbology of the “replicant” PLPL paintings came to be understood and re-embraced in local Buddhist practice.
Wat Jong Klan (WJK), in Mae Hong Son, Thailand was decorated with several hundred individual reverse glass paintings (RGPs), created in the late 1850s. This being a highly seismic region, and RGPs being a very easily damaged art medium, many of the paintings were severely fractured or otherwise degraded by a series of earthquakes over the following century. In 2008, we digitally photographed all the RGPs still extant at WJK. Using the Adobe Photoshop app, we developed a simple technology for “virtually repairing” the worst damaged originals; thence having their replacements digitally inkjet-printed on new glass panes and remounted in situ.
Restoring, Re-creating, and Elaborating Interpretive Materials for the Sri Thanonchai Interior Wall Paintings in Bangkok “The White Lotus Press illustrations of the Wat Pathumwanaram lower course walls excluded the caption boxes below each of the main panels. Evidently, while undergoing extensive restorations (in 2010-2012, during which the wihaan was closed to the public, the original caption box texts were overpainted and the former several lines of the script weren’t included in any of the restorations as they presently stand.”
More equitable energy intensification in accordance with the Strategic Assessment (SEA) of Myanmar’s Hydropower Sector? The recently-completed SEA of hydropower scenarios would rule out the two largest —and now “suspended”— such schemes: Myitsone (6,000 MW) on the Ayeyarwadi, for which the Chinese developers have already spent $100 million USD; and Mongton/Tasang (7,500 MW) on the Salween/Thanlwin: projects long and furiously opposed by restive, economically-marginalized, and self-militarizing ethnic minorities whose lands, cultures and autonomy are seen as disbenefitted. Prospects for reaching an agreement have been radically unhinged by the 1st February 2021 Tatmadaw coup; which was fastidiously bloodless at first but has since devolved into full-scale civil war.
Excavating Orwellian Deconstructed “All but the ghosts have abandoned the wartime cemetery here. No relatives visit. The monument to honor the sacrifice of the dead stands unfinished. The pagoda for family prayer is empty. Weeds run wild among the graves, and headstones lie toppled. A generation ago, when these boy soldiers died, bereaved mothers encased their photographs in stone markers. Surprisingly, many of the pictures have not faded. The faces —clear-eyed, clean-shaven, proud— much like those of the young men one sees today on the streets of Hanoi” Bien Hoa, Viet Nam: David Lamb, Los Angeles Times, 17 July 1998
In George Orwell’s seminal dystopian novel “1984” “The Memory Hole” was both an appliance —a wall receptacle into which documents inconsistent with ruling party ideology would be reflexively deposited and whooshed pneumatically to a furnace somewhere below— and the permanent outcome of such usage: here unpacking attempted and accomplished memory holing in post-1975 Viet Nam, Thailand, and the United States.
Taleo Kao An Interactive Visualization Archive of Vat Taleo Kao: a semi-abandoned, “destroyed” Buddhist temple, in Savannakhet Province, Lao PDR.
Waterfalls Hydropower Development Visualization in Waterfalls Hydropower Aesthetics: Impact Assessment, Mitigation, and Post-facto Evaluation.
Pak Mun/Mekong Orwell Arguably —in weighing the trivial power produced against the phenomenal downside— the worst hydroelectric dam ever built, anywhere.
Mekong Memory Hole This was originally produced by the Resources Renewal Institute (RRI), as a part of their video series “Environmental Elders”. It is still available on the RRI website, and I would encourage you to look through the rest of the Environmental Elders productions, Go directly to this URL… vimeo.com/86935784
TVA on the Mekong: the semi-abandoned American visionary roots of Mekong Basin hydropower development.
Facing communist insurgencies following French Indochina’s collapse, the United States conceived a Mekong basin-wide approach to social and economic uplift on the TVA model. The Development and Resources Corporation —”D&R”; headed by former TVA Director David E. Lilienthal, and which operated from 1955 to 1979— devised the Pak Beng scheme: its keystone project, which lay dormant for three decades.
Boeung Kak “Reclaiming” Boeung Kak for high-end development took evicting 2,000 former shoreline households and 4,000,000 cubic meters of pumped landfill.
Wat Jong Klong The 2004 earthquake damaged or destroyed many of the original reverse glass paintings, of which there was then no hi-rez archive.
—trained originally as a limnologist specializing in tropical rivers— holds a doctorate in environmental planning (Ph. D., 1989) from U.C. Berkeley. His focus has always been on media applications in cultural and ecological conservation, and on the evolving interactive visualization toolbox for strengthening impact assessment, public participation, and post-facto evaluation. A combat veteran of the Second Indochina War —wherefrom emerged a not-so-hidden agenda towards personally undoing some part of the damage— he was based in Vientiane from 1995 through 2002. While there he founded the Digital Conservation Facility, Laos (DCFL): affiliated since 2003 with both the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois U. (NIU) and the NIU Center for Burma Studies. Dr. Potkin’s recent research has been on the aesthetics of waterfalls hydro power in Sri Lanka; on the 12,000 MW Myitsone cascade project on the Ayeyarwady headwaters in Myanmar’s troubled Kachin State; on museums as essential to pharaonic projects; and on downstream learning —broadly defined— from Mekong Basin actual outcomes.
