Abstract

Abstract: The notion of ‘newness’ is a tenacious apparition possessing discourses of new media art. Artistic explorations engaged with technology in Singapore tend to be perceived in discontinuous fragments, imbuing such practices with an apparent ahistoricity. This essay seeks to disturb this amnesia beneath which Singapore new media art histories appear to rest. By drawing upon Jussi Parikka’s elucidation of media archaeology, two early instances of internet art by Singaporean artists will be analysed: Ocarina (1994), a digital art object housed within the virtual Lin Hsin Hsin Art Museum, and the internet performance/installation presented at Documenta11, alpha 3.4 (2002), by collective tsunamii.net (artists Charles Lim Yi Yong, Woon Tien Wei, and scientist Melvin Phua). These works, bracketing the period of the mid-1990s to early-2000s, are examined in relation to existing discussions of internet art in art history, as well as discourses of technology inflected by Singapore’s attempts to build and consolidate internet infrastructures through masterplans and initiatives. This essay thus gestures towards the complications and contrivances in thinking about Singapore’s new media art as a discursive entity, which is interwoven with regional historiographies of art and technology, and a project intrinsically related to questions of modernity and contemporaneity.

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