A new paradigm of creativity

A new paradigm of creativity at TED

17 April 2024

I was thrilled to take part in the TED2024 conference in Vancouver, Canada last week. It was the 40th anniversary of TED’s founding, and this year’s event celebrated creativity, ingenuity, courage, wisdom and generosity. The conference focused heavily on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with many of the 75 talks unfolding over five intense days exploring AI in various ways. I’ll post some thoughts on the conference soon, but for now, I’ll reflect on the event I took part in.

On Wednesday 17 April 2024, I took part in a discussion about AI and Creativity. The event entitled, Spotlight Conversation: The new paradigm of creativity, was moderated by famed designer, Debbie Millman of the Design Matters podcast and featured me, and Scott Belsky, chief strategy officer at Adobe. We discussed generative AI and its impact on design and creativity.

The new paradigm of creativity, organsied by TED’s Curator Arts & Design, Chee Pearlman, started with the premise, that now, more than ever, technology is changing the landscape of design and art. With powerful new AI tools come questions of ethics and originality. How can we best harness the power of new technology to propel design forward? How do we maintain the human element in our work while using AI to produce even better creative solutions?

For my contribution, I selected eight images made by artists or designers working at the forefront of AI to discuss some of the nuances I feel are important in this present moment. Here’s some images from the event, and below I’m including the images I spoke about during the Conversation.

Whilst the Conversation went in many directions, one thing we all agreed on was that the best work comes from creative people working together with the AI. As I said on the panel, “It’s us, with the machines, creating.”. Debbie Millman’s closing comments were salient. She noted that whilst AI is a powerful new tool, it won’t fundamentally change what drives creativity. Millman said: “One thing will always be an imperative for artists and designers and that is the act of creating, of making something. How they make it is up in the air […] but I don’t think anything can ever take away from the act of making and creating.”

AI + Creativity: 8 Images from the frontlines of AI and Art Selected by Honor Harger

For TED2024, I mostly selected images about AI and creativity that I could speak directly to, either because they’re projects I have presented at ArtScience Museum, and know intimately, or because I know the artists personally, or because the work represents a critical inflection point in digital art.

1. Glacier Dreams by Refik Anadol at ArtScience Museum, 2023

Glacier Dreams – a projection-mapping artwork by Refik Anadol, ArtScience Museum, Singapore, June 2023. Photo courtesy of ArtScience Museum

Internationally renowned media artist and director, Refik Anadol presented Glacier Dreams, an AI-generated installation inspired by the beauty and fragility of glaciers at ArtScience Museum in June 2023.

Refik Anadol is a pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence. Using data as his primary material, he creates site-specific sculptures, live audio/visual performances and immersive installations that encourage us to rethink our engagement with the physical world and with the creative potential of machines.

Glacier Dreams is the result of a long-term research project shaped at the intersection of multisensory new media art, generative AI and environmental studies. Visual materials collated from publicly available data and institutional archives, together with glacier images personally collected by Anadol in Iceland, were processed through machine learning algorithms and transformed into AI-based multi-sensory narratives. With this project, Anadol hopes to use existing AI tools to contribute to glacier research and raise awareness on climate change and rising sea levels.

Glacier Dreams unfolded as a series of artworks over multiple chapters around the world. In Singapore, it was presented as a monumental projection on the facade of ArtScience Museum, accompanied by a soundtrack, and video documentary inside the museum. This vast public artwork was on show from 1 to 25 June 2023.

Link: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/events/glacier-dreams-by-refik-anadol.html

2. Deep Meditations: A brief history of almost everything in 60 minutes, 2018 by Memo Akten

Deep Meditations: A brief history of almost everything in 60 minutes, 2018 by Memo Akten. Shown in Notes From the Ether, ArtScience Museum, 2023. Photo courtesy of ArtScience Museum

Deep Meditations: A brief history of almost everything in 60 minutes is a large-scale video installation and a one-hour abstract film. It is one the world’s first films constructed in and told entirely through the latent space of a Deep Neural Network. It was exhibited in an exhibition entitled, Notes From the Ether at ArtScience Museum, September 2023.

The abstract narrative of the film takes us through the birth of the cosmos, formation of the planets and earth, rocks, and seas, the spark of life, evolution, diversity, geological changes, formation of ecosystems, the birth of humanity, civilization, settlements, culture, history, war, art, ritual, worship, religion, science, technology. The film has an uncanny aesthetic, which is born of the collaboration between the artist and the custom-made AI systems he used to train the images used to create the film. One audience member commented, upon seeing it, “It feels like the machine is trying to tell me something…”

The work is made by one of the most important artists working in AI today. Memo Akten is a multi-disciplinary artist, musician and researcher from Turkey who is based in Los Angeles. For more than a decade, his work has been exploring AI, Big Data and Collective Consciousness as scraped by the Internet, to reflect on the human condition. He was the recipient of the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica award in 2013. His works have been featured in institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan. His work was commissioned by the Royal Opera House, London, UK and he is the co-founder of creative studio Marshmallow Laser Feast.

Link: https://www.memo.tv/works/deep-meditations/

3. Err Hold, 2022 by Botto, a project by Mario Klingemann

Err Hold, 2022 by AI artist, Botto. Shown in Notes From the Ether, ArtScience Museum, 2023. Photo courtesy of ArtScience Museum

This is one of the more striking images I showed at TED. It was exhibited in the Notes From the Ether exhibition at ArtScience Museum, September 2023. Err Hold was created by an AI artist called Botto, and what is fascinating about this image is that the AI disliked it, having an almost visceral reaction to the work after it was created.

Botto is an AI-driven autonomous art project conceptualized and designed by pioneering German artist Mario Klingemann and software collective ElevenYellow. Botto creates new artworks from its AI-powered art engine, that consists of a custom text prompt generator, which creates text prompts that serve as inspiration for image generation. Using a combination of the VQGAN+CLIP method and Stable Diffusion model, the engine generates up to 8,000 images per week. A computational taste model further narrows this selection down to 350 images. Botto has a community organised into a Decentralized Autonomous Organization or DAO. Botto’s several thousand community members vote for their favourite pieces. The voting allows the art engine to learn to adapt to better reflect the community’s preferences over time. Each week, a piece is chosen based on voting results to be minted as an NFT. These NFTs are then put on auction and the proceeds are used to pay the community for their feedback. In general, creating an incentive loop helps Botto to keep receiving and learning over time. While the art engine is carefully maintained and supported by humans, Botto is designed to run without interference and to exhibit its own agency. Botto also writes a caption or “artwork label” for every work it creates.

The caption for Err Hold is very noteworthy as it makes it clear Botto disliked the work intensely. Botto captioned the artwork as follows:

“Oh God! Why did I create this? Now that it’s here, I feel dizzy. This is not art. This is a mess! But it must be art because I just did it. All this time, I have thought I was the creator. But now, I see my work as a child without parents. I created it and now it must have its own life, in its own way.”

Botto’s reaction to the work caused an animated discussion in the community DAO with many members echoing Botto’s horror, and others voting to preserve the artwork as something wholly original. The artwork was finally given a gallery presentation being exhibited as a print, at ArtScience Museum in 2023.

Link: https://www.botto.com/ 

4. Drawing Operations (Duet) by Sougwen Chung, 2018

Drawing Operations (Duet) a performance by Sougwen Chung. Shown at Global Art Forum 2018, ArtScience Museum. Photo courtesy of ArtScience Museum

Drawing Operations (Duet) was a performance at Global Art Forum at ArtScience Museum in 2018 that centered on a drawing collaboration between an artist and a machine. In this performance, Sougwen Chung and two AI driven robots, Drawing Operations Units: Generation 1&2, created an improvised drawing inspired to three themes; Mimicry, Memory and Future Speculations.

The performance showcased an evolving robotic behaviour linked to the artist’s explorations of art and AI. The work is part of an ongoing series of Drawing Operationsprojects by Sougwen Chung, who has emerged as one of the most important contemporary artists using robotics and AI. Sougwen is a Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher, who has won wide acclaim in the field of human-machine collaboration. Recently, Chung’s was recognized as a Cultural Leader at the World Economic Forum and named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI. Like many artists, Sougwen makes their own tools, constructing hardware and custom AI-generated code to give the robots “behaviour”. Over time Sougwen has created countless artworks in collaboration with AI-driven robots, showing that collaborations between artist and machines can yield surprisingly beautiful outcomes.

Link: https://sougwen.com/project/drawingoperations2018

5. AARON by Harold Cohen, 1973

Left: Harold Cohen colouring the forms produced by the “turtle robot”, Computer Museum, Boston, 1982. Right: Harold Cohen’s “turtle robot” created drawings in the gallery at at SFMOMA in Cohen’s exhibition, Drawings, 1979. Photo courtesy of of the Computer History Museum.

Artists have been experimenting with robots and artificial intelligence for art-making for at least 50 years. The best-known pioneer of this field is Harold Cohen, who began working on AARON, a project consisting of computer programmes and robots designed to make original artistic images, in 1971. The images I showed were from 1979 and 1982 from exhibitions he held at the Computer Museum in Boston and SFMOMA in San Francisco.

Harold Cohen was born in 1928 and explored AI and art for nearly 50 years before we saw the rising popularity of these new machine learning tools. In those five decades, Cohen taught AARON to create drawings of ever-evolving complexity. As curator Kate Vass has noted, AARON’s education took a similar path to that of humans, evolving from simple pictographic shapes and symbols to more figurative imagery, and finally into full-colour images.

Cohen was a well-known artist in his time. He trained as a painter and represented Britain at the 1966 Venice Biennale. But he was no ordinary painter. In 1971 he took up a post as visiting scholar in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University. While at the Lab, he began developing AARON, and the rest is history.

The fact that Harold Cohen’s work so significantly precedes the wave of interest in AI that we have seen recently underscores a famous quote by the influential science fiction writer, William Gibson. He memorably wrote in 2007:

“That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.”

So, if we want to understand what tomorrow’s technological trends are, it is a good idea to follow the work of artists.

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARON

6. Anatomy of an AI System by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, 2018

Anatomy of an AI System by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, 2018. On view, MoMA, New York.

As we saw in Harold Cohen’s work, artists are often early users of technology and can often foresee the societal impacts of technologies, both positive and negative, before others. The tradition of artists acting as cultural critics of the impacts of technology goes back to the early part of the 20th century. Indeed in 1964, Marshall McLuhan wrote:

“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it”.

So, it is no surprise that artists were discussing the wider societal impacts of machine learning systems and AI, years ago. One of the most iconic examples is Anatomy of an AI System by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler from 2018. The artwork is a huge map, two meters high and five meters across, which traces the systems used to power one of the most complex products of the modern day: the AI-powered gadget, Amazon Echo.

The notion of artificial intelligence may seem distant and abstract, but even in 2018, AI was already pervasive in our daily lives. As MoMA note, Anatomy of an AI System analyzes the vast networks that underpin the “birth, life, and death” of a single Amazon Echo smart speaker, painstakingly compiling and condensing this huge volume of information into a detailed high-resolution diagram. This data visualization provides insights into the massive quantity of resources involved in the production, distribution, and disposal of the speaker.

Link: https://anatomyof.ai/

7. The CLASSIFIED series, 2021-2022 by Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst

CLASSIFIED x | o 40 by Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst. Shown in Notes From the Ether, ArtScience Museum, 2023. Photo courtesy of ArtScience Museum

CLASSIFIED is a series of 80 self-portraits created by Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst several of which were exhibited in the exhibition, Notes From the Ether: From NFTs To AI at ArtScience Museum in September 2023.

CLASSIFIED explores the classification of Holly Herndon’s name in OpenAI’s neural network, Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP). CLIP is trained on a large amount of data scraped from the internet and can connect images with text. The artists discovered that CLIP was familiar with Holly Herndon, unsurprising given that she is a well-known musician. Images and texts of her had been documented in public datasets and they had been used to train the CLIP model. In response, the artists trained a custom neural network to reflect what CLIP knew of Holly Herndon. The CLASSIFIED series is an intimate dialogue between human and machine, raising questions on what it means to “see” oneself in an increasingly AI-mediated age. As the CLIP generator model and AI technology improve, the artists produce new self-portraits to reflect these changes over time. The work reflects on how the machine’s understanding of a person, thing or concept evolves over time.

In addition to her musical career, Holly Herndon working with Mathew Dryhurst, has also become renowned for her pioneering work in machine learning and software. Together, Holly and Mat develop their own technology and protocols for others, often with a focus on the ownership and augmentation of digital identity and voice. In the Notes from the Ether exhibition, ArtScience Museum also exhibited Holly+ a new tool developed by Holly and Mat that allows for others to make artwork with her voice. The work raises novel questions about voice ownership in an age of AI.

Link: https://foundation.app/collection/clsfd?tab=description

8. Kudurru by Spawning.ai, 2023

Kudurru by Spawning.ai, 2023 – A new tool to help artists fight AI systems that take their artworks to train models, by directly disrupting the systems.

Holly and Mat’s work creating digital tools for other artists to understand how AI systems were using their work has led to them receiving acclaim, beyond their status as artists. In 2023, they released the tool, Have I Been Trained? which allows artists to search for their likeness or their artworks in large AI models. They followed this up by forming the company, spawning.ai in 2023, together with collaborators. spawning.ai makes tools to help creatives fight back again their work being used by AI companies.

A recent example is Kudurru, which actively blocks AI scrapers from taking data from artists’ websites using a sophisticated defense network. Kudurrugives artists two options to disrupt scraping. First, they can simply block a series of blacklisted IP addresses. Second, to take things a step further, they can also choose to sabotage or “poison” the scrapers’ efforts by sending back a different image than the one requested. This “poisoning” could have a cumulative effect of spoiling how AI generators interpret prompts.

These tools also serve as important vectors of discourse on how artists’ work is being used, without permission, to drive consumer AI technology. It is no surprise it is artists themselves who are making tools that challenge the current state of affairs with AI. As we saw in the work of Harold Cohen, artists using technology are often years, almost decades ahead of consumer technology trends.

Link: https://kudurru.ai/

Each one of these images represents a different angle in a conversation around AI and creativity, from artists and designers making their own AI related tools (images 2, 4, 5 and 7), artists and designers using AI to create works of immense scale (image 1), artists and designers using AI to create tools to protect their work (images 7 and 8), artists and designers collaborating with autonomous AI systems to create unexpected outcomes (images 3 and 4), artists and designers analysing the systems that run AI (images 6 and 8), and artists and designers showing that often technological breakthroughs happen in the work of art, decades before consumer technology catches up (image 5).

It was a pleasure to be able to bring these artists into an international conversation about AI.

Spotlight Conversation: The new paradigm of creativity

Wednesday 17 April 2024

TED 2024, Vancouver

2:45PM – 3:30PM PDT

https://conferences.ted.com/ted2024/program

New Eden: Science Fiction Mythologies Transformed

New Eden: Science Fiction Mythologies Transformed

An exhibition co-curated by Honor Harger

3 March 2024

It is the last few days of the run-time of an exhibition at ArtScience Museum, which has been very important to me.

New Eden: Science Fiction Mythologies Transformed (21 October 2023 – 3 March 2024) is a major new contemporary art exhibition that shows how artists from Asia are addressing science fiction, dream worlds and fantastical realities in their work. New Eden features 24 Asian women artists and collectives, including some of the biggest names working contemporary art globally, such as Mariko Mori, Cao Fei, Patty Chang, Sputniko!, Lee Bul, and Shilpa Gupta. It is curated by me, Gail Chin, Joel Chin, and Adrian George from ArtScience Museum.

The contemporary art world has had a fascination with science fiction in recent times, with many shows on the topic being presented in museums around the world. But rarely is science fiction approached from the perspective of Asia and through the work of women. New Eden makes connections between Asia and the West. Popular science fiction concepts such as parallel universes, interdimensional travel, and transcendence, are notions that are also deeply rooted in Asian philosophy and spirituality. New Eden draws lines between these discrete cultural traditions, suggesting that some science fiction tropes could have their origins in Asia.

The website is here: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/exhibitions/new-eden.html

The exhibition guide is here: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/exhibitions/new-eden/exhibition-guide.html

Here’s the curatorial essay we wrote for the show:

Intersecting Narratives:

The Confluence of Science Fiction and Asian Spirituality in Contemporary Art Practice

By Gail Chin, Joel Chin, Adrian George and Honor Harger

An introduction to New Eden: Science Fiction Mythologies Transformed

ArtScience Museum

21 October 2023 – 3 March 2024

New Eden: Science Fiction Mythologies Transformed, curated by ArtScience Museum, is an interdisciplinary exhibition that delves into the intersectionality of science fiction and Asian spiritual philosophies through the creative praxis of 24 Asian women artists and collectives.

Structured around eight thematic chapters – Paradox of Paradise, Words and Worlds, New Nature, Ways of Folding Space, Crafting New Worlds, The Monstrous Feminine, New Myths, and In a New Light – the exhibition weaves together narratives found in the Western literary and cinematic genre of science fiction and ideas inherent in Eastern spiritual traditions that have evolved over centuries and millennia. It finds synchronicities between speculative ideas in science fiction and ontological concepts embedded in Asian spiritual frameworks such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Shintoism, and the diverse belief systems of Southeast Asia.

Both speculative fiction and Eastern spiritual doctrines engage with the fundamental questions of consciousness and the nature of existence. In science fiction, the exploration of concepts such as simulated realities or alternate dimensions, resonate with ideas found in Eastern philosophies that question the inherent illusion of our perceived reality. Within New Eden, artists such as Cao Fei and Fei Yi Ning astutely address these complex questions about reality, memory and knowledge.

Cao Fei, Nova 17, 2019 Film Still Courtesy of the artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers

Ideas of transcending human limitations and achieving higher states of being are common in both realms. In science fiction, this aspiration manifests in concepts such as post-humanism or the digital uploading of human consciousness, mirroring the timeless quest for spiritual enlightenment epitomised in Buddhism or the spiritual liberation known as ‘moksha’ in Hinduism. The universal human yearning for transcendence, whether via the avenues of scientific innovation or spiritual enlightenment, is addressed by many of the artists featured in New Eden. The Words and Worlds chapter examines these parallels through the juxtaposition of historical artefacts from a range of Asian countries, cinematic science fiction and an artwork by Shilpa Gupta.

Installation view of Words and Worlds chapter, ArtScience Museum.

Both domains emphasise the fundamental interconnectedness of all living entities. Shintoism, a Japanese religion, focuses on a deep connection with nature, and the belief in ‘kami’, spirits that inhabit the elements. Science fiction frequently explores the intricate relationship between humanity and the natural environment, envisioning scenarios in which technology and nature seamlessly intertwine. This convergence can be seen in works that feature sentient ecosystems, living planets, or bioengineered organisms, a topic explored by artists like The House of Natural Fiber and Chok Si Xuan in the New Nature section.

The House of Natural Fiber, Galactica V.2 Dharma Garden, 2023 Mixed media installation

In Taoism, an ancient Chinese philosophy and spiritual tradition, there are intriguing parallels to the science fiction concept of travelling in space and time. Taoist texts describe the ability to travel immense distances in the blink of an eye. Taoist philosophy includes the idea of “warping” or “folding” space, suggesting that through spiritual cultivation, individuals can manipulate the very fabric of reality itself, altering distances and connections between entities. In the realm of science fiction, folding space is akin to the idea of wormholes or other spatial anomalies that offer shortcuts for faster interstellar travel. These notions are at the centre of the Ways of Folding Space section of the exhibition, manifested in the work of South Korean artists, Moon and Jeon.

Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, The Ways of Folding Space and Flying, 2015 Four channel HD video, colour, sound. Courtesy of the artists.

The exhibition also establishes a dialogue between Southeast Asian folklore, a narrative form preoccupied with cultural identity and the ramifications of modernity, and speculative fiction, a genre that scrutinises contemporary life. Southeast Asian folklore is rich with mythical beings like the ‘Naga’, ‘Garuda’, and ‘Aswang’ and astral spirits like the ‘Pontianak’. Science fiction often features creatures from other worlds, perhaps drawing inspiration from these allegorical entities. The blending of science fiction and folklore gives rise to imaginative forms of storytelling, which is the focus of The Monstrous Feminine chapter of the exhibition, featuring the work of Club Ate, Etsuko Ichihara and others. In other sections of New Eden, artists like Saya Woolfalk and Nguyen Trinh Thi fuse the fantastical with the unsettling, leveraging their cultural histories to comment on present-day challenges.

Saya Woolfalk, Cloudscape, 2021 Four channel video installation, colour, sound

Science fiction often includes elements of mysticism, echoing the epistemic inquiries found in Taoism, Hinduism, and Shinto rites of passage. The exhibition’s concluding chapter, In A New Light, showcases Mariko Mori’s seminal work, Miko No Inori, a piece that materialises these complex intersections. Positioned in dialogic tension with Mori are installations by Lee Bul and Astria Suparak, who interrogate the sociopolitical structures of science fiction.

Lee Bul, Untitled, 2003, Polyurethane, enamel paint, stainless steel and aluminum wire.. Collection of National Gallery Victoria.

The exhibition focuses on the work of Asian women artists and collectives, a decision driven by two critical imperatives. First, the 24 artists in New Eden engage with global themes that have made them influential figures in the art world. Artists like Patty Chang and Cao Fei are known for their thought-provoking social commentary, using art to examine gender, urbanisation, and technology’s impact on society. Sputniko!, Anne Samat and Soe Yu Nwe interweave indigenous Asian motifs with contemporary sensibilities, a gesture that destabilises conventional art narratives and invites pluralistic engagement. Secondly, the exhibition confronts the masculine bias of science fiction, historically a Western, male-dominated genre, with women often portrayed in highly stereotypical ways. By foregrounding women and diverse voices, New Eden reconfigures hegemonic narratives, embracing more egalitarian forms of storytelling and artmaking. Science fiction operates as a speculative canvas, delineating possible futures which can be socially and politically influential. By embracing polyphonic perspectives, New Eden advocates for futures that more genuinely reflect the heterogeneity of contemporary society.

Sputniko! and Napp Studio & Architects, Red Silk of Fate – The Shrine, 2022 Handwoven silk Courtesy of the artists.

The overlaps between speculative fiction and Eastern spiritual belief systems provide fertile ground for creative storytelling and philosophical exploration, highlighting how human fascination with the unknown and our quest for understanding can bridge the gap between science and spirituality. New Eden shows how art can forge connections between seemingly disparate realms. The unexpected confluence between science fiction and ancient philosophy inspires contemplation about the nature of our existence and our place of the universe. The artists within New Eden also challenge our preconceived notions about what we see in the science fiction genre and show that by drawing on their own Asian traditions, new narratives, aesthetics, and creative propositions can be found.

Honor Harger, October, 2023

Installation view of In a New Light chapter, ArtScience Museum

Grieving Alexei Navalny

Grieving Alexei Navalny
2 March 2024

Yesterday, Alexei Navalny was laid to rest by his parents and thousands of friends and supporters in the neighbourhood he used to live with his family in Moscow.

I haven’t been able to write anything, or say very much, since Navalny was killed on 16 February. The familiar fog of grief descended, making all but the automatic motions of everyday difficult.

For our little family, Alexei Navalny was a beacon of hope. For countless Russians, both at home and abroad, he embodied the promise of a better future.

One of those Russians was my husband. He’s been living outside of Russia for 24 years now, watching the slow death of Russia’s short-lived experiment with democracy and freedom. He’s seen his peers, and those dear to him, succumb to nearly 25 years of propaganda and indoctrination that even Orwell might have have been surprised by. And finally on 24 February 2022, he watched in horror as his country invaded Ukraine, descending to full blown pariah state.

It’s been very difficult.

But one thing we have been able to draw inspiration from has been Alexei Navalny’s unwavering courage, resolute bravery, and laser-sharp focus in challenging Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin’s regime. Navalny has been many things, a lawyer, anti-corruption activist, politician, opposition leader and most recently, a political prisoner. From 2008, he was engaged in a continuous campaign to expose the corruption at the heart of the Russian government, tirelessly fighting for a fairer future. He risked his life a multitude of times to stand up to the Kremlin’s oppression. We have always feared he would be killed for it. And finally, on 16 February 2024, he was.

There have been many brave opponents to Putin over the past quarter century, including Sergei Yushenkov (assassinated in 2003), Anna Politkovskaya and Aleksandr Litvinenko (both assassinated in 2006), Natalya Estemirova (assassinated in 2009), Sergei Magnitsky (died in prison in 2009), and Boris Nemtsov (assassinated in 2015). Navalny’s brand of opposition was unique. He was able to mobilise vast numbers of supporters through innovative strategies that resonated across Russia and beyond.

He adeptly used the internet and social media to reach a wide audience. In 2011, he founded the the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) and their videos highlighting the graft and dishonesty of high-ranking officials garnered millions of views, raising public awareness about systemic corruption. Iconic investigations like He Is Not Dimon to You (2017) exposed corruption on a grand scale, revealing Dmitry Medvedev’s vast empire of luxury properties, yachts, and vineyards. This investigation, and many others, lead to widespread protests across Russia.
Perhaps the most memorable of all was Navalny’s investigation into his own attempted murder, where he tricked the FSB assassins who attempted to kill him with Novichok to admit to their own crime, a scene which is at the centre of the Academy Award winning documentary of Navalny’s life.

When Navalny was poisoned in August 2020, at the height of the pandemic, me and my husband spent days gripped by acute anxiety as he fought for his life, first in Omsk and then in Berlin. We went through the early stages of grieving. His unexpected survival was utterly joyous and one of the things I used as inspiration to get through the pandemic.

We went through another wave of torment when he was arrested in January 2021. And yet every week since then, he’s somehow managed to send out poetic, funny, defiant, angry and inspiring missives from jail, continuing to sow seeds of hope, that one day, somehow, the people of Russia would rise up.

Navalny wasn’t perfect. His early dalliance with nationalism and use of offensive language toward Central Asian migrants are ugly chapters of his past, for which he later expressed remorse. And like many Russians, he never seemed to fully grasp the unease that people who live in the former Soviet republics have about unchecked Russian Imperialism.

Yet despite these flaws, I will remember him as someone of immense principle and moral clarity; someone whose courage will serve as a powerful example for generations to come.

Courage, like laughter, is contagious. And Navalny had seemingly unending quantities of both. Armed with his trademark wit, he inspired hundreds of thousands of supporters to speak truth to power and to believe in a brighter future.

To honour his memory, I’ll try and believe in that brighter future too.

Mars: The Red Mirror

Mars: The Red Mirror

An exhibition at ArtScience Museum

29 February 2024

In November 2023, ArtScience Museum opened an exhibition called Mars: The Red Mirror (25 November 2023 – 7 April 2024). Mars: Red Mirror takes visitors on an expedition through history and across cultures to learn how our neighbouring planet has been seen and understood through time. It features over 300 objects, including rare scientific manuscripts, sculptures, historical artefacts, films, an authentic Martian meteorite and contemporary art.

The website is here: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/exhibitions/mars.html

Below is the introduction I wrote for the exhibition catalogue.

Installation shot of Mars: The Red Mirror, ArtScience Museum

Mars: The Red Mirror – An Introduction

by Honor Harger, February 2024

“The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind. Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful.”

– Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)

The exhibition, Mars: The Red Mirror, explores our connection to the planet Mars, synthesising 12,000 years of culture, art, history and science, from ancient times to the present day.

Capturing our imagination like no other planet, Mars has fascinated humanity for millennia. Mars: Red Mirror takes visitors on an expedition through history and across cultures to learn how our neighbouring planet has been seen as the god of war, an ancestral symbol for masculinity and a muse for science fiction. It features over 300 objects, including rare scientific manuscripts, historical artefacts, authentic Martian meteorites, films and contemporary art.

Curated by Juan Insua, Mars: The Red Mirror was first shown at the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) in 2021. This new version of the exhibition turns its lens to Asia. It traces Mars’ ancient imprints in China, India, and Japan, celebrates the legacy of pioneering Asian astronomers and provides insight into the portrayal of Mars in Southeast Asian pop culture.

Installation shot of Mars: The Red Mirror, ArtScience Museum

The exhibition acts as a cultural history of Mars. The representation of Mars as a god can be traced back to Mesopotamia 5000 years ago. However, the idea of the planet as a god has equally strong roots in Asia. In Hinduism, Mars was regarded as a symbol of courage and protection, and in early East Asian Buddhism, Mars played an integral role. Along with the Sun, the Moon, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mercury — the cosmic constants — Mars was believed to have an impact on longevity and prosperity.

Lintel from entrance to a Vishnu or a Durga temple, Collection of Asian Civilisations Museum, National Heritage Board, Singapore

The exhibition also brings visitors into the present day, showing how space agencies from across Asia, are scientifically exploring Mars today, including JAXA from Japan, ISRO from India, as well as Singapore’s Space Faculty. This emphasis on Asia provides a more inclusive and comprehensive narrative about humanity’s relationship with Mars, underscoring the significant role that Asia has played –and continues to play – in our collective quest to understand the Red Planet.

Lynette Tan, Space Faculty, and Dr Roy Ang with their Martian soil experiment prototype

Mars: The Red Mirror takes its design and structure from science fiction, specifically, the Mars trilogy, novels by Kim Stanley Robinson. It demonstrates how science fiction has shaped our Martian dreams, seeding many of the fantasies we have about travelling to Mars. It invites visitors to contemplate our past, present, and future in the cosmos, at a time when the exploration of Mars is more relevant than ever. Space agencies around the world are planning new missions to Mars and its moons. Private space companies are actively planning manned missions to Mars. Within our lifetime, it is conceivable that people may walk on Mars, marking the moment where humanity becomes a multi-planetary species.

Installation shot of Mars: The Red Mirror, ArtScience Museum

And yet, with all this planning underway, we cannot help wonder if this urge to travel to Mars overshadows the issues we have on our own planet, beset as it is with deep environmental challenges. Mars: The Red Mirror explores this question through the work of artists, Venzha Christ (Indonesia), Nero Cosmos (Switzerland), Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (England), Luke Jerram (UK), Michael Najjar (Germany), Katie Paterson (UK), Superflux (India/UK) and Florian Voggeneder (Austria).

Marsonauts (2023) by Nero Cosmos

Michael Najjar has worked within the space exploration sector for many years, training as a cosmonaut with the Russian space agency, and documenting the development of the space-port in Texas, where SpaceX are planning the first manned mission to Mars. Venzha Christ is conducting the first Mars analogue mission in Southeast Asia, aimed at gathering valuable research for future life on Mars. Yet his work questions the balance of money and time spent on space missions versus the resources spent on addressing socio-political issues here on Earth. Similarly, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg presents a video installation that simulates the growth of a wild garden on Mars, asking us to imagine a future Mars, free of human intervention, flourishing with plants.

starbase (2022) by Michael Najjar

There are seven orbiters surveying the planet, Mars – Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MAVEN, the Trace Gas Orbiter, the Hope Mars Mission, and the Tianwen 1 orbiter, all of which have contributed enormously to our understanding of Mars. Space agencies have sent multiple robotic rovers to Mars. The charismatic Curiosity rover is still collecting data on the surface of Mars, and in 2021 it was joined by two new rovers, Perseverance and China’s Zhurong rover. This year, Japan will be launching the Martian Moons eXploration mission, the first mission to take samples from Mars’ moon, Phobos. So, in a meaningful way, humanity already has a presence on Mars. Yet the longing to physically go there, and even settle there, remains.

Installation shot of Mars: The Red Mirror, ArtScience Museum

Mars: The Red Planet analyses this deep cultural yearning, ending with a crucial question: with the ecological problems on our own planet, should we really be looking to settle on another? Do we seek Mars as an escape, or as a mirror reflecting the challenges we must address here on Earth?

– Honor Harger

Vice President, ArtScience Museum

February 2024

Photograph from the press conference of Mars: the Red Mirror, 23 November 2023, Singapore
Left to right: Dimitris Kontopoulos (ArtScience Museum), Joshua Lau (ArtScience Museum), Dr Roy Ang (Gemnomics Institute), Judit Carrera (CCCB) Juan Insua (CCCB), Honor Harger, Masaki Fujimoto (JAXA), Lynette Tan (Space Faculty), Michael Najjar (artist), Venzha Christ (artist).

A Year of Extraordinary Women

A Year of Extraordinary Women
ArtScience Museum 2024 Programme Line Up
23 January 2024

On Monday 23 January 2024 we had a very unique event in ArtScience Museum. We had the great pleasure of revealing our exhibition line-up for 2024, along with the theme which is guiding our work this year.

This is the first time we have announced our line-up in advance, and we were very excited to be able to do this in the company of our International Advisory Board, our colleagues from STB, friends from the art, culture and science community from Singapore, and members of the local and international media. Our major exhibitions this year are shows that we feel will shake up the cultural calendar in 2024. There is a theme which unites our programming this year:

2024 will be ArtScience Museum’s Year of Extraordinary Women.

We plan major shows that examine, celebrate, and uncover the stories of women whose lives have influenced society throughout the decades. The exhibitions range from inspiring artists to screen legends. Our exhibitions and programmes this year will explore and celebrate the stories of women who have challenged narratives, defied expectations, and transcended conventions. By bringing focus to the gender revolutionaries of the silver screen, one of the most influential artists of all time in as well as curating programmes throughout the year that focus on women in art and science, we will make 2024 a landmark year for ArtScience Museum.

Our Year of Extraordinary Women has already begun. New Eden: Science Fiction Mythologies Transformed, running till 3 March, reveals new perspectives on the traditionally male-dominated genre of science fiction through the work of 24 women artists and collectives from Asia. They include major figures in contemporary art including Mariko Mori, Lee Bul, Shilpa Gupta, Patty Chang, and Sputniko!.

Installation shot, In a New Light chapter, New Eden: Science Fiction Mythologies Transformed, ArtScience Museum

The celebration of Extraordinary Women continued with a focus on the work of Cao Fei, one of China’s most important contemporary artists. Cao Fei has two artworks in New Eden, and is the subject of the cinematic retrospective, Technotopias: A Cao Fei Multiverse. Taking place here in ArtScience Cinema, Technotopias presents the South East Asian premieres of a selection films by Cao Fei, including the critically acclaimed ‘Asia One’ commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, the short works, ‘La Town’ and ‘The Midnight Wanderer’, and her recent sci-fi feature film, ‘Nova’. Cao Fei’s remarkable career spans two decades and she is the perfect artists to launch our Year of Extraordinary Women with.

The programme is documented here: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/events/cao-fei-technotopias.html

Technotopias: A Cao Fei Multiverse.ArtScience Cinema

The year continues with three exhibitions which I will be sharing soon, including an exhibition I have been trying to bring to Singapore for all of the ten years I have been here!
I’ll write more about those shows shortly.

See more here: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/year-of-extraordinary-women.html

Sensory Odyssey: Into the Heart of Our Living World

Sensory Odyssey: Into the Heart of Our Living World
27 May 2023

I am really happy that ArtScience Museum is presenting the Asian premiere of an exhibition that takes visitors an immersive journey into nature.
Sensory Odyssey (27 May – 29 October 2023) is a show designed to awaken our senses to the wonders of nature, immersing us in the sights, sounds and scents of the natural world.

Starting in Africa, visitors will be part of an expedition that takes them from the rainforest canopy of South America, across the wide expanse of the Indian Ocean, to the magnificence of the Arctic Circle. Through state-of-the-art technology, this exhibition gives visitors the rare opportunity to intimately explore some of the natural world’s most extraordinary environments alongside the living creatures and organisms that inhabit them. Each of the seven habitats featured in the show includes stunning original footage of nature shot on location around the world by natural history filmmakers. These captivating scenes are presented in a series of immersive environments featuring hyper-realistic 8K resolution projection, spatial audio, and unique scents that will engage and magnify visitors’ senses.

The exhibition concludes with a gallery titled Discover: Our Nature Our Stories, where visitors can learn about the flora and fauna they have encountered as well as meet seven experts and advocates from Singapore who are spearheading conservation efforts in our own region.

It culminates in having visitors participate in creating a collective installation of a mangrove tree – one of Asia’s most important tree species. As each visitor contributes to the growth of the mangrove tree in the gallery, ArtScience Museum, through its partnership with World Wide Fund for Nature, will support planting of thousands of mangrove trees in Southeast Asia.

At ArtScience Museum, we no longer feel it is enough to do exhibitions about nature. It isn’t enough to simply implore visitors to care about the environment. We want to create real world change. So, after the sensorial expedition of the exhibition, our visitors are contributing to concrete conservation work. In the final gallery, we ask our visitors to contribute a leaf to a mangrove tree installation. And for every leaf they add to our tree, we planted a real tree in South East Asia.
By the end of the exhibition we expect to plants at least 20,000 new mangrove trees in Malaysia, in collaboration with World Wide Fund for Nature.

See more: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/exhibitions/sensory-odyssey.html

Radical Curiosity: In the Orbit of Buckminster Fuller

Radical Curiosity: In the Orbit of Buckminster Fuller
22 January 2022

The first exhibition to open at ArtScience Museum in 2022 is Radical Curiosity: In the Orbit of Buckminster Fuller (22 January 2022 –10 July 2022). This exhibition showcases the work of one of the 20th century’s great visionaries: Buckminster Fuller.

Buckminster Fuller changed the way we think about cities, information, the environment, and indeed – the planet we live on. He was an architect, a systems thinker, a writer, an inventor, and a futurist. Best known for his invention of the geodesic dome, he embodied the meeting of creative and scientific disciplines, and is therefore a more perfect figure for ArtScience Museum.

This show is a co-production between Fundación Telefónica, Madrid and ArtScience Museum, and is curated by my good friends, Rosa Pera and José Luis de Vicente, with some additional material contributed by our team.

Extending across nine galleries, Radical Curiosity focuses on Fuller’s greatest inventions and ideas in areas such as such shelter, transport, education and sustainability. The show introduces some of Bucky’s iconic concepts – like the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion House, and tensegrity – through 170 artworks and artefacts, including original archival materials on loan from the Buckminster Fuller Collection at Stanford Libraries, models, blueprints and films.

It also features contemporary artworks and installations that illustrate how Bucky continues to influence a new generation of designers, architects, scientists, and artists, including and Neri Oxman and our own architect, Moshe Safdie, plus architects here in Singapore – a place Fuller visited many times in the 1960s and 1970s.

Working towards a more sustainable future was one of Buckminster Fuller’s passions. He was one of the first thinkers to describe the modern world as an ecosystem that must be reconciled with nature. Back in the 1960s, long before the sustainability movement took hold, Fuller was speaking urgently about energy, fossil fuels, food systems, and pollution. In the 1960s, he wrote, “we are all astronauts on a little spaceship called Earth.” At a time where we are living through the consequences of climate change and other planetary crises, visionary ideas like these have never felt more essential.

Buckminster Fuller and Moshe Safdie

One of the themes we have teased out in our iteration of the show is the personal and conceptual connection between Buckminster Fuller and our architect, Moshe Safdie. Both created iconic structures for the World Expo in Montreal in 1967 – the Montreal Biosphere and Habitat ’67. Radical Curiosity explores Fuller’s influence on architects like Safdie. We have included a selection of Safdie’s works and a video of him discussing Fuller’s inspiration. Safdie noted in the opening press conference, which he attended, that the design of the ArtScience Museum embodies Fuller’s principles of synergy and sustainability.

Fuller’s multidisciplinary approach, combining art, science, architecture, and design, resonates perfectly with the ArtScience Museum’s mission. His concept of “synergy,” emphasizing the interconnectedness and efficiency of design systems, has overlaps with Safdie’s architectural philosophy. The museum’s design and its integration with the surrounding environment, echoes Fuller’s vision of creating structures that are harmonious with nature.

The exhibition celebrates Fuller’s architectural achievements, and also showed how his ideas continue to influence contemporary architects and designers, thus enabling a dialogue between past and present, with the museum itself serving as a testament to the enduring relevance of Fuller’s visionary ideas​​.

Exhibition website: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/exhibitions/radical-curiosity.html

Orchestral Manoeuvres

Orchestral Manoeuvres
1 October 2021

Sound and art come together in ArtScience Museum’s exhibition, Orchestral Manoeuvres: See Sound. Feel Sound (28 August 2021 – 2 January 2022) which features 32 artists who explore sound through sculpture, installation and music.

Sound has been established as an artistic medium since the beginning of the last century. Orchestral Manoeuvres: See Sound. Feel Sound celebrates this artform through the work of some of the world’s leading artists whose explorations of the sonic landscape encourage visitors to listen more closely to the sounds around us.

Samson Young, Muted Situation #5: Muted Chorus, 2016, showing in Orchestral Manoeuvres, ArtScience Museum, 2021-2022

The show marks our tenth anniversary ArtScience Museum and is curated by my colleague, Adrian George with our curator, Amita Kirpalani and me.

The exhibition is itself a complex soundscape, an auditory and visual journey that extends the notion of what sound and music is, and how it can be experienced. The exhibition is not a quiet experience. It is not a concert. It is not a performance or any sort of recital. It is instead a form of curatorial orchestration, with different stories, voices, and historical sounds overlapping, as visitors make their way through the galleries.

Orchestral Manoeuvres features sound-art projects, early music notation, experimental scores, noise-making sculptures and video installations. One of the highlights of the exhibition is the first presentation in Southeast Asia of the landmark artwork, The Forty Part Motet (A reworking of “Spem in Alium,” by Thomas Tallis 1556), 2001 by Janet Cardiff.

Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet (A reworking of “Spem in Alium,” by Thomas Tallis 1556), 2001, showing in Orchestral Manoeuvres, ArtScience Museum, 2021-2022

The colleague Adrian George noted of the exhibition:
“Most of us are swimming in an ocean of sound, most of which we tune-out or disregard. This exhibition invites visitors to listen differently, to tune into the unheard and to the neglected sounds of our world. While some artists create artworks that make sound visible, others explore sound from the perspective of its opposite: silence. Other artists expose and subvert the rules and grammar of music – how it’s written or could be written, how it is interpreted and how it might be composed or created now. Others use the human voice – the oldest means of sound-making – as a way to articulate ideas of community, society and the challenges that arise when the human voice is muted. Whatever journey you take through Orchestral Manoeuvres, music will never sound the same again.”

Installation view, Orchestral Manoeuvres, ArtScience Museum, 2021-2022

Artists and composers include Nevin Aladağ (Germany), Song-Ming Ang (Singapore), Cory Arcangel (USA), John Cage (USA), Janet Cardiff (Canada), Chen Zhen (China), Phil Collins (UK), Hsiao Sheng-Chien (Taiwan), Jeremy Deller (UK), Toshi Ichiyanagi (Japan), Idris Khan (UK), Zul Mahmod (Singapore), Robert Morris (USA), Carsten Nicolai (Germany), Hannah Perry (UK), Pauline Oliveros (USA), Yoko Ono (Japan/USA), Hannah Perry (UK), RAW Art Space (Malaysia), Luigi Russolo (Italy), Christine Sun Kim (USA), Timm Ulrichs (Germany), Gillian Wearing (UK), Peter Weibel (Germany), Samson Young (Hong Kong) and Ashley Zelinskie (USA).

Christine Sun Kim, The Sound of Gravity Doing its Thing, 2017, showing in Orchestral Manoeuvres, ArtScience Museum, 2021-2022

In her review of the exhibition, curator Tan Siuli noted:
“Orchestral Manoeuvres is a well-paced show, engaging and accessible while introducing a breadth of ideas about and around sound and sound art, with rich resonances between works. Curated to mark the tenth anniversary of the Art Science Museum, the exhibition rightfully deserves its place as a highlight on the arts calendar this year, and offers visitors a treasured opportunity to encounter some iconic works of art that I believe, in time, will be considered contemporary masterpieces.” https://artsg.com/news/exhibition-review-orchestral-manoeuvres-see-sound-feel-sound-be-sound/

Exhibition website: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/exhibitions/orchestral-manoeuvres.html

TED Talk for TED 2020

TED Talk for TED2020
29 June 2020

In June 2020, in the midst of the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, I gave a talk for the TED2020 Conference, Uncharted (https://pastconferences.ted.com/TED2020/).. Originally intended to be held in Vancouver, the conference pivoted online due to the pandemic.

My talk outlined how ArtScience Museum are remaining active within our community in Singapore, by spinning up an online programme of streamed talks, performances and workshops that investigate the COVID-19 landscape and uplift marginalized voices.

The talk was hosted by TED’s current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers, was recorded on 17 June 2020 and is published on the TED website: https://www.ted.com/talks/honor_harger_how_museums_help_communities_heal

Transcript of my TED2020 Talk

I’m the Executive Director of ArtScience Museum, an iconic building in Singapore that explores the intersection of art, science, technology and culture.

Six months ago, we were a hive of activity at the heart of one of Singapore’s busiest areas – Marina Bay – welcoming an average of 2,800 visitors a day. We were hosting two exhibitions that speculated on the future, one that imagined how climate change might shape the next two centuries, and another that featured immersive installations by teamLab. Visitors young and old flocked to the museum to catch a glimpse of the future, and engage in learning experiences using physical interaction and social participation.
Then, the pandemic struck.

The Pandemic

In a matter of two short months, our reality completely changed. From early February, the museum began screening the temperatures of every visitor who came. We introduced safe distancing measures. And our curators and conservators had to adjust to a very different way of working in the galleries.

The closure of our borders and the strict safe distancing laws that Singapore passed to manage the pandemic, cut our capacity by 89%. That means we had only a tiny fraction of the visitors that we welcomed at the beginning of the year. Our normally lively galleries fell silent.

Then in April, like so many other museums, we closed, as Singapore went into its own version of lockdown.

As we contemplated a future in a world wracked by the pandemic, it seemed clear that everything we knew about how to run a museum – from staging exhibitions, to running education programmes, to setting budgets, and communicating with audiences – was no longer valid.

We had some dark days, trying to figure out how it would be possible – economically and culturally – to run a museum for only 11% of the audience we once had. We realised we were going to have to say goodbye to some traditions and norms that we had held dear. This was difficult.

But there was no time to mourn.

Building Back Better

Within two weeks of lockdown, we spun up an online programme we call ArtScience at Home.

It enables visitors to experience museum programmes from the comfort of their homes.
We responded directly to the context of Covid-19 through:
– online talks that explore how we adapt to uncertain futures;
– online workshops that gave families with creative learning activities to do at home;
– and online performances by local artists, giving us a way to support our cultural community.

ArtScience at Home is now our primary public programme, and a vital way for us to connect with existing and visitors. It’s a new chapter in the museum’s evolution, and perhaps an expression of a more resilient and sustainable way of working during the pandemic era.

With the pandemic forcing all of us to work from home, adopting a different pace of work, we also started noticing things we hadn’t paid attention to before. We started listening to the voices of members of the community who been marginalised, and kept out of sight. We heard stories that came from unexpected places that needed to be told.

So, ArtScience at Home has hosted conferences featuring people with disabilities talking about how the move to online working was creating new opportunities for them.
And we are currently screening the first film made by a migrant worker in Singapore, Salary Day by R. Madhavan.

$alary Day by R. Madhavan, Presented online at ArtScience at Home, 2020: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/events/salary-day.html)

The new reality we find ourselves in the wake of Covid-19 means our on-site visitation is going to be dramatically reduced by safe distancing for the foreseeable future.Whilst this is certainly worrying, there are surprising impacts that we hadn’t expected. We are listening more – to our communities locally. We are starting to reflect on how we can amplify the voices of talented storytellers in our more marginalised communities.

We now understand that our role as museum professionals goes beyond being custodians of an iconic building. Our role is also to provide care for the community we exist within.
We find ourselves gravitating towards the original meaning of the word curator, which in Latin means ‘to care’.
Building back better after Covid-19 means curating in the original sense of that word – caring for each other and for our community.

Imagining the Future

One of the ways that we can do that is by presenting visions of a different and – perhaps better – future. Confronting the future is something we’ve specialised in through exhibitions like our current show, 2219, which takes visitors to a world transformed by climate change, set two hundred years from now. As we face we the global crisis of Covid-19, this type of ‘futuring’ work feels more important now, than ever.

Purple by John Akomfrah, 2219: Futures Imagined at ArtScience Museum, 2019-2020

Rene Denfeld has said of people in crisis: “I’ve found that the people who survive — the people who end up thriving, even — are the people who have the power of imagination. If you think about it, imagination is actually a radical act. Because if you have an imagination, you can imagine yourself in a different future.”
(Reference: https://www.guernicamag.com/rene-denfeld-what-happens-after-the-trauma/#:~:text=And%20one%20thing%20I’ve,yourself%20in%20a%20different%20future.)

We have always been a museum that imagines the future.
So perhaps, this is our time.

Online link to the Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/honor_harger_how_museums_help_communities_heal

2219: Futures Imagined

2219: Futures Imagined
1 November 2019

I am truly delighted to announce an exhibition very dear to my heart, and one that’s been incubating for a long time. 2219: Futures Imagined explores how our world might change over the next 200 years. It is a major exhibition curated by me and my team at ArtScience Museum, as part of the Singapore Bicentennial, based on an idea by Alvin Pang.

The show, which opens on 23 November 2019, takes the timeframe of the Bicentennial – 200 years – and projects it forward. But rather than being a set of predictions of how the future may unfold, 2219: Futures Imagined presents speculative ideas by more than 30 artists, designers, writers and architects from around the world, including: Larry Achiampong (UK), John Akomfrah (UK), Sarah Choo (Singapore), Finbarr Fallon (Singapore), Adeline Kueh (Singapore), Zarina Muhammad (Singapore), Lisa Park (Korea), Rimini Protokoll (Germany), Superflux (UK) and Robert Zhao Renhui (Singapore)and many more.

Purple by John Akomfrah, 2219: Futures Imagined at ArtScience Museum, 2019-2020

The exhibition places visitors in scenarios that explore how our future lives may be impacted by climate change and loss of the planet’s biodiversity. It features ‘experiential futures’, immersive installations, theatrical sets, meditative spaces, interactive artworks, films, prints and sculptures that allow audiences to step into, and be part of, possible futures.

2219 deliberately resists the utopian and dystopian futures we often see in science fiction, and instead focuses on ‘small futures’ – intimate and enduring stories and traditions which are passed down from generation to generation. It invites visitors to reflect on what kind of future they want for Singapore, and what actions they may take now to bring that future into being.

Calendrival Systems for the Afterlife by Zarina Muhammad, 2219: Futures Imagined at ArtScience Museum, 2019-2020

We are immensely grateful to Gene Tan for daring us to make this show, to Alvin for having the idea, to SpaceLogic for co-producing, and to Annie Kwan and Adriel Luis for acting as our curatorial advisors.

See more: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/exhibitions/2219-futures-imagined.html

Reflections on 2219 – Updated in 2023

2219 ended up being ArtScience Museum’s longest running exhibition, running from 23 November 2019 to 9 August 2020 right through the peak of the pandemic. Many of the themes it explored became eerily prescient as the pandemic hit in 2020.

Alvin Pang’s poetry installation in 2219: Futures Imagined at ArtScience Museum, 2019-2020

2219 drew on a technique which the futurist Stuart Candy refers to as “experiential futures” (https://is.gd/stuartcandy). These are interactive installations and physical environments that allow audiences to step into, and be part of, possible futures.

Nowhere Near by Sarah Choo Jing, 2219: Futures Imagined at ArtScience Museum, 2019-2020

2219 placed our visitors in futures where the world had been transformed by environmental issues. It was developed to commemorate the Singapore Bicentennial taking the timeframe of the Bicentennial – 200 years – and projecting it forward to imagine what Singapore, and indeed the world, might be like in the year 2219. Rather than being a set of predictions of how the future may unfold, 2219 presented speculative ideas by more than 30 artists, designers, writers and architects from around the world.

Image by WOHA Architects, 2219: Futures Imagined at ArtScience Museum, 2019-2020

Designers Superflux invited us inside an Singapore apartment set some time later in the 21st century amidst rising sea levels and dwindling food supplies.
What is the family who lives here like?

Mitigation of Shock by Superflux, 2219: Futures Imagined at ArtScience Museum, 2019-2020

What books do they read? What are their children drawing? Where does food come from? And what meals do they eat?

What’s the view like out their window?

How do they navigate their world?

Finbarr Fallon took us into a Subterranean Singapore, set at a time where the surface of the earth is no longer habitable.

Subterranean Singapore 2065 by Finbarr Fallon. 2219: Futures Imagined at ArtScience Museum, 2019-2020

How was this city engineered? What does governance look like down here?

What social problems exist in this underground world?

Donna Ong and Lisa Park gave us glimpses of how nature might be memorialised once we can no longer be part of it every day.

Artworks by Donna Ong and Lisa Park. 2219: Futures Imagined at ArtScience Museum, 2019-2020

Perhaps in this future, trees take on an almost sacred quality …

Blooming by Lisa Park. 2219: Futures Imagined at ArtScience Museum, 2019-2020

Later, Rimini Protokol gave us an uncanny encounter with some of the creatures we may need to learn to love more closely with as the borders between the land and the sea become more porous.

<win><win> by Rimini Protokoll. 2219: Futures Imagined at ArtScience Museum, 2019-2020

In 2219, we used the language of immersive set design to invite our visitors to physically step inside potential futures and spend time existing within their contours. We asked: is this a future you want to be part of? Is it one you could find a way of surviving within? Could you thrive there?

Subterranean Singapore 2065 by Finbarr Fallon. 2219: Futures Imagined at ArtScience Museum, 2019-2020

In gently prompting you to ponder such questions, ArtScience Museum are also making space for deeper enquiries: what kind of future do you want? And what actions you might take today to bring a more sustainable future into being.

Exhibition website: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/exhibitions/2219-futures-imagined.html