Ong Kian Peng, Cloud Traces, 2024, digital image of custom software. Courtesy the artist and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art.
Communities of Practice. Techno Diversions
Nothing has to be the way it is
NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore is pleased to present Nothing has to be the way it is, an exhibition featuring the artistic propositions created by Chok Si Xuan, bani haykal, and Ong Kian Peng as part of their involvement in Communities of Practice. Techno Diversions, a five-month programme curated by Anna Lovecchio that interlaces artistic research, transdisciplinary encounters, and the formation of communities around shared interests to propel transformative understandings of technology.
The uncanny symbiosis between humans and the digital devices, interactive interfaces, online platforms, and global infrastructures that increasingly operate our lives is a defining feature of contemporary society. In these wired times of machine intelligence and computational acceleration, microchip wars and platform powers, the artworks featured in this exhibition cast a sideway look at techno-driven progress. Moving across different conceptual frameworks and a multiplicity of mediums, Chok Si Xuan, bani haykal, and Ong Kian Peng share a common investment in reclaiming agency within the technosphere. They divert, possess, possibly disrupt the streamlined existence of technological artefacts through gestures that question the escalation of technological sovereignty and, ultimately, the role of technology in our lives. Purposefully, these artists do not position themselves at the edge of advanced technologies. Rather, they interfere with existing apparatuses and instil into them worldviews other than those that originally brought them about. The systems they envisioned proceed by appropriations and approximations, frictions and forays, scrambled codes and enigmatic conjectures. In the essay “It Doesn’t Have To Be the Way It Is” which inspired the title of this exhibition, Ursula K. Le Guin remarks that the subversive power of the imagination “gnaw(s) at the very foundation of the belief that things have to be the way they are”. Nothing has to be the way it is hints at the endless permutations of how things can be.
The exhibition will take place in The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore’s programme space nestled at the heart of the Research Centre and launched in September 2024. This event marks the first time The Hall hosts a group exhibition, bringing home the Centre’s longstanding commitment to dwell upon and experiment with the spaces of the curatorial.
As participants in Communities of Practice. Techno Diversions, Chok Si Xuan, bani haykal, and Ong Kian Peng are conducting a residency at NTU CCA Singapore from October 2024 to February 2025. Revolving around critical engagements with the material, political, and spiritual layers of technology and the complexity of our relation to it, this multidimensional programme is a generative platform that provides artists with time, space, and resources to unravel their aesthetic inquiries and catalyse communities around their interests and creative processes.
Nothing has to be the way it is is couched between two series of public programmes— Empirical Workshops and the Transdisciplinary Lectures—developed in conversation with the artists themselves. Steeped in a do-it-yourself ethos, the Empirical Workshops took place in December 2024. Each workshop germinated by the artist’s own research and was aimed at creating knowledge through skill-sharing and the creative dabbling with raw materials. In Temporal Oscillations, Chok Si Xuan dived into the physics of circuitry and erratic electronics, teaching participants how to assemble common electronic components to modulate the flow of electricity and hijack standard systems of temporality. With METAL MACHINE MISCHIEF (or how to make noise music with bicycles), bani haykal took his workshop participants on an unconventional group ride. Through tinkering and drilling, cranking and whirring, discarded bicycle parts were assembled into unorthodox musical instruments activated in a final jam session that produced a one-of-a-kind audiovisual experience. Different wavelenghts resonated in Ong Kian Peng’s Natural Radio workshop where participants could explore a range of low frequency waves emitted by natural electromagnetic phenomena as a way to tune in to the inaudible voices of the environment.
Coming up in February 2025, the Transdisciplinary Lectures will bring the artists in conversations with philosophers, sociologists, scientists, and other creatives whose work significantly inspired them. Deepening the ramifications of their research in different disciplines, the Transdisciplinary Lectures will feature contributions by: Tiziano Bonini (Associate Professor, Sociology of Culture and Communication, University of Siena, Italy), Eugene Yew Siang Chua (Nanyang Assistant Professor of Philosophy, School of Humanities, NTU, Singapore), Lee Pooi See (Professor, School of Materials Science and Engineering, NTU, Singapore), Emiliano Treré (Beatriz Galindo Distinguished Professor, Language Theory and Communication Sciences, University of Valencia, Spain and Reader, Data Agency and Media Ecologies, Cardiff University, United Kingdom), and Boedi Widjaja (interdisciplinary artist, Singapore).
Conceived as a seedbed for experimentation, Communities of Practice is a shapeshifting research platform that brings forth communities at the intersection of artistic practices. Holding a space where artistic research can develop through interdisciplinary collaborations, exchanges, and processes of co-creation, Communities of Practice advances the role of NTU CCA Singapore as convener, capacity builder, and incubator in the arts sector.
Exhibition Credits
Curator
Anna Lovecchio
Director
Karin G. Oen
Programmes Coordination
Eunice Lacaste
Ong Jing Ting
Admin and Operations
Jasmaine Cheong
Joann Yeo
Communication
Eunice Lacaste
Corporate Communications Office, NTU
The artistic practice of Chok Si Xuan (b. 1998, Singapore) is driven by a deep fascination for the complex relations that enmesh technology in the everyday. Exploring ways in which technology, machines, and industrial materials shape contemporary subjectivities and corporealities, her growing body of work features composite sculptures and kinetic installations that coalesce odd circuitries, feedback systems, found electronics, and material components of common technological devices. She is currently pursuing a degree in electronics engineering to gain a deeper understanding of the material nature of electronics and electricity. Her work has been shown in and commissioned by institutions such as ArtScience Museum (2024), Singapore Art Museum and Esplanade (both 2023) as well as independent art spaces in Singapore.
Image: Portrait of Chok Si Xuan. Photo by Kee Ya Ting. Courtesy NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.
As artist and musician, bani haykal (Singapore, b. 1985) experiments with language, sound, and fiction. His work revolves around human-machine relationships/intimacies, and cultural identity formations reflecting critically on how language, tools and technologies have shaped and continue to shape our life experiences. From interfaces to interactions, from fictions to frictions, from commuting to communicating, the creative output of his research often involves the creation of DIY tools and it encompasses site-responsive installations, poetry, and performance as well as publications and music releases.
Working across a broad range of mediums, including film, sound, VR, and electronics, ong kian peng (Singapore, 1981) situates his practice at the intersection of art, technology and ecology. His work explores ecological thinking through immersive multi-media environments and installations that address environmental crises, climate change, and the expanding field of human-technology interactions. Delving into the complex relationship between culture, nature, and technology, he creates visionary scenarios and raises existential questions about our role in shaping the future of a vulnerable planet. His work has been featured in international exhibitions and festivals such as, most recently, Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria, 2024) and Singapore Biennale (2022). In 2017, he co-founded Supernormal.space, an independent art space focusing on emerging and experimental art practices. He was awarded the President’s Young Talents award in 2015. He is currently a PhD candidate at the NTU School of Art, Design and Media and a recipient of the NTU Research Scholarship.
