[DEMONSTRATION] Anatomy of a Kolam by Aditi Neti

 

Kolam, also known as rangoli, is a traditional Indian art form drawn on the floor using rice flour, coloured powder, or chalk. Aditi Neti’s research reimagines their creation through generative design and human-machine interaction. Join Aditi as she introduces the mechanisms of three interactive experiments, investigating how human creativity, intentionality, and physicality can be adapted using digital tools while maintaining the cultural significance of kolam-making.

 

About Aditi Neti
Aditi Neti is a South Asian creative technologist and graphic designer exploring the interconnectedness and synergy between machine, man, and nature. She finds herself most excited by speculative narratives, interactions, and artefacts informed by cultural perspectives. In her practice, she aims to highlight how the complexities of human relationships with the natural world can manifest in alternative and absurd ways through technology.

 

Image courtesy of Aditi Neti.

[SHARING] Critical of/for what? by Candice Ng, Justin Zhuang, and Vanessa Ban

Time: 10AM–7PM

Venue: Level 1, Gallery 1

Free (General admission fees to the exhibition apply)

 

Design educators Candice Ng, Justin Zhuang, and Vanessa Ban will showcase findings from their research project that investigates what it means to critically teach, learn, and practice graphic design in Singapore today. Set against the backdrop of a neoliberal economic system and an industry constantly disrupted by emerging technologies, the project takes a deep dive into the tension between education and professional practice, and how design as a field is being redefined. They will extract preliminary insights from their research, including interviews with local design educators and practitioners as well as an earlier closed-door panel discussion.

 

About the speakers
Candice Ng is a designer, educator, and researcher whose work focuses on critical inquiry within graphic design education and pedagogy. She holds an MFA in New Media and participated in the 2018 SVA Design Writing and Research Summer Intensive. A two-time recipient of the Nanyang Education Award, Candice is currently a Senior Lecturer at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.

 

Justin Zhuang is an observer of the designed world and its impact on everyday life. Since 2009, the journalism graduate has covered architecture and design for magazines in Singapore and around the world. He has authored several books and projects about design and the city Singapore, including INDEPENDENCE: The History of Graphic Design in Singapore since the 1960s (2012) and Everyday Modernism: Architecture & Society in Singapore (2022). Together with his partner Sheere Ng, Zhuang runs In Plain Words, a Singapore-based writing studio and publishing imprint.

 

Vanessa Ban is a designer and educator. She has over a decade of experience working across cultural institutions and clients in the commercial sector. She is also the founder of External Assessment Summer School, an interdisciplinary educational initiative that aims to bridge the gaps of art, theory and design. Additionally, she has served on jury panels including D&AD and the Crowbar Awards. As an adjunct faculty, she brings into her classes the experience she received at Pentagram, Typography Summer School New York, and the London College of Communication.

 

Image courtesy of Candice Ng, Justin Zhuang and Vanessa Ban.

[SHARING] Feng Shui in the Expanded Field

Time: 1PM–6PM

 

 

Feng Shui in the Expanded Field is a collective research project expanding the horizon of contemporary Feng Shui practice. It engages with both formalised and folk beliefs to put forth new means of spatial and metaphysical consultation and augmentation.

 

 

 

Central to this project is the gathering of artists and designers informed by diverse mediums, including but not limited to architecture, graphic design, animation, musical composition, and even traditional Chinese seal carving. Members of the collective will be present in the space to share more about their micro research endeavours.

 

 

FSitEF is led by Sean Gwee and includes Kin Leonn, Quek See Yee, Ryan Benjamin Lee, Adeline Setiawan, Armaan Bansal, Zachary Chan, Iyn Huii Nai, Chok Si Xuan, Ashley Hi, Jasmine Ho, Gideon Yap, Mollie Anna King, Aki Hassan, Charlene Kuah, Mengju Lin, Hong Shu-Ying, and Michelle JN Lim.

 

 

Image courtesy of Michelle JN Lim.

[PANEL DISCUSSION – OFFSITE] No Discipline by Hothouse

Venue: Aliwal Arts Centre, 28 Aliwal St, #02-10 Singapore 199918

 

Founded in 2020, Hothouse is an ever-evolving interdisciplinary setup encompassing expertise across contemporary art, technology, design, and architecture. Coinciding with the collective’s 5th anniversary, the fellowship has been an opportunity to critically dissect and refine their methods for engaging in transdisciplinary collaborations within Singapore’s independent artistic landscape.

 

Taking place at Hothouse’s physical space, this sharing and panel discussion will contextualise their practices, steered by two external interlocutors, art critic Harry Bird and researcher Ethel Pang.

 

About Hothouse
Hothouse is a collaborative effort by the following three entities:

INTER-MISSION is a new media art collective dedicated to discourses of technology in art initiated in 2016 by Urich Lau and Teow Yue Han. It focuses on interdisciplinary and collaborative works in video art, audiovisual, performance, installation, and interactive art.

Currency is a creative design agency established in 2014 with a mission to develop strong brands, innovative solutions, and cultural identities.

formAxioms was established in 2018 by Eva Castro and Federico Ruberto as a research framework, agency, and teaching cluster part of Singapore University of Technology and Design — Architecture and Sustainable Design. Their research is based on speculative narratives focusing on two scales: territorial and architectural assemblages.

 

Image courtesy of Hothouse. Photo by Juliana Tan.

[DRAWING PERFORMANCE] EcoXTechnologies by Superlative Futures

 

Superlative Futures is an art+design research agency devises transdisciplinary ways to probe how cities and communities can better relate to neglected margins and the broken environment. Their project is a speculative design proposal imagining new forms of climate-crisis technology, taking interest in the mangrove—said to come from the word “mangle” (and wooded “grove”)—to contort our manicured ideas of nature in comfortably ordered urban environments. For the showcase, they will perform a studio drawing of a “mangled garden” aided by a suite of devices that mimic the behaviour of the ghostly tidal mangrove forests.

 

About Superlative Futures
Superlative Futures comprises Wong Zi Hao and Liu Dian Cong. Wong Zi Hao (Dr.) is an artist, designer, researcher, and educator. His practice-led research probes neglect in the interstitial (but also creatively fertile) margins of landscape and architecture, art and design, asking how critical care might look like for these places when neglect is speculatively undone. In 2023, Wong received his PhD in Architecture at the National University of Singapore—the first doctoral design-led research to be attempted and completed at NUS’s Department of Architecture. Liu Dian Cong is a design-researcher who recently completed his Master of Architecture at the National University of Singapore. His design-led thesis explored sedimentation as an architectural process, tapping into modes of creative artmaking to express alternative watery conceptions of “ground”, in the process rehabilitating the place of water in relation cities. In 2024, Dian Cong was selected as a participating artist in NUS Museum’s Prep-Room “Currents”.

 

Image courtesy of Superlative Futures.