EXCAVATING AMNESIA: A MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY OF EARLY SINGAPORE INTERNET ART

Abstract

The notion of ‘newness’ is a tenacious apparition possessing the discourse of new media art in Singapore. Artistic explorations engaged with technology are perceived in discontinuous fragments, imbuing new media works with an apparent ahistoricity. This thesis firstly seeks to disturb the gossamer veil of amnesia that Singapore new media art histories appear to rest beneath. By drawing upon Jussi Parikka’s lucidation of media archaeology, analyses of two earlier instances of internet art by Singaporean artists will be conducted—of the virtual Lin Hsin Hsin Art Museum and digital art object housed within, and the internet performance/installation, alpha 3.4, y tsunamii.net (Charles Lim and Woon Tien Wei), presented at Documenta11. Such works, bracketing the period of the mid-1990s to early-2000s, will be examined in elation to existing discourses of internet art within mainstream art histories for the time period, as well as the discourses of technology inflected by Singapore’s attempts to build and consolidate internet infrastructures through a continuous stream of masterplans, policies, and initiatives. It will be demonstrated that discourses of technology are refracted through such works of new media art. This thesis thus intends to gesture towards the complications and contrivances in thinking about Singapore new media art as a discursive entity, the construction of which is interwoven with complex processes of historiography for art and media histories; a project that is necessarily modulated by geocultural and political context, intrinsically related to questions of modernity and contemporaneity.