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ABSTRACT
This article explores how digital art exhibitions and bioecology interact in the contemporary Singaporean cultural milieu. Applying theoretical tools from recent work in environmental and oceanic media studies, I argue that mediations of digital art exhibitions in the postcolony reveal postcolonial approaches to bioecology. Digital art exhibitions can provide a frame to understand humans and bioecology as relationally – that is to say, ecologically – embedded with each other, confusing boundaries between the material and immaterial, universal and particular.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Richard Cavell for his guidance with the initial draft of this paper, as well as the two anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful and constructive comments helped improve the manuscript. The author would also like to thank Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies editors Robin M. Boylorn and Cassidy D. Ellis.
Notes
1 Amanda Lee Koe (@amandaleekoe), “Photo of Bougainvillea Flowers.” Instagram Photo, June 25, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CB3TFLtHpCJ/.
2 Marshall McLuhan, “The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,” in Media Research, ed. Marshall McLuhan and Michel Moos (London: Routledge, 1997), 111; Sebastian Vehlken, Christina Vagt, and Wolf Kittler, “Introduction: Modeling the Pacific Ocean,” Media+Environment 3, no. 2 (2021).
3 “About SAW,” Singapore Art Week, https://www.artweek.sg/about (accessed April 24, 2022). Emphasis added.
4 Emphasis added. Greg Lowan-Trudeau, “Mapping (as) Resistance: Decolonizing↔Indigenizing Journalistic Cartography,” Media+Environment 3, no. 1 (2021).
5 Timothy Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 421.
6 Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,” 413.
7 Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding, “From Jehol to Stowe: Ornamental Orientalism and the Aesthetics of the Anglo-Chinese Garden,” in Eastern Resonances in Early Modern England. New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800, ed. Claire Gallien and Ladan Niayesh (London: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019), 156.
8 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 25.
9 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 25–6.
10 Mitchell’s ideas of spatiality and colonialism in part derive from Edward Said, who has argued that the “Orient” as such was a historical fabrication through which Europe understood itself. Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage Books, 1979), 3.
11 For more on this, see Vijay Prashad’s compelling historical study on neoliberalism and the Global South. Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso Press, 2012).
12 Lang Ng, “A City in a Garden,” Civil Service College https://www.csc.gov.sg/articles/a-city-in-a-garden (accessed April 21, 2022)
13 These metaphors also have resonances with the Garden City movement, a 20th century urban planning movement begun in 1898 by Ebenezer Howard, who aimed to “fus[e] together rural space and the urban nexus.” While the Garden City here describes a style of city planning that Singapore did not follow exactly, the movement’s European utopianist history is itself revealing. Jean-Yves Tizot, “Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Idea and the Ideology of Industrialism,” Cahiers Victoriens Et Édouardiens, no. 87 (2018).
14 Ng. “A City in a Garden.”
15 Michele Chong, “Feeding the Monkeys: Toward a Multispecies Singapore,” in Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene, ed. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2020), 128.
16 Bertrand Seah, “Another Garden City is Possible: A Plan for a Post-Carbon Singapore,” in Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene, ed. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2020), 243.
17 Henri Lefebvre illustrates these two views: “[natural space] is still the background of the picture; as décor, and more than décor, it persists everywhere, and every natural detail, every natural object is valued even more as it takes on symbolic weight.” For Lefebvre, ecology-as-décor is being replaced by its symbols; the idea of nature must be saved, not nature itself. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 31.
18 Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2013), 17.
19 Vehlken et al., “Introduction: Modeling the Pacific Ocean.”
20 Vehlken et al., “Introduction: Modeling the Pacific Ocean.”
21 McLuhan, “The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,” 110. But Vehlken et al. project a different kind of spatial metaphor onto McLuhan’s original formulation of the anti-environment. Richard Cavell, in McLuhan in Space, argues that McLuhan’s anti-environments are meant to be understood as being generated “from within [the environment],” basing this contention on McLuhan’s assertion that he critiqued the environment from within, as the sailor did in Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” surviving the vortex by allowing himself to get pulled “into the Maelstrom” and going with the flow. Vehlken et al., however, use a different allegory of McLuhan’s to differentiate and define their position. McLuhan writes that “[o]ne thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.” Vehlken et al. suggest that for the fish (and McLuhan), the anti-environment requires them to “yank themselves out of the water,” but they (Vehlken et al.) instead look to find out “[w]hat happens when media theory no longer operates from the surface but rather jumps off its surfboard into the cold water, thus inverting the perspective to look up from below the water surface to the surfboard-based anti-environments above” – but this was McLuhan’s position. Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 209, 33; Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village: An Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations That Could Be Eliminated by More Feedforward (New York City: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 175.
22 McLuhan, “The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,” 119.
23 Tiara R Na'puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 6. For more on Na’puti’s work on mapping and rhetoric, see Na’puti and Joëlle M. Cruz, “Mapping Interventions: Toward a Decolonial and Indigenous Praxis Across Communication Subfields,” Communication, Culture & Critique 15, no. 1 (2022): 1–20.
24 The websites remain for a while. Many of the links available during the time of writing will be defunct. These might be rendered as “broken links” in a relationship.
25 Steven Loft, “Mediacosmology,” in Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, ed. Steven Loft and Kerry Swanson (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2014), 175.
26 Steven Loft, introduction to Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, ed. Steven Loft and Kerry Swanson (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2014), xvi; Loft, “Mediacosmology,” 172.
27 Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopia, Ecologies (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017), 251.
28 Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds, 253.
29 Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans; With A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 42.
30 Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, 43.
31 Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds, 63.
32 Wolfgang Ernst, “Media Archaeography,” in Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 55
33 “Our Story,” Somewhere in Bedok https://somewhereinbedok.com/our-story (accessed April 24, 2022).
34 “Our Story.”
35 “Our Story.”
36 These works are, respectively: Adeline Kueh, What you don’t know, you won’t miss, 2021, Somewhere in Bedok, Singapore. https://somewhereinbedok.com/adelinekueh; Ian Woo, Conference of the Birds, 2021, Somewhere in Bedok, Singapore. https://somewhereinbedok.com/ian-woo; Juria Toramae, Threading Time, 2021, Somewhere in Bedok, Singapore. https://somewhereinbedok.com/juria-toramae.; Tini Aliman, Before Bedok. 2021, Somewhere in Bedok, Singapore. https://somewhereinbedok.com/tini-aliman.
37 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 25.
38 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 25.
39 Johan M. Fauzi, Adeline Kueh, Ian Woo, Masuri Mazlan, Tini Aliman, Juria Toramae, and Sarah Lin, Somewhere in Bedok – Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcTrsqsxROU (accessed April 24, 2022); Johan M. Fauzi, Adeline Kueh, Ian Woo, Masuri Mazlan, Tini Aliman, Juria Toramae, and Sarah Lin, Somewhere in Bedok – VR https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=vtQ3Je5RKo4 (accessed April 24, 2022).
40 James McArdle, review of “Marjorie Doggett's Singapore: A Photographic Record.” Trans-Asia Photography 10, no. 2 (2020).
41 Loft, “Mediacosmology,” 176. In this vein, Dipesh Chakrabarty has suggested that a precapitalistic sense of time is one that departs from European history; what Chakrabarty calls the “precapital” is “not a reference to what is simply chronologically prior on an ordinal, homogeneous scale of time,” but “exists within the temporal horizon of capital and that at the same time disrupts the continuity of this time by suggesting another time that is not on the same, secular, homogeneous calendar.” Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 96.
42 “About Peripheral Spaces,” Peripheral Spaces https://peripheralspacesexhibition.com (accessed April 25, 2022).
43 Hera, Peripheral Spaces Catalogue, 2022. https://peripheralspacesexhibition.com/Peripheral_Spaces_Catalogue.pdf.
44 Hera, Peripheral Spaces Catalogue.
45 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964, ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Berkeley: Gingko Press, 2003), 5. Sybille Krämer writes: “For McLuhan, technology is an extension of the human body […] electronic media of human consciousness. Kittler avoids this method of anthropomorphic genealogy of media in the spirit of the human senses – and quite rightly so.” For Friedrich Kittler, with electronic media “[s]ense and the senses turn into eyewash. […] Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number,” suggesting that electronic media are not related to or extensions of the body, but cause the body to become erased and replaced by a number. Similarly, Jussi Parikka suggests that a method of viewing media separated from the human, and as part of the earth, is “anti-McLuhanian.” Sybille Krämer, “The Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation: On Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Media,” Theory, Culture and Society 23, no. 7–8 (2006): 105. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 1. Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 5.
46 Cavell, “Kittler’s Apophrades,” Berlin Journal of Critical Theory 6, no. 1 (2022): 26.
47 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 68.
48 Loft, “Mediacosmology,” 175.
49 Parikka, A Geology of Media, 34.
50 Donna Haraway, Manifestly Haraway (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 103–4.
51 Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, 42; Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, 70.
52 Parikka, A Geology of Media, 24.
53 Kyle Devine, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2019), 138; Devine, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music, 134.
54 “Singapore: A Global Hub for Innovation,” Forbes, 1 August 1, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/custom/2018/08/13/singapore-a-global-hub-for-innovation/.
55 Josh Lepawsky and Creighton Connolly, “A Crack in the Facade? Situating Singapore in Global Flows of Electronic Waste,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 37, no. 2 (2016): 167; Lepawsky and Connolly, “A Crack in the Facade? Situating Singapore in Global Flows of Electronic Waste,” 171.
56 Jeremy Morris, “Sounds in the Cloud: Cloud Computing and the Digital Music Commodity,” First Monday 16, no. 5 (2011).
57 There are a wealth of texts on this topic. Some especially notable ones in media and postcolonial studies include Walter Benjamin’s “Age of Technological Reproduction,” Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Gayatri Spivak’s “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” and Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism.
58 For instance, Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg’s excellent critique of the notion of the “Anthropocene” attends to its global nature, but not from any cultural specificity. Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 62–9.