Technically Speaking
Reviving the Past Through Technological Enhancement and Creative Approaches: The Gibson-Hill Photographic Collection Project
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Soonhwa Oh
The "Gibson-Hill Photographic Collection" is a collaborative project between the National Museum of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, funded by the Ministry of Education Singapore. The photo collection consists of over 7,500 black and white photographic images that were produced between 1942 and 1962 by the last expatriate director from the Raffles Museum in Singapore. A team led by the PI A/P Oh Soonhwa and Co-PI Assistant Prof Chu Kiuwai has been working on a historical photographic collection for its initial discovery, digitization, and re-creation by employing digital media including photo, film and animation, for audiences’ engagement and immersive experience. The paper demonstrates the various employment of digital media connecting the past with the present, interchangeably and simultaneously. The study informs the audience with the step-by-step research procedures, progresses, and findings of the project from photographical, environmental, sociological, and historical perspectives. The aims of the project include: 1) The creation of digital assets with Gibson-Hill’s negatives and photographs; 2) The Examination of the photographs both as historical aesthetic artefacts and as reflexive cultural tools addressing environmental issues in specific cultural and temporal contexts; 3) The re-imagination and re-invention of the methodological approaches to re-photography by replicating the site and the content, while unraveling the initial intentions and grammar of the first photographer; and 4) the exploration of various technology assisted visual strategies to engage the exhibition visitors.
Queer Virtual Realities and the Memory Archive Machine: Exploring Practices through Jordan Tannahill's "Draw Me Close" and Camille Intson's "Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries"
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Camille Intson
This paper explores the opportunities, challenges, and ethics of “re-performing” or re-enacting intimate memories through virtual reality (VR) performance, using queer multidisciplinary artist Jordan Tannahill’s Draw Me Close (National Theatre London 2019; Soulpepper Theatre 2020) and my own “Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries” (2023) as case studies. Draw Me Close is a 1:1 VR performance in which the artist’s childhood memories, experiences, and interactions with his mother are reconstructed in the wake of her passing. Bringing audiences into the world of the “shifting” (Chen 2012) archive, we inhabit Jordan’s reconstructed virtual world from his early explorations of queer sexuality through to his mother’s cancer diagnosis and passing. Following Chen (2012) and Schneider (2016), this paper will explore how the world of Draw Me Close represents a “touching” and-or “queering” of time within its archive, blurring and transgressing the boundaries between the animate-inanimate. On a theoretical level, considering foundational queer performance and archival scholarship (Phelan 1993; Munoz 1996, Taylor 2003), it will also examine how performance’s ephemerality rewards its artists the dual advantages of visibility and protection, allowing for an ethical exploration of traumatic memory and loss within a transient medium. Finally, this provocation introduces a research-creation project of my own, entitled “Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries”, which draws from the aforementioned theory-into-praxis to design a surrealistic VR collage which brings together formative queer spaces, objects, and writings from my adolescence into adulthood. By taking up VR as queer and performative, these projects reveal how reconstructing intimate memory is itself a performative act.
Art Against the Kill Vehicle - Poetry about Drone Warfare : Artistic Engagement with Autonomous Weapons
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Finn Harvor
This paper considers the work of a small subset of contemporary poets who deal explicitly with the theme of autonomous weapons systems and their impact on the societies in which these weapons are used. It cites work by poets (and video poets) such as Kazim Ali, Kim Garcia, Clint Smith and the author, and examines the ways these poems depict the impersonal nature of these weapons, and argues that the nightmare scenarios of dystopian science fiction about « killbots » and lethal AI are already in the first stages of fruition. The paper argues that critics, poetry prize juries and literary scholars would do well to reflect on these technological changes, and that we need both art and criticism about militarized artificial intelligence.
