Cyberarts: Intersections of Art and Technology, 
Singapore Art Museum, Dec 8 2001 – Feb 4 2002
Curated by Gunalan Nadarajan

Exhibition Website: www.cyberarts.scholars.nus.edu.sg/nsa01

In the last few decades the art world has been flooded with a number of terms invented to define the developing artforms employing the so-called ‘new’ technologies; for example, electronic arts, digital arts, media arts, new media and most recently, cyberarts. While all these terms have been variously useful in defining historically specific developments in contemporary artistic practice, I have found the term cyberarts to be most useful and inclusive.  For example, the term Electronic Arts is historically-specific to some art practices from the sixties till the early eighties which were based on and operated via electronic systems. The term ‘digital arts’ is also historically-specific to the digitisation technologies brought about by developments in computer graphics. These technologies have themselves been superceded by the so-called ‘cybertechnologies’ of which digitization is merely one aspect. Moreover, the term digital arts in also limited by the type of authoring techniques used and images / sounds thus generated. However, it is noteworthy that the term ‘digital arts’ enjoys and may continue to have currency in the contemporary art world. The term, ‘cyberarts’, proposed here seeks to ultimately replace ‘digital arts’ by providing a more comprehensive term to embrace artworks and practices that already go beyond ‘digital media’. 

The most recent term that has been invoked to refer to these technologically driven developments in contemporary art is ‘new media’. Lev Manovich, the media theorist, has in his recent book, The Language of New Media, identified five characteristics that conceptually distinguish ‘new media’ from previous art forms. These are namely, numerical coding that facilitates the programmability of the media; modularity that creates a structural discreteness of its parts; automation of its production and access; variability, meaning that the media can continue to be presented in variable formats and versions well after its ‘completion’; and finally, transcoding, insofar as its codes operate between and are therefore transferable across different systems. While, Manovich’s conceptual clarification of what constitutes ‘new media’ is incisive and useful for our understanding of many of the contemporary developments in art and technology, there is no reason why the term ‘new media’ is most appropriate. The term ‘new’ in new media, is conceptually empty insofar as what constitutes the ‘new’ at any point in time is so variable as to impossible to identify. The use of the word ‘new’ also does not facilitate a better theoretical framing or understanding of the peculiar artistic and/or technological developments of the art works. However, given the theoretical value of the abovementioned characteristics to illuminate our understanding of the ongoing developments in the cyberarts, it would be useful to coopt them into our understanding of the cyberarts.  

The term ‘cyber’ derives from the Greek root, kubernare that refers to the “act of controlling a ship” where the ‘pilot’ was refered to as kubernetes. Kubernare is also the root of the word, ‘government’ which refers to the composite acts of control as well as the organization / entity that is charged with that task. The mathematician Norbert Weiner defined cybernetics as the study and strategic deployment of communicative control processes within complex systems constituted by hierarchically ordered entities. And by this he initiated a revolutionary development in the way we have come to think about information and control. Cybernetic systems are thus conceived to be made up of information flows between differently constituted entities like humans, computers, animals and even environments. The flow of information was conceived as a principle explaining how organization occurs across and within multiple hierarchical levels. This meant that seemingly bounded entities could be translated / codified into information thereby enabling interfaces and easy interactions between them. It is in fact arguable that in the last two decades a large amount of technological innovation has been towards greater cyberneticization. This means that in addition to innovations that allow existing technologies to become integrated with each other through cross-platform operability, the ‘new’ in many ‘new technologies’ have been exactly their ability to hybridise previously separate functionalities, e.g. web-integrated mobile phones, biochips, artificial life, etc. It is this translatability, more accurately desire to translate, different physical entities and processes into information as well as the control afforded thereby that distinctly characterizes and enables what have come to be called cybertechnologies. 

Thus, one can sum up that the term cyberarts refers to all those art forms, practices and processes that are produced and mediated by the continuing developments in cybertechnologies, specifically in information, communication, imaging, experiential, interface and bio-technologies. The cyberarts as defined by contemporary art practice include the following: digital imaging (whether as digital painting, digital photography and digital video); computer animation; holographic art; virtual reality environments, including gaming; robotic arts; net-art, including works in hypertext and telematics; human-machine interfaces (e.g. cyborg technologies); bio-arts that employ biotechnologies (e.g. DNA music, transgenic art, artificial life); computer music & sound arts; and hybrid art works involving interaction with other art forms (e.g. theatre, dance, installations, etc.). 

This exhibition introduces the Singapore audience to the exciting art works that have resulted from the intersections of art with recent developments in technologies. The term, technẻ, which forms the root of the word ‘technology’ in the classical Greek referred to the means and methods of creative making and as such was not different from the idea of art. However, historically technology has been relegated to refer to functional and pragmatic creation in contradistinction to art. The aim of this exhibition is to deliberate on the intersections and productive tensions between art and technology as exemplified in recent developments in the cyberarts. Given the serious lack of such artforms and practices in Singapore the exhibition had to jumpstart its systematic development by facilitating the local production of exemplary works in the field of cyberarts. Through an initial curatorial briefing and introduction to the cyberarts, proposals for projects dealing with intersections of art and technology were invited. Interested artists were advised to concentrate on the conceptualisation of their projects without being too concerned with the technological peculiarities and requirements of their proposed works. This was especially crucial as there was a paucity of artists working with cybertechnologies in Singapore and as such, the bulk of the proposals were anticipated to be from those who worked with other media. From a total of nearly thirty proposals, seven proposals were finally selected. The selection was based not simply on the artistic merits of the works but on the potential to exemplify and generate critical discussion on the intersections between art and technology. Selected artists were then matched with appropriate technological experts to consult and aid in the production of the final works. The works in this exhibition have been drawn together on the basis of two central issues in cyberculture: virtual actions and virtual spaces. All the works deliberate on how our conventional notions of spaces and action are complicated by technologies of and encounters with the ‘virtual’.