'Can everybody see my screen?" We've heard this phrase – and likely said it ourselves – a lot more during the pandemic when remote working became the norm. It's a sign of our increasingly digital times, and a fitting name for Singapore Art Museum's latest showcase at Tanjong Pagar Distripark.
Can Everybody See My Screen? invites visitors to consider the digital interfaces and technologies that have crept into almost every facet of our lives, changing the very way that we perceive, experience, and interact with reality. Artists from Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and China turn to paintings, physical installations, and virtual platforms to interrogate our fraught relationship with the digital.
There is an element of fun to Can Everybody See My Screen?. Liana Yang's A Souvenir presents a claw machine – visitors are encouraged to drop tokens into it and attempt to win a special 'love' prize. It's a metaphor for online dating and the illusion of control that we have over a process that might very well be rigged. Similarly, Terra Bajraghosa's Narcissus Pixelus presents "an alternative to the modern-day selfie", allowing visitors to create a digital self from a selection of pixel swatches, which they can print out to share with friends or paste up on the museum wall.
Things take a more shadowy turn with Trace2 by Teow Yue Han. Inspired by our recent experiences with TraceTogether, this motion sensor-activated tracing system has contact hubs that registers passing bodies – triggering poetic verses and moving figures on a screen – raising the possibility of collective creation even under the spectre of bio-surveillance. Meanwhile, Chong Kim Chiew's Unreadable Wall stands as a symbol of the fracturing online space. A brick wall made from the shredded and pulped sheets from Malaysia's vernacular newspapers, it blocks the entrance to an exhibition room in SAM, forcing visitors to find a different point of entry.
But freedom, creativity and expression abound too, in Cao Fei's i.Mirror and Xafiér Yap's 2nd Puberty, where online games, virtual worlds, and digital avatars present an opportunity for liberation from the 'real' world's trappings and expectations. Can Everybody See My Screen? asks visitors to take a second and deeper look at the ubiquitous screen, and offers new and interesting perspectives on the physical-digital relationship while doing so.
Can Everybody See My Screen? runs from September 9 to December 11 and is free for entry for all visitors.
