Can Tech Save the World and Art Heal It
Sustainable Singapore Gallery, Marina Barrage, SingaporeCurator: Kamya Ramachandran
Sustainable Singapore Gallery
Switzerland is widely known for its picture-postcard scenery, shaped by mountains, clear lakes and rivers, cows and green meadows... Behind this idyllic backdrop lies a country wholly committed to cleantech, which will be showcased through this exhibition, featuring the most beautiful Swiss landscapes and learning how enterprising businesses find innovative solutions to make our lives decidedly more sustainable. Integrated in the permanent exhibition of the Sustainable Singapore Gallery at Marina Barrage, this exhibition will be enriched with a showcase of thought-provoking and interactive art pieces that seek to challenge our relationship with our environment. Curated by the techart platform BeFantastic.in, a techart platform which envisions a positive, sustainable future leveraging creative tech, the artworks are a result of the recent international fellowship program “BeFantastic Together”.
The brochure to the exhibition you can download here
Used to be my Home too
Marc Lee (Switzerland)
For enthusiastic human observers, the sight of wildlife amidst the stark artificiality of the everyday surroundings can be a source of excitement and hope. In the vast expanses of concrete, brick and mortar, that burgeons radially as it does vertically, where our species have found an uneasy comfort, we are often unaware of the ghosts that haunt the cities we inha-bit. While contemporary discourse around nature conservation guides our thoughts to be sensitized to the phenomenon of extinction, it can still be difficult to imagine the variety of lives that have shared our homes across time, whose entire species have ceased to exist because of the radical evolutionary pressures imposed on them because of our human activities. Many species have already become extinct, and plant, animal and fungi populations continue to rapidly decrease across the planet. Is our globalised vision of the world perpetuating homogeneity at a rate at which only domesticated life might have a place in it in the near or distant future? And what effects might such a homogenisation have on our lives and environments?
Used To Be My Home Too is a digital monument to the species that have been bargained to seat humanity as an evolutionary force for other life on Earth.
In this experiment, we are virtually transported via Google Earth to locations of recent sight-ings of wildlife that have been observed in real time by participants on iNaturalist.org, where we are allowed a moment to register other species who once inhabited this area whose extinctions have been recorded on IUCN’s RedList.org.
Exhibited Artwork
Used to Be My Home Too
Real-time cartographyThis experiment shows photos of animals, fungi and plants that are uploaded right now by unknown users to iNaturalist.org via mobile phone. On Google Earth, these are mapped at the exact location where they were photographed. In addition, taxonomically similar species that occurred in the same country and became extinct within the last 30 years are automatically added in real time via RedList.org. Used more …
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