SINGAPORE, Feb 27 — For something billed as Singapore’s first homegrown digital arts festival, the recently-opened Betwixt Festival has a surprisingly archaic name. Having been largely superseded by “between” for hundreds of years, it is an odd fit with the relatively young field of digital art.
It is a deliberate move by the festival’s founders, the artist collective Spang & Lei, who noted that the decision to use “such a long-forgotten word” was because “digital technology often gets conflated with the future and futurity itself”. After all, digital technologies are a current reality, intertwined with every aspect of our lives.
Archaisms aside, the festival, particularly its three-day visual art exhibition, skews towards the young, with some notable exceptions — an effect of the relative youth of those who responded to the festival’s open call. While it might speak of some vivifying, youth-attracting quality of digital art, Spang & Lei also pointed out that it “speaks of the need for digital arts to reach out to other communities”.
The works of the recently graduated (and yet-to-graduate) rub shoulders with those of more established practitioners, and run the gamut from various flavours of interactive installations, to novel repositories of hashtagged memories, and in the case of one artist, Boedi Widjaja, a clock that does not so much measure time but suggests its passing. The overall tenor of the works encompasses both contemporary visual art and design-focused experimentation, with standouts such as Samantha Chua’s aural intervention at the entrance of Sunshine Plaza, and Sarah Mamat’s #dataselfieme, which redeploys persistent geolocation tracking — as a means of portraiture.
Also present, simultaneously checking off the boxes marked youth, education, and community outreach, are three works by Pingyi Secondary School students — the outcome of a workshop conducted by the festival’s founders.
Of course, a festival which consists only of a visual art exhibition would not really be distinguishable from a regular visual art exhibition. Betwixt’s programming kicked off last night at the ArtScience Museum’s ArtScience Late programme, featuring the performance Video Conference: Co-optive by Urich Lau in collaboration with Marcel Gaspar and Teow Yue Han, and PPM [Puzzled.Processed.Meshed.] by Otto Krause, Milan Loviskal, Alwyn Burger, and Jason Nel. As befits a festival, Betwixt also features a bevy of talks, panel discussions and lectures, addressing subjects ranging from the individual practices and experiences of the artists involved, to broader subjects such as women, art and technology, or digital art in South-east Asia. Or, for a more hands-on approach to things, the festival also offers masterclasses in reactive art and DIY optics.
Even if the festival as a whole seems palatably safe, sane and socially responsible, something specifically dedicated to the intersection of art and technology seems a welcome complement to the overall growth of more general-purpose fairs, festivals and other marquee events.
And, in what might be a nod to Singapore’s “smart city” ambitions, Spang & Lei hint that the theme of the next edition is centred on “a word that questions the existing structures in invisible systems, a word that highlights relations of power”. — TODAY
Betwixt Festival runs until March 1. Opening hours and location dependent on individual events. Visit http://2016.betwixtfestival.com/ for details.
