Hothouse is a space in Singapore that supports and prototypes artistic practices. It nurtures experimentation and production as a mode of upending conventions and liberating inquiry. Founded in 2020, it is housed within space and time shared between art collective INTER–MISSION, design agency Currency, and more recently, research lab formAxioms.
This ever-evolving interdisciplinary setup encompasses expertise across contemporary art, technology, design, and architecture, allowing for emancipatory approaches toward art practice, knowledge building and dissemination.
Hothouse’s Internal Practices (IP) function as ongoing research presentations. Each IP is designed for reproduction, reactivation, and versioning, all guided by Hothouse’s evolving thematic explorations. This programming mechanics preserves the labour and production required and builds on our experiments and intentions while still allowing for reformatting and reworking across new contexts and audiences.
Our suite of IPs includes Negentropic Fields first presented at the National Gallery Singapore (2021), not housed commissioned by the Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF 2023), and Geometria Situ commissioned by the National Art Council for Singapore Art Week 2024.
Negentropic Fields (INFO) is a digital platform that incorporates virtual environments. An exploration of archival practices in the context of emerging digital modes of artistic expressions and forms of being. The current paradigm shift exposes the necessity to imagine new emancipatory practices for non-physical forms of creation, mediation, and exposure; for the navigation and manipulation of abstract materials.
Geometria Situ delves into the speculative ecologies of the everyday and responds to the immediate vicinity of the heritage district of Kampong Gelam. Looking into the diagramming and expansion of memory with Hothouse as a starting point, this project serves as a theatre of memory, where latent traces and impressions of the locale are collected by multiple invited interdisciplinary artist–traceurs. The digital environment incorporates the unique artistic interests of the four practitioners from different fields including sound design, 3D media art, and movement, and provides a space for collected elements to convolute and coalesce.
not housed is a transdisciplinary project by Hothouse that maps out the milestones in Singapore’s filmmaking history through exhibitionary and digital interventions. This initiative aims to consolidate, archive, and interconnect various facets of film education, practices, screening venues, and programmes, placing them within the context of evolving media technologies and the national narrative.
Our project space also runs residencies, events, and publish through a series of signature presentations:
Hotdesk is a residency programme that supports artistic and critical research processes, valuing space as a crucial condition of production. This caters to practitioners whose work aligns with research and academia. We hope to share and open workspace, equipment, knowledge, and networks as resources to seed more possibilities for thought, conversations, and collaborations.
Intermedia is an event-based programme that explores possibilities of counterpointing film, audio, visuals, and performative elements. We hope to invite practitioners interested in the refinement of their practice by challenging and exploring the possibilities in layering various mediums via architecture (metaverse), AR, VR, and live broadcasting.
Mindspace is a conversation series that charts the conditions of various technology-informed art practices and practitioners in an attempt to present a working history of media art in Singapore.