Moving on to our deep dive into the past, we wanted to start by recalling the Feminist Art Workshop held at LASALLE College of the Arts in 1999 and its resulting exhibition, symposium and catalogue, A Self of One’s Own.  Unfortunately, the workshop did not continue past its first iteration, and who knows what the future may hold in terms of reviving it, but can you share more with us? Namely, what were the impetus and the intention of the workshop? What was your biggest takeaway from the workshop?

I offered a hybrid seminar-studio course in the Spring 1999 semester at LASALLE and titled it a “Feminist Art Workshop.” The idea was to read feminist theory together as a collaborative collective of art students who would then go and make work, bring it back to class and get feedback that would be informed by ideas and works of contemporary feminist artists, theorists and art historians. One of the key results of that workshop was that collaboratively, the students, another lecturer at LASALLE, Adeline Kueh, and I decided to do an exhibition. The exhibition and a symposium were called A Self of One’s Own. Adeline and I subsequently raised funding to publish a catalogue.

A couple of years ago, when I visited Singapore, the participants of that event, Adeline Kueh, Margaret Tan, Shirley Soh, and I met again and realized that it was a 20-year anniversary of the Feminist Art Workshop and A Self of One’s Own exhibition.

For our 1999 symposium, we invited a leading feminist artist in Singapore, Amanda Heng, as well Dana Lam from AWARE (Association of Women in Action and Research). The workshop and symposium participants were important to Singapore’s feminist art history. That event was a collective effort.

 If you look at the exhibition’s catalogue, with the wonderful cut-out images and the multiple languages on the cover, you would recognise that the feminist, psychoanalytic, post-colonial and contemporary theory that we read as part of the workshop was informed by our differences, by multiple “selves” waiting to be born as part of the feminist practice – our own selves, and not just those identities that our societies wanted from us.

It was not so much about presenting a front like the United Nations, but more about how our notions of self, are still a project, in a feminist sense and a post-colonial sense. They are an existential and political project.

After the workshop’s success, I joined LASALLE to teach other courses in contemporary art theory and history. I taught there until early 2001 when I was invited by George Landow to move to the National University of Singapore to start the Cyberarts and Cyberculture Research Initiative with the University Scholars Program. 

Throughout my intellectual life and in the development of my books, I have always been interested in and collaborating with contemporary artists because I consider many contemporary artworks as significant as activism for social change. As a scholar, I’m specifically interested in philosophical, political, cultural and social alternatives: if we want to move from where we are now, as a community, to somewhere else, where and how do we move? For me, art and activism prototype and enact social change. 

Art is important because of the possibility of building something new. I’m very interested in the moment of creating something new. I believe that creative makers have a lot to contribute to those who seek progressive change in society. That is a larger theoretical premise — that theory has a lot to learn from contemporary art and activism that already imagine alternatives to the status quo and put them into practice. So that we can discuss those alternatives, engage with them here and now, in our lifetime, and not just always imagine good things happening in some distant fuzzy future or in literature and science fiction.

So much of feminist work and knowledge comes from actively finding the language to articulate or disarticulate what has been witnessed or experienced. As with so many other fields, education plays a crucial role in initiating conversations and considerations about how our realities are shaped by gender, as well as class, and race. Can you share more about what you taught at LASALLE and what was the reception to these courses like? Were there some key ideas from then that you felt have persisted in informing your work today or that you continue to teach today at the University of Michigan?

I taught quite a few classes at LASALLE. My dissertation was already focusing on technology and notions of subjecthood or the self in relation to machines. I was thinking about Sherry Turkle’s work at that time. One of the courses I taught was focused on cyberfeminism. Another course was on technological embodiment where we thought about cyborgs and artists like Stelarc. There was also a course on Russian Constructivism and going back to the question of the avant-garde with the history of the Bauhaus where technology was a huge part of the project. It was the idea that artists were changing society, working with machines and technology, like printing technology and other industrial machines. I experimented with my curriculum and taught that course solely based on women artists from the Russian avant-garde. I don’t know if anyone else ever taught a course on Russian constructivism and had art history examples only of women artists. Those slides that I was showing are still probably somewhere there in LASALLE’s library.

The movie, The Matrix, came out, as you remember, in 1999 as well. One of our LASALLE collaborators in cyberfeminism was a famous American artist Faith Wilding and the cyberfeminist art collective she founded with several other artists, subRosa. In fact, we did a project — Adeline Kueh, Margaret Tan, myself and subRosa members, called Matrixial Technologies, in the early 2000s.

As a result of those early collaborations and conversations, I became very interested in questions of gender, technology, and space. What is the Matrix? Why Matrix? I came up with a theory of matrix as a welcoming space and even made an artwork called Virtual Chora, which was exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum. In this work, a separate server supported a website to provide 50MB of free space for users, without any passwords. That was before YouTube, as you can imagine. Virtual Chora’s Homepage had an image of smiling lips, Mona Lisa-style, questioning cyberspace as the matrix / empty space imagery of “Chora.”

There is some documentation as part of the Cyberarts Exhibition, curated by Gunalan Nadarajan, over here (the link plays with Flash Player) and my essay about Virtual Chora which was published in "Technics of Cyberfeminism: The Mode is the Message” and translated for the catalogue of the First International Women’s Art Festival in Taiwan “Women, Art and Technology” curated by late Elsa Chen. Chen’s exhibition and symposium took place during the first SARS pandemic, so travel, as I remember, was disrupted between Singapore and Taiwan, in 2003.

When I moved to the US, I continued working on the topic of the welcoming space and technology, and wrote the book on the notion of the matrix as connected to the welcoming space. It is called Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture and was published by Columbia University Press in 2012. The beginning of that book can be traced back to that time in Singapore and our collaborations with subRosa. In Singapore, unlike in Europe at the time, technology was not just a utopian or dystopian vision. I could bring my students to experience new technology, such as virtual reality or haptic devices, in NUS in 2002, so it was not just a fantasy. It was important for me to acknowledge that and reflect on our technological experiences in real-time, as well as to enable my students to look at it from artistic and critical humanist perspectives.

At that time, we discussed a lot about what it means to have access to technology. Who has access and who doesn't? This continues to inspire me and I’m still thinking about how our lives are not just affected by technology but also about what kind of creative interventions are possible.

You mentioned about the various things happening at that time in the early 2000s, like the interest in biotechnologies, the Nokia Cyberarts exhibition, as well as the Cyberarts and Cyberculture Research Initiative in NUS, all of which were part of or shaped the burgeoning media art landscape at that time. The insight to how things were like before may not be so easily gleaned especially with the lack of or difficulty of accessing documentation or a consolidated archive. It’s a wonder to see the Tactical Media Lab website persisting and that’s also how we’ve come to read more about the project.

Could you elaborate more about how you felt like the media landscape was in Singapore at that time, that may have enabled the initiation of projects such as Matrixial Technologies and other technologically-centred works?

There were artists who already worked with technology, such as Matthew Ngui and Amanda Heng. The artists in residence program in NUS was part of the Cyberarts and Cyberculture Research Initiative so I could bring NUS researchers in contact with artists. The Dean at that time was George Landow, who wrote Hypertext (1992), the famous textbook on electronic poetry and literature, so he was very supportive and there was a lot of great energy among students and artists too. Charles Lim was also one of the first artists in residence whom I supported at NUS. He was developing one of his earlier works in new media as part of the programme.

As you know, Singapore then had a lot of technology, but it was not so easy to pair that technology with art because that required funding structures and institutional support. For example, NUS did not have an art department and no artists were working at the university. As part of the Cyberarts and Cyberculture Research Initiative (CRRI), I had to write the job description to hire artists-in-residence. When I wrote the job description, I made sure to include language that invited artists might not be necessarily trained in painting or other traditional art forms, or even have an art school degree. They might have a background in engineering or creative writing. I included that language so that university administrators would not just carry certain expectations of artists as working only in traditional art forms or media, like painting all day in their studio. They could use stem cell or wifi technologies in labs and engage with other technological and scientific materials. Providing platforms for the new and original trends in humanities and the arts is important, and at that time I considered writing those new job descriptions as important as my own scholarly work on the matrix. Singapore already had a lot of infrastructure and technology to support ground-breaking artworks, such as Margaret Tan’s Virtual Reality art, and I wanted in my own modest way, to help make those connections so that art and technology collaboration would become possible. It was around that time also when the National Arts Council was setting up its funding frameworks.

At the University of Michigan where I’m currently at, different disciplines meet at one art and design school without any silos and departments, that separate us purely by the medium (painting, sculpture, graphic design, etc.). Our faculty and students can work in various media, as well as conduct various forms of creative research with collaborators from other schools, departments and outside the university. So, our students from early on could be proficient in various skills but more importantly, we want them to be leaders of their respective fields and invent new fields and their own forms of expression as they consider them important and needed. One form of art or design does not replace or retire another.

From the University Scholars Programme at NUS, I moved to ICM (Information and Communication Management) programme. When Professor Milagros Rivera became the head of department, it was renamed to Communication and New Media (CNM), in 2003. That’s what I meant by structure. For projects to be supported and enabled, how you name yourself matters because you indicate the scope of work and then we enable certain practices to happen. So that was how that time was, many collaborations and a focus on educating the public and ourselves. Sometimes, within a community, how one relates to or defines media art and technology can vary across different generations. Today, it might not be as prevalent, but back then, we were arguing over words, like whether “cyberart” was the right term to use or was “new media” a better fit. Now, I’m happy that we don’t fret so much over terminology, in 2020, and cyberfeminism is still as young as ever.

One of the funnier moments of that time I recollect was that Singapore Art Museum in 2001-2002 did not have computers to show artworks. And here we are bringing interactive virtual reality artworks which recreated C++ raw data from the Visible Human Project by NUS Engineering students who were really excited to work with the artist. So, we loaned computer screens and servers from NUS. We drove them in the back seat of a car and connected them there at the museum, luckily finding an electric outlet. The museum had no wifi or broadband connection in its galleries as well, and that’s Singapore in 2002! This was before museums became more interactive or receptive to different forms of art. I know it is hard to imagine today that we had to bring computers from NUS to show Margaret Tan’s work. There is now the Art Science Museum.

This project, Virtual Bodies in Reality by Margaret Tan, continues to come up in my own thinking and research, because I think that work was very significant but has not been written about yet as much as it deserves. So, I might come around and write about it soon, or team up with another researcher, because I think you were right, that we were so “go, go, go” all that time then, we didn’t properly take the time to sit, document and archive what we were doing, or understand its historical significance. I am grateful that you found these texts and documentation about “Locating Cyberfeminism in Singapore” (2008) because we were busy then and now it’s great to have this opportunity to reflect on these earlier projects.