Tuesday, July 11, 2006
The research presentation at National University of Singapore went well, and it was a treat to be in Singapore—although it was more than a bit expensive in comparison to Malaysia. I was glad to meet some of the faculty in the program of Communications and New Media, namely my host Sun and her colleague Alex (who expertise is in interactive media, particularly games). Once we made it through the requisite tech hassles everything went smoothly. Unlike my other presentations, the people who attended didn’t wait for the end to start interjecting questions, like when I was showing Loss Glazier’s "IO Sono at Swoon" someone asked, "this is poetry." I didn’t mind the interruptions and the opportunity to address such issues spontaneously, and in general the casual atmosphere suited me well. From what I can tell the NUS program is top-notch—I was glad to be there and will keep my eye on what is going on there for future possibilities. Beyond the digital poetry lecture, I showed them my database project (explaining my long term reasoning behind it) and also described the potential "neuro-nets" project that came up last week, which really interested them.
We saw an interesting exhibition earlier in the day at La Salle College, an art school on the edge of downtown S’pore. One installation especially interested me, by a Taiwanese artist who had thoroughly documented one of the islands off the coast of Taiwan. He had taken a lot of pictures and made recordings of sounds, like performances by indigenous singers and ambient sounds, and had a couple of chairs set up with headphones in front of a tv on which the images were projected on dvd. I thought the setup was effective, and that doing the same thing with my Malaysian works (with the addition of putting the poems on the wall) would be a great way to present the work. We also visited a couple of other galleries and art spaces, like the Red Dot, which were slick and inspiring.
Tonight—after traveling much of the day by train from S’pore—I’m off on a late flight to Penang, where I’ll be making a presentation at the Museum at USM tomorrow afternoon. So this is a bit of an Southeast Asian Island Digital Poetry tour, presenting my research and distributing the eBook to a few people who are interested in such stuff…
We saw an interesting exhibition earlier in the day at La Salle College, an art school on the edge of downtown S’pore. One installation especially interested me, by a Taiwanese artist who had thoroughly documented one of the islands off the coast of Taiwan. He had taken a lot of pictures and made recordings of sounds, like performances by indigenous singers and ambient sounds, and had a couple of chairs set up with headphones in front of a tv on which the images were projected on dvd. I thought the setup was effective, and that doing the same thing with my Malaysian works (with the addition of putting the poems on the wall) would be a great way to present the work. We also visited a couple of other galleries and art spaces, like the Red Dot, which were slick and inspiring.
Tonight—after traveling much of the day by train from S’pore—I’m off on a late flight to Penang, where I’ll be making a presentation at the Museum at USM tomorrow afternoon. So this is a bit of an Southeast Asian Island Digital Poetry tour, presenting my research and distributing the eBook to a few people who are interested in such stuff…
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 6:46 PM 
