DISCOV3RY

In this day and age where data and transportation networks make up the vernacular of everyday life, infrastructural and information systems generate conveniences, mobility, and the circulation of bodies and data while also bringing about acceleration and sensory overload. But within the dense tangle of predetermined pathways and programmable routines, is it still possible to get lost?

Intrigued by this question-provocation, AWKNDAFFR explores the circuitry of movement in the multi-site, multi-authored project, Islandwide Coverage. Activating a variety of vantage points (on the move, from above, within this existential plane and from somewhere other), AWKNDAFFR attempts to delineate from a well-worn terrain, navigating towards a sense of nowhereness (but not lost), as they invite audiences to wander on and off beaten paths around the island as a passenger-viewer.

Teaming up with artists and collaborators who act as interlocutors in different vehicles and venues, the artworks are asynchronously integrated into the movement and mechanism of each vehicle or venue. This way, it transforms an encounter that takes place in familiar surroundings, and transports the passenger-viewer into new frames of relational and sensorial experience on each journey and at each portal.

AWKNDAFFR is an artistic operation led by Wayne Lim and Soh Kay Min. For Islandwide Coverage they collaborate with Areumnari Ee (KR), ila (SG) and Ang Kia Yee (SG), Ranu Mukherjee (US), and Extended Asia (ID).

What does “to work collaboratively” mean? To what extent can we push the limits of virtual collaboration? How is art presented during social restrictions? How do we reproduce and regenerate “the form” created by experimentation of multiple networked collaborations? These questions have confronted us with going beyond the uncertainty of pandemics and the artistic scene, coinciding with the massive adoption of digital media. Digital media crept into the mainstream and simultaneously created a new infrastructure in artistic production. At the same time, the public also believed that the virtual universe could keep life on and maintain the sanity of humans who live collectively.

Extended Asia’s involvement in the Islandwide Coverage project is a continuation of Impssblprjct: Affirming the Crisis, organized by the Cemeti Institute for Art and Society (Yogyakarta) in 2021. We presented the idea of developing Extended Asia with archives and a systematic mind-map on how we manage the organization model. For Islandwide Coverage, we bring the theme “Discovery” to re-visit, re-read, and re-develop our artistic work practices in organizing two online festival programs: Extended Asia: Asian New Generation (2020) and Extended Asia: Satellite (2021).

We applied rigorous experimentation in art by hosting virtual live performances and we wrap all these programs into one project to emphasize Extended Asia’s positioning as an “online terminal” which offers various forms of production and presentation based on networked collaboration using internet-based audio-visual-media technology.

This project is part of Islandwide Coverage, a multi-site, multi-authored project by AWKNDAFFR. Commissioned as part of Natasha, Singapore Biennale 2022, organized by the Singapore Art Museum, from 16 October 2022 to 19 March 2023. The Biennale is commissioned by the National Arts Council, Singapore, and supported by the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, Singapore.