“It was not only a privilege but an entirely fulfilling exercise to be able to integrate the resources, exhibitions and activities of the NUS Museum into my 2017 teaching modules. Notwithstanding the diversity of mediums and abundant public programmes, most appealing was discovering the NUS Museum ‘prep-room’ (things that may or may not happen), where a speculative exhibition design and production process engages via curatorial and cultural enquiry, between latent, basic materials and rules of transformation that enable those often overlooked primary and secondary materials to become manifest text—whether aspiration, elegy, image, sign or in fact any text or object to be studied.
The structurally inspired ‘prep room’ was opportune, as a pedagogue and practiced based researcher I strive to demonstrate the academic value in these same dynamic processes. A particular highlight was leading the 4th year Interactive Media Design Capstone Project – Department of Communications and New Media (CNM) students whom at the end of their undergraduate phase are able to galvanise the nexus between art, design and technological innovation by devising an event which demonstrates the genuine social impact of these creative actions in the wider public sphere. With this objective in mind we took much pleasure in witnessing and mirroring this ‘prep room’ and developed a ‘process room’ for our reflections and preparations towards the 9th edition of Random Blends – Interceptions – included in a public programme at ArtScience Museum Singapore.
Initial engagement with NUS Museum gave a clear and compelling claim for the students to identify and build upon excellent precedents set, but also the potential of how to identify a project’s potential to build upon creative standards where it they chose to both extend and at times contradict existing methodologies. Research is commonly known as the application of existing knowledge so as to generate new concepts, methodologies and understandings, but it can be also defined as the creation of new knowledge which is particularly thrilling in this case because the ‘prep room’ was speculative, experimental and discursive in nature.
Interceptions – Random Blends 2017 captured the public’s perception with media design fiction, augmented reality, experimental games and performance art. Jointly presented by ArtScience Museum and the Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore, March 24-26.”