Geofences (2020)

Installation

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Geofences, part of larger body of work Performing the Smart Nation, is an exploration of decommissioned bikes in Singapore which co-opts data by locating its entanglements with narrative, emotion, and alternative maps. In doing so, it engages with (im)mobility, labour, logistics. It asks: what happens when a system of shared resources fail? How can technological systems be repurposed to revive a social commons and collective body? What are the alternative paths through the system that hijack policed spaces and private ownership for the possibility of movement?

In Geofences, these questions are considered as a communal response that spans four works: Ofoes; Pirate(d) Fleet; a compressed Obike scrap metal cube; and a workshop to collectively gather and recompose found bikes within the Supernormal space. Through these comical, playful, stark, and laborious gestures, the life-world of the decommissioned bikes is revealed as a series of disposals, reclamations, as well as material and narrative interventions. Alternative ways of being are thus presented: material and speculative, playful and solemn, liberated and constrained, idealistic and practical.

And it is, as Yue Han describes, a map. By plotting these nodes along a shared plane, a sprawling diagram that charts space, action, emotion forms, one which reconfigures what data can be and how data can make us feel, make us come together. This map doesn’t tell us where to go so much as chart what exists in the crevices created by failure (which is why so many adjectives apply ⁠— this work is undeniably plural).

When systems fail, then, we answer not by creating, but by collecting, repurposing, bringing together existing lines of movement to meet in a common space, locating and establishing node through which new signs can manifest and new signals can be sent.

Text by Ang Kia Yee