A Machine Boosting Energy into the Universe: Korakrit Arunanondchai [electronic resource].

Singapore Art Museum 2022

Open access content

What does it mean to possess a deep understanding of the material world around us? When so many of us spend countless waking hours engrossed in screens, “material intelligence” feels hard to come by these days. The most recent champion of the term, craft scholar Glenn Adamson, demands nothing short of a literal call to arms to “recover our literacy in the ways of the physical world”: do things with your hands, farm, weave, build furniture, construct a house! In Adamson’s historical thinking, our practical detachment from the environment is implicated in an ongoing denigration of manual skills and trades in favour of technical and linguistic aptitude. To value “material intelligence” entails not only fostering individual curiosity towards the physical world around us, but also working to tip the scales of social consensus on what constitutes “smartness.” The end goal is to cultivate profound respect for obdurate things, from teacups to skyscrapers, and the often-forgotten people who labour to make them. If Adamson’s call to “material intelligence” takes aim at the numbing ubiquity of technology in everyday life, an earlier popularisation of the term during the dot-com boom conveys a different sense of optimism. Writing in 2000, educator Andrea diSessa used the expression to describe an “intelligence achieved cooperatively with external materials.” A champion of computer education since the 1980s, diSessa wanted children to approach the computer not simply as a portal to virtual cyberspace, but as an assistive tool of eminently physical import. As the things around us come to be designed, made, and operated with the assistance of digital technologies, promoting computational literacy under the guise of material intelligence means imparting skills that will allow non-experts to participate in building our shared world. While Adamson and diSessa appear to land on opposite sides of the physical/ digital divide, they are both committed to an ethical balancing act. Their i
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Technology and the arts
Art criticism
Drone aircraft
Art--Exhibitions
New media art
Video art

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Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol
Syaheedah Iskandar
Korakrit Arunanondchai
Alex Quicho
Akapol Op Sudasna
Alex Gvojic
Chomwan Weeraworawit
Elaine Ee
Melissa Wong
CROP.SG