FIELD MEETING: THINKING PROJECTS

Bruce Quek (Singapore)

Consider(); Cadastre per Aspera

After over two hundred years of the growth of urban lighting, most city-dwellers would be lucky to see more than a dozen stars at night. Yet for millennia prior, stars were of great cultural, mystical and practical significance to people in fields as varied as medicine, agriculture, navigation, and divination. Bruce Quek’s presentation composed of insights accumulated through his long term research about light pollution in many cities of the world, posed the question: what if the tendency to project meaning onto the stars did not simply vanish once we were unable to see them, but grafted onto the artificial lights which supplanted them?

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Bruce Quek’s FIELD MEETING participation is supported by Asian Cultural Council.

Bruce Quek, Consider(); Cadastre per Aspera, 2017. Performance Lecture documentation FIELD MEETING Take 5: Thinking Project, November 15th at SVA Theatre.

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Bruce Quek‘s works are driven by a fascination with the complexity of urban life in an information-drenched age. He observes technology and society with a sense of cynical humour, taking our everyday experiences and rendering them absurd. His practice ranges across installation, performance, and experiments in generative animation and image recognition. He focuses on producing disquieting experiences, with recent projects examining everything from light pollution in relation to pattern recognition, and the limits of empathy imposed by informational overload.

Bruce Quek, The Hall of Mirrors: Asia-Pacific Report, 2015, Clock mechanisms, receipt printer with computer program, publicly available statistics, size variable.