Watched in the Territory of the Laboratory
Essay and images
2017
First published in Mynah Magazine Issue #2
With editorial direction by Karen Gwee, Isabelle Lim, and Ruby Thiagarajan
Print layout, design, and art direction by Cleo Tsw
This project began with images gleaned from Google Maps Street View while remotely exploring Singapore – watching from afar while on residency in Amsterdam in 2016. That process started with collecting ostensibly "aesthetically interesting" images generated without intent by automation, but focus eventually landed on the layered urban imprints of development, the documented presence of the work and lives of transient migrant workers, locations of "purpose-built dormitories", and revisiting sites of explicit antagonism surrounding labour. This traversing, looking, and capturing a virtually infinite horizon of images inadvertently became a way to think through the state itself as an observer, monitor, and all-knowing p(l)anning machine, where mass surveillance deployed with new "smart" predictive tools cast a persistent watch over territory that it has termed a “living laboratory”.
As can be seen from speculative media produced by state organisations, the future being sold to the citizen-resident is a rosy one enabled by capital, but it is palpable and palatable, however, due only to a continuing legacy of repression. Its ground is clear, flattened as post-participatory politics, hardened in risk mitigation and crisis denial; the figure: precarious, transient, alone. These may seem like conditions localised to a specific national space, but the software for its propagation has been primed for global trade and export. Which is to say, this is a model that appeals to the ruling class everywhere seeking to secure new paths for accumulation. The text sketches out links between rhetoric and systems of security, the deployment of enabling technologies, and the colonialist impetus driving their overlapping unimpeded expansion. |
Consider the state as machine. The “GovTech” statutory board of the Singapore government was launched in October 2016 after the restructuring of two sub-ministerial quasi-corporate entities. Following this, GovTech charted its new brand identity and mandate by releasing a sleekly produced video speculating upon the kind of future it wants to create with emergent technologies.[5] This is a future that features first-responder aerial drones, self-driving school transports, and estate-wide smart detection and warning systems. What is projected is a digital administration that melds new tools and predictive technologies with the state-form--where the state is turned into a kind of responsive thinking machine; what could be thought of as a working proto-AI that subsumes governance. As the command nexus of a distributed skin-like sensory organ, it would take care of the citizen's every worry, even before they arise. The narrator in the video seeks to inspire greatness:
“Because only when we drive through our discontent can we arrive at excellence. The excellence of new breakthroughs. The excellence of new applied technologies. The excellence of intuitive experiences.”[6] What does “driving through our discontent” suggest: the dismissal of disagreement and questions of politics, or the imagining of a future that centres cooperation rather than competition? Is “drive through” conceived as a violent act like that which has been used to target crowds, or could it be one of reconciliation where everyone is brought along on the drive, at a speed which could accommodate all? With “discontent” placed before “excellence” on a linear trajectory, the future is almost held hostage—“driving through” the former becomes an ambiguous prerequisite, as if it were a one-off obstacle, and failing to cross it would foreclose the appearance of this techno-futurist horizon. This rhetoric thus functions both as a condition and a type of conditioning, hinting at the kind of ideological software that informs the state-as-machine. Text excerpt with footnotes:
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