INTER/FEAR — ATTUNING TO INTERFERENCE: AN ESSAY AND CURATORIAL DIALOGUE ON GROUND LOOPS

January 26, 2026

Emerging from a transnational dialogue between Feelers, a Singapore-based research lab, and School for Poetic Computation (SFPC), an experimental school in New York, Ground Loops (2026) unfolds as an exhibition and series of experimental workshops exploring the intersection between technology and art. Engaging critically with computational systems, ground matter and embodied modes of knowing, what really comes through in this show is SFPC and Feelers’ shared commitment to representing technology as a space of building and engaging community rather than merely as means of frictionless exchange.

Media art within Singapore has traced a path of evolving inquiry and unravelling. From as early as exhibitions like Nokia Singapore Art 2001 (NSA01)–which opened shortly after Singapore’s first participation in the 49th Venice Biennale–technological media had already made its entry into the visual arts arena since then but has vastly changed. Back then, technology itself was very much unfamiliar terrain, and art became a representation of wonder, and experimentation with this new frontier of thought and experience. We see this shift through the years in shows such as Twilight, Tomorrow (2004) as experimentation with the medium gradually grew, laying the groundwork for artists to move beyond novelty, towards introspection on issues such as the fine line between “fictionalized cinema and documentary”. Familiarity with the technological medium lent itself to malleability and today, this capacity has become all the more expansive. Within this lineage, Ground Loops continues to interrogate our relationship with technology as it begins to saturate our lives, rethinking how we inhabit and in return are inhabited by technological systems and the potential of art, to unsettle that.

When digital technologies draw us inward, capturing attention in soft loops of scrolling, repetition becomes second nature. Within this architecture of interiority, meaning is rarely found, and often, delivered without a second thought.

Ground Loops begins by loosening this delivery. The exhibition designifies repeated stances of passivity through observation (which art itself encourages at times), instead emphasising on a mode of insistence. By reframing unintended interferences as a condition of encounter rather than a fault, the exhibition has created a space where gestures lose their fixed referents and attain meaning in their own right. In doing so, the digital art that we see in Ground Loops comes together as a powerful counter-movement, working against the threats of its very medium.

Across the exhibition, gesture is repeatedly detached from its expected meaning. Laughter is separated from bodies and movement generates language without guaranteeing coherence, refusing a stable point of view. In each instance, signification is loosened. What remains is not emptiness, but presence, the sense that something is happening before it can even be named. When gestures no longer point cleanly to what they are supposed to signify, attention is forced to slow down. Participants are asked to rest in prolonged uncertainty, to register sensation, and allow it to unravel before interpretation.

Be that as it may, Ground Loops never denies the containment of these phenomenons. Each gesture, each sound bite, is processed through a framework of code, executed within a system that determines its newfound meaning. As such, the perceived freedom that digital systems offer are entrapped within a glass ceiling, and its open-endedness exists alongside its algorithmic boundaries. Furthermore, in commodifying the products of such art works, participant engagement shifts from a deeply personal experience to one that can be catalogued, reproduced and circulated at mass. As such, these installations become nested within a larger system that continues to track, measure and process attention as a resource.

Ultimately, Ground Loops does not resolve the tensions it stages. It allows interference to persist. In refusing to smooth out noise, the exhibition insists that digital systems are not neutral infrastructures but lived environments shaped by gesture, feedback, and negotiation. What it offers is not mastery over technology, but attentiveness to how we move within it: where control is assumed, where it falters, and where something unintended begins to speak. In these moments of hum and interference, attention is no longer efficient, but awake and alive.

DIALOGUE WITH CURATOR CELINE WONG KATZMAN

You mentioned that the idea for Ground Loops came about when you met Ashley Hi, co-founder of Feelers, in Singapore. What significance does Singapore, and your personal relationship with the country, have for the ideas explored in Ground Loops?

Celine Wong Katzman: My mother is Singaporean and some of our extended family lives in Singapore. I was raised in New York, where I currently live, and since my childhood I have been returning to Singapore regularly. Starting in 2022, I began making longer and more frequent trips to spend more time with family, to meet artists and curators, and in the process, deepening my own relationship with the country. In 2024, I received an Individual Fellowship in Curation from the Asian Cultural Council to spend three months in Singapore, to hear directly from artists working in new media and alternative education about the social and political conditions impacting their work. The fellowship expanded my relationships with those communities in Singapore and led to my meeting Ashley, Charmaine, Bani, and Kian Peng, who would become collaborators in Ground Loops.

I think that Singaporeans and New Yorkers have a lot to learn from each other. In many obvious ways these distant cities are so different: Singapore is clean, orderly and polite; New York is gritty, chaotic, and confrontational. Singapore is tropical; New York is temperate. Yet they are also both multicultural, densely populated cities shaped by impacts of the rising cost-of-living, influenced by the priciest real estate markets in the world, and shared pasts as former British colonies. These common and divergent conditions inevitably impact artistic and technological production, spaces of learning, and community infrastructures.

Ground loops are electrical phenomena which occur when multiple points connected to the same circuit are intended to have the same ground reference potential, but instead have a different potential between them. The result is unintended interference, or noise, in audio, video, and computer systems. I thought this served as an apt metaphor for a space of encounter between two communities with shared interests, yet also distinct approaches that respond to their respective geopolitical contexts.

How were the artists and artworks selected for the show?

CWK: The selection of artists grew out of relationships and conversations between art-and-technology communities in New York and Singapore. As I mentioned, the project began through an exchange with Ashley Hi, and from there expanded through encounters with artists and teachers in Singapore and New York. During studio visits, shared meals, and other conversations, it became clear that teaching, learning, and knowledge exchange were shared concerns, and that felt essential to a project rooted in alternative education.

I was drawn to artists whose practices critically engage language, archives, and contemporary technologies, and who understand these systems not as neutral tools but as sites of history, power, and relation. Thinking through the concept of ground loops, I was interested in how these practices hold differences within connection—how shared infrastructures can produce both resonance and interference.

One factor I considered in my selection of the artworks was a shared visual language of familiar, simple, and readily available materials because they demonstrate that meaningful work about technology doesn’t rely on novelty, the most advanced tools, or expensive apparatuses. This idea is important to the pedagogy and ethos at SFPC, which strives to make working creatively with technology more accessible and ecologically sustainable. This approach was also necessary for showcasing student work at SFPC in its former space in Westbeth Artists Housing in New York since for many years the school operated as a very DIY organization. Students often worked with inexpensive materials such as open-source software, receipt printers, pen plotters, second-hand monitors, and risograph printing, which match material approaches in this exhibition. Many contemporary art exhibitions, especially ones focused on new media or digital art, are oversaturated with screens and other technologies which require exorbitantly high expenditures in electricity, computation, and other precious resources. I wanted to propose a different approach here.

Digital systems inevitably frame and limit participation. How does the exhibition negotiate the tension between openness and algorithmic containment?

CWK: In 2017, I interviewed artist Ryan Kuo about his artwork Tables of Content, a branching sequence of 92 HTML tables, part of a series which address how publishing content online requires submitting to the politics inherent to its design protocol. I asked Ryan what compels him to work in a medium that he already knows can only frame his ideas incorrectly. He began, “This is my basic experience of America. It has framed me incorrectly, and more importantly, has done so with a particular insistence. I think I'm responding to the absoluteness of the American frame.” He went on to explain that rather than rejecting framing altogether, he pushes against its absoluteness by working in tools he knows are limiting, valuing process, slowness and contradiction, reflecting how ideas are constantly rearranged, contained, and discarded. I found his comment and approach resonant.

The exhibition doesn’t attempt to resolve the tension between openness and algorithmic containment. Openness is not framed as escape from algorithmic systems. It is located instead in moments of friction, feedback, and misalignment—where systems reveal their limits and participants find ways to speak, move, remember, and relate from within them. The exhibition itself is also embedded within institutional systems—educational, cultural, and logistical—that shape what is possible. My hope is that, within these limits, moments of connection, misalignment, and feedback emerge—small acts of refusal or reorientation that unsettle the authority of the frame. In this way, openness is the capacity to generate meaning, relation, and dissent from within containment.

Works in the exhibition allow meaning to emerge slowly as viewers interact by playing a dance arcade game and watching others play; reading zines around a table together; encountering unexpected sounds of laughter; and watching video. Was duration an important consideration in how audiences encounter the exhibition?

CWK: Duration was on my mind. In an era of instant gratification and tech accelerationism, I’m inspired by the slow tech movement which encourages a more intentional and humane relationship with technology. It pushes back against always-on culture and rapid obsolescence, favoring tools that respect attention, privacy, sustainability, and long-term value.

I wanted to make an exhibition that felt fun to experience and rewarded time spent dancing, reading, listening, observing, and being present with others. In Melanie Hoff’s Dance Poem Revolution, meaning emerges through the composition of slowly paced word fragments over the length of a song, or longer, depending on the choice of the dancer. In my opinion, it’s just as fun and rewarding to watch others realize their poem as it is to dance your own.

In addition, I’ve observed that many exhibitions about digital or new media art often prioritize the novelty of a new technology. My interest was in featuring works that shift that perspective—drawing connections to longer historical timelines and examining how technologies are deeply entangled with enduring political, social, and historical systems. Charmaine Poh’s GOOD MORNING YOUNG BODY, for instance, reanimates early 2000s digital media to reflect on the politics of the gaze and agency across time, and Zainab Aliyu’s Lenticular Temporalities interweaves ancestral lineage with computational histories.

You’ve recently joined Creative Time, a public art organization in New York. Do you see the approaches explored in Ground Loops informing your work there?

CWK: Yes. Both public space and technology are deeply entangled with politics, history, and power. It is important to approach these entanglements with care and specificity. The exhibition foregrounds the idea that infrastructures—whether digital systems, public sites, or institutional frameworks—are never neutral, and that meaningful artistic engagement often comes from working creatively within their constraints.

I’m excited to continue exploring how artists can activate public space as a site of inquiry, exchange, and collective imagination, particularly through practices that are grounded in research and community. Many of the approaches in Ground Loops—such as embracing feedback, slowness, and productive friction—feel especially relevant in public-facing work, where participation is shaped by social, political, and technological conditions. I’m looking forward to working alongside artists who engage these complexities with curiosity and rigor, and who are interested in creating encounters that invite reflection, dialogue, and new ways of relating to one another in shared space.

With a degree in English Literature and Art History, Ashley Lim currently works at National Gallery Singapore, sustaining engagement from the exhibition to the public programmatic space. Her research explores the interstices between art, literature, and the natural world. Driven by intrigue in how theological perspectives shape cultural understandings of nature, she is committed to developing cross-disciplinary approaches that bring visual and textual analysis into closer dialogue.

Bibliography

Yap, June. 2004. Twilight Tomorrow. Singapore: Singapore Art Museum.

National Arts Council. 2001. Histories, Identities, Technologies, Spaces: Singapore Art Today: Nokia Singapore Art 2001. 2 vols. Singapore: National Arts Council.