tsunamii.net

Following up from this week’s wonderful discussions about artists and projects along the aesthetics of the “archival” (thanks to Loribeth, Maris, Ding and Julianne!), I wanted also to share with the class on a Singapore-based artist collective known as tsunamii.net (2001-2005). Given that there are some artists and people deeply involved/interested in art, and that there was a mention of Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, I thought it would be nice to introduce an artist collective from (my) home that had been working on the geopolitics of the internet’s physical infrastructures, a decade before we’ve seen a proliferation of so-called “post-internet art” or the likes of artists such as Trevor Paglen, Tyler Coburn, and Nina Canell dealing with similar issues. In fact, Rhizome included an entry focusing on tsunamii.net’s project alpha 3.4 (2002) commissioned for Documenta XI: https://anthology.rhizome.org/alpha-3-4

Yet, the collective remains pretty much on the margins of net art’s history as “outsiders” (word is, they were unknowns at Documenta, invited in a last-minute attempt to have some representation from Southeast Asia); but also strangely un-discussed within Singapore’s own art history as well. That the artists came out of a formative performance art period in Singapore also meant that they favored an ephemerality to their alpha projects; hence not much documentation of their work remains today – further complicating their non-inclusion in the archives of art history.

Lastly, I guess I’m sharing this as I’m hoping to research further on tsunamii.net’s body of work for my final project.

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