Saturday 30 January 2021

Singapore Art Week 2021: Where to see Debbie's Works

For those in Singapore at the moment, I have a couple shows ongoing/upcoming during and beyond Singapore Art Week. I'm showing them as digital works and video works, so technically your location won't matter once I have properly uploaded all the works later in the year...!



1. VOID

Void is a small game that's available for download on itch.io (Mac currently / Win coming soon) and you could say it is a translation of my current reality into game form. Since I work full-time but also have a toddler who doesn't quite go to daycare, I spend my days shuttling between void decks, waiting for taxis to take me between my own house, my parents' house, and the office. There's usually anywhere between 5 to 12 minutes of waiting where I don't know what to do and for the fun of it I began scanning the various spaces in a very ad-hoc fashion. I rather liked the bad scans more than the good scans, and I ended up using this material to make an interactive experience in which you're a little boat drifting between ruins, with the pillars looking a bit like the pali da casada (the poles that stick out of the water in front of buildings) in Venice.

If you're in Singapore, its also in an awesome CAVE for just 4 days only at Gillman Barracks (9 Lock Road, #03-21, in the former unit of Arndnt), made by the amazing team from DUDE.SG. What this means is that you can navigate through the otherworlds inside it by raising a hand, squatting, flapping your hands wildly in front of you, and swiping. The entire show is a labour of love by INSTINC and altermodernists and all the artists involved, and the CAVE experience is truly seamless. Go and see it!

Otherworlds: non/digital realities
Organised by Instinc @instinc_space
Co-organised by @altermodernist
Curated by @hilda_hiukwan
Opening Hours: 28 Jan 2021 – 7 to 10pm 29, 30 Jan 2021 – 12nn to 10pm 31 Jan 2021 – 12nn to 7pm
Venue Gillman Barracks Block 9 Lock Road, #03-21
FREE ADMISSION
8 artists 2 cities
Digital and physical works
Facebook Event Link: https://www.facebook.com/events/302803607957276
Debbie's "Void" on Itch: https://dbbd.itch.io/void



2. THE LEGEND OF DEBBIE

My vision for this work was to mine myself for material and create a gallery in which all my artworks were magical wormholes into alternate realities where I would tell you ridiculous stories that were both believeable and unbelievable and you would see various crazy visual representations and reinterpretations of my old work. We always talk about digitisation lately especially during covid – but are we really and truly exploring all the possibilities in a new interactive format like a 3d video game? I had some pretty tight time constraints (only working on this on weekends when I'm off work - I mean I do have a full-time job too), and being a one-woman developer team reined in my wild ambitions for this work (initially wanted to make a crazy ragdoll puppet of myself, which I scrapped due to having difficulties with ragdoll physics and rigging and lipsyncing, none of which is my speciality). I definitely feel this work is not even close to its final form and I imagine slowly improving it over time...

State of Motion: https://stateofmotion.sg/
Curated by Syaheedah Iskandar & Thong Kay Wee
Marina One
20 Jan – 21 Feb 2021
Exhibition open 12pm — 8pm daily (Except Public Holidays)
7 Straits View, Singapore 018936



3. MOTHER

In the basement of the National Gallery Singapore, I have a project called MOTHER. Try to visit it on Thurs-Sunday when there are helpful little elves to guide you through using the kinect-based interaction. Visually speaking this work is indeed a departure from what I usually make - i guess because of the involvement of form axioms' dev team and my own limitations in Unreal (specifically: having tried to make my part of it on my own without any experience with Blueprints or having watched a proper tutorial or course on it - woops! Yes as it turns out one cannot transfer skills of one game engine to another haha). The background environment for MOTHER was also contributed by the development team; I described it and they translated it in their own way into what you see there. I suppose I imagined in my head something more brutalist and weird and oddball - but what came out was a bit more scifi alien in the end, a bit like walking into a basement lan cafe and you're deafened by the ambient sound of nonstop clicking and shooting. So... yeah, not entirely what I expected, in case anyone is confused how this strange thing is a "Debbie Ding" work. Nevertheless I do feel like I learnt a lot from the progress of making it, especially experimenting with vocaloids.





4. RULES FOR THE EXPRESSION OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIRES

I guess this was my first video work, which I shot in Berlin over a summer, and made foley sound for in the dark scary basement of the ZKU building. The writing that accompanies the work was written about an anonymous city but there are glimmers of other very real cities in it. I'm just showing the video work for this exhibition at SEED space and it opens this weekend Saturday - and I am humbled to be showing alongside the amazing video work by Martha Atienza, Charles Lim, Lim Sokchanlina, Perception 3, Christina Quisumbing Ramilo, and Tromarama.

Images above from when I showed the work in Maison Salvan in Toulouse. Will update the pic of the show in SEED space when I can get a better picture!



Documentation for the works coming soon!