Going onstage (www.esplanade.com).

Visual Arts

Insights: Syahrul Anuar

Blurring lived reality and digital realms

Calendar

Published: 10 Jan 2025


Time taken : <5mins

For millennia, man has endeavoured to understand and predict the weather. As forecasting methods improve with technology, we gradually lose embodied knowledge, relying more on data and systems to navigate climatic phenomena. Syahrul Anuar delves into ideas of value and myth-making that surround our evolving relationship with the abstract phenomenon of weather. Through three bodies of process-driven works, he aims to re-configure and re-evaluate this complex relationship. In what he terms an “infinite-state machine”, artworks extract live data about the weather to produce an infinite series of unpredictable states or outcomes. Various agents in this ecosystem predict climatic patterns, commoditise weather as assets and trade weather derivatives. Actual data is presented alongside fictional narratives or commentaries, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, lived reality and digital realms.

Syahrul considers our present-day preoccupation with using technology to decipher the world around us similar to ancient practices of interpreting weather through mystical rituals and folklore. This taps on the fundamental human desire to understand and distil value from the world around us. the infinite-state machine is weathered is a reflection on our complicity in shaping the narratives surrounding our environment and the universe.

Installation view of the infinite-state machine is weathered, Syahrul Anuar, 2024.

Installation view of the infinite-state machine is weathered, Syahrul Anuar, 2024.


In Conversation with the Artist

Weather is referred to both as noun or subject matter and adjective in the exhibition title. It is an interesting topic to unpack because it is both abstract and tangible, while being phenomenal or mundane. What drew you to this topic and how does it build upon what you have been investigating in your practice?

Within the scope of my practice, I have always been obsessed about the surroundings and this can be in any shape or form. It could range from built man-made materials to the organic and could also extend into the living. The interest is not so much about what they mean but how interconnection results in a constellation of ideas, a map or even pairings that can be related even when they seem unrelated.

It became natural for me to investigate the topic of weather, not just as an experience but also the nature in which living entities respond to it. You could see it as an investigation of an obsession over the most mundane, which is surprising in its own ways. This act of finding something deeper within the “mundane” led to further discoveries in which the artwork touches upon—the trading of weather commodities. In the simplest sense, the face that financial and market makers trade and hedge against weather volatility to protect themselves became the tipping point that made me rethink how the world is fundamentally built.

Installation view of the infinite-state machine is weathered, Syahrul Anuar, 2024.

Installation view of the infinite-state machine is weathered, Syahrul Anuar, 2024.

The work is not so much about telling what weather is but is instead a documentation of the intrinsic human response to weather. I think this approach is fundamental to the way I approach my practice. It might sound truly bizarre, but I see myself as a documentary photographer till this day, even if the work has no photographs.

In this exhibition, you delved deeper into the presence and impact of technology in daily life, working extensively with technology as medium. What perspectives have surfaced through your engagement with the mediums you harnessed in this show?

When it comes to working with technology, it is important to realise that it should not merely be an interface to experience a piece of work. I do not like it when an artwork is shown on a screen or a projection without actual meaning on its experience as a medium. The presentation format would always affect the meaning and experience of the artwork.

I took this into deep consideration when producing the work as purely screen-based. Working with multiple screens posed a new way of thinking. Not everything on a screen needs to exude a sense of dynamism which a viewer would expect from a screen. Showing restraint and approaching differently in a way that presents the element of predictability in the weather that Singapore faces made more sense than attempting to show many moving parts; which seems to sit at the intersection of which weather can be both chaotic and predictably uncanny.

In our conversations, the ouroboros as concept and analogy was something that kept coming up. Tell us more about this influenced or undergirded your explorations for this exhibition.

The concept of ouroboros occurred to me while reading a thought-provoking book The Stack by Benjamin Bratton. He frames the discussion around technology as one where technology shapes and continually impacts the world in what he calls ‘planetary scale computation’. The amount of computational power needed to predict global warming could be a major contributing factor to the phenomenon of global warming.

This intrigued me as we often see technology as a way to “improve lives” and at the same time it has shifted the way we live our lives. Our relationship with weather is not so direct anymore. We interface with weather through technology through weather forecasting, alert notifications and the distribution of global news regarding weather disasters. A nuanced ouroboros has inadvertently been produced. It is the consequence of technological progress with no limits. There is a thinking that underpins success as a natural consequence of using technology but this is not always the case.

You could also argue that the work sits itself as a fascination with technology as the very medium that it presents itself is interfaced through screens. I have no answer for this contradiction but I found it funny enough to present it through this means. I am aware that I am an inconsequential agent in the larger grand scheme of things, a part of this ouroboros, and there is no way we can stop it.

The idea of myth making and the interweaving of live data with fiction permeate the exhibition. How did you engage with the notion of myth making and bring the various strands together?

When one is faced with the feeling of a fact being challenged and presented as a myth, or vice versa, it creates an uncanny feeling that I find humorous. Here, I chose the concept of weather commodities. They are financial products backed against weather entities where market makers produce them for traders to hedge against future losses and/or to make money. This idea of “commodity” concerns an actual physical entity, but a weather commodity is not a real entity in the strictest sense as it is created from thin air and represents something else. This gave a crude feeling of the factual and fictional which I wanted to probe further.

A digital screen from the art installation, infinite-state machine is weathered by Syahrul Anuar, 2024. The screen displays a graphic labeled 'Pyronomic Futures,' featuring a pixelated building with a temperature reading of 55° and dollar signs. The text below reads 'Thermal Asset Bubble Expansion Critical,' accompanied by a sidebar with repeated 'merchants' text.

Detail of the infinite-state machine is weathered, Syahrul Anuar, 2024.

Another strand is the live data streams presented as one goes up along the escalator. Presenting data here worked quite nicely as it was made to be presented in a way that felt fictional. The choice of aesthetic was deliberate. I opted not to show reality and instead presented a pixelated version of Singapore. This was a fictionalisation of the factual. I found that people found it funny to see the weather forecast when they could just shift their gaze to the windows and see exactly how the weather is at that point in time.

I wanted to directly engage with weather myths through fictional products that presented themselves as factual entities. I explored the thematic concerns of rainfall, temperature and humidity which are the three sources of joys and pains of Singaporeans. Can technology produce a transformed commodity from a physical element and if so, would anyone think it would be real? At the end of the day, I opted to leave the tension between fact and fiction more open-ended. I was not concerned of informing the viewer on what is fact or fiction. It is up to them to decide.

the infinite-state machine is weathered by Syahrul Anuar was presented at Esplanade Mall Level 3 Community Wall from 4 Oct 2024 to 5 Jan 2025.

You have 3 out of 3 articles left this month. Create a free Esplanade&Me account or sign in to continue. SIGN UP / LOG IN