“We are as you made us”: exploring materiality and (Dis)embodied representations of power in Singaporean AI narratives

Abstract

Materiality underlies much of Singapore’s social, political, and economic consciousness, as the nation-state’s limited natural resources compels Singapore’s leaders to explore material alternatives in growth and sustainability if the nation-state is to stay relevant on the global stage. Technology is one of those material alternatives; since the 1980s, Singapore has restructured its economy to pursue a knowledge-intensive market in an effort to improve its global competitiveness — amidst which AI development became key. In this essay, I first explore the intersection between materiality and technology through the depictions of AI in Sonny Liew’s Malinky Robot and Victor O’Campo’s ‘Infinite Degrees of Freedom’. In these texts, I identify how the tension underlying social relations are necessarily socioeconomic due to the materiality inculcated in the Singaporean cultural imaginary. Next, I close read O’Campo’s ‘As If We Could Dream Forever’, ‘Entanglement’, and Melissa de Silva’s ‘Blind Date’ in the context of Leonardo Sias’s “utopia of certainty” to explore the invisible infrastructures of control disseminated through technology. These invisible infrastructures are materialised in Clara Chow’s ‘Archive House’, which uses the “house” as a location of socioeconomic value that simultaneously reifies and resists material construction. Although AI is typically perceived as an immaterial entity, this paper delineates its necessarily material status and how it functions as a vector of material change. Consequently, these texts underscore the significance of materiality and materialism in Singapore culture, and how these concepts inform the construction of Singapore’s digital development as an extension of its national development.