Introduction to OS2: Operating Systems

Open Systems (OS) originated as a platform for exploring the impacts of digital culture on creative expression. The programme framework was always an attempt to engage with both the short memory of online spaces and to anticipate the rapid transformation of internet culture.  The title, Open Systems, is intended as a reference to the software that structures our interactions with digital technologies—operating systems—through updates to content and user experience. It is also a nod to the utopian aspirations of open source technologies which, often through the tireless devotion of volunteers, reject the profit-seeking motives of major technology platforms in favour of a (more) egalitarian model; an example for movements such as right-to-repair and copyleft. Finally, Open Systems calls on a broader scientific framework, invoking the realm of physics to suggest a dynamic system capable of exchanging both energy and matter. Understood more abstractly, through the lens of “platform physics”—a term coined by New Models principles Caroline Busta and Lil Internet to describe the ways in which a medium’s design determines the form and circulation of content through its network—Open Systems is an experiment in how the screen, the browser, and the platform influence artworks that rely conceptually or technically on these systems.

For the second version of Open Systems, OS2: Operating Systems, I invited TO NEW ENTITIES, a Singapore-based collective of artists, designers, and curators to engage with the platform and framework. My intent was to open up Open Systems and, like beta testing a piece of software, expose the limitations and possibilities of the platform. Within the etymological history of Open Systems, I understand OS2: Operating Systems as an expanded engagement with systems thinking, a mode of analysis that examines the relationships between components within a whole. Simultaneously looking backward and forward, the Janus-faced project frames contemporary lived experience (online and off) as inextricably linked to vast networks of invisible systems—technological, ideological, economic, and cultural—that govern the ways we interact with one another, with institutions, and with the environment. Perhaps influenced by TO NEW ENTITIES own collaborative nature, the exhibition primarily features artworks produced through deep collaboration and/or under individual and collective pseudonyms. An invitation that was intended to challenge individual authorship over a platform yielded even more unexpected results through a challenge to authorship over both the exhibition and individual artworks, a gesture I view as an apt expression of how we navigate online spaces and the communities that develop therein.

As we continue to navigate the complexities of our interconnected world, OS2 invites us to question the systems that govern our lives and to imagine new ways of operating within them. Ultimately, this exhibition reminds us that while systems may shape our world, it is up to us to shape the systems.

— Duncan Bass, Curator, Singapore Art Museum

OS2: Operating Systems

In a meme-as-cover-art for a podcast by New Models between the hosts and their guests  (writer and curator Shumon Basar and futurist and consultant Noah Radford), a hooded rogue figure appears with the accompanying caption “Dubai is is developing the protocol of future cities.” The podcast broadly discussed how the city state is transforming and shaping its future through ambitious projects, futuristic urban development, and its positioning in the global landscape as a purported model of innovation; one that arguably deviates from current Western “democratic logics of national and societal governance”.

Radford further scoped into how the state views the potentials of technological, societal, and economic transformation to influence its rise as a global hub, whilst Basar added a cultural critique through his reflections on the way that the city blends tradition and modernity whilst questioning the implications of this ultra-contemporary approach to global trends.

This conversation happened against the background of a gathering that occurred just briefly before the podcast recording—ArtDubai’s Global Art Forum in 2023— which members of our collective had the opportunity to attend. Our collective’s return to a fixation on the framing and lens of operating systems was first seeded by our conversations with Shumon then. In our online and offline conversations at that time, we discussed how one could look at statecraft steering as a form of operating system. We also reflected on the surfacing critique of uncritically romanticising Dubai’s state crafting without consideration of the state’s documented unethical breaches of human rights amongst other ills, all of which  prompted a new line of thought: not unlike with computer operating systems, there shouldn’t be one operating system to be unequivocally lauded but that they should all equally be understood, mastered, and hacked.

At this point we were also cognizant of the paradigm shifts happening in the landscape of art and cultural production informed not only by the advent of technological disruptions, but also new formulations of economic (and social) models brought about by the (re)emergence of cryptocurrency. It felt to us like we were at the precipice of a major event in the timeline that included—at least as we saw it—a growing distrust in institutions, a post individual moment, and a convening in communities for new meaning and knowledge making.¹

When Duncan, curator at Singapore Art Museum, approached us to embark on the second iteration of Open Systems, we felt it most appropriate to timestamp and bring together artistic endeavours from our constellation that we felt spoke to these considerations. In this iteration, the artists and writers, through their work, reorient our focus to both historical and emergent implications of systems on our realities. Collectively they traverse and unpack traditional knowledge systems and archival methodologies, reinvigorate ecosystems, and propose alternative and new models for systems moving forward.

Our hope is that this project in its totality could in some ways shed light and make visible the invisible systems that mould and shape us, and serve as a reminder that systems should not always be set in stone (or code) and should always remain malleable and updateable for our ever shifting times. — TO NEW ENTITIES