Term: December ’23 – January ’24
Eddie Wong (b.1982) is a Malaysian interdisciplinary artist who works with artificial intelligence and computational arts. He holds a Master’s degree in Computational Arts from Goldsmiths University of London, and is a 2022 Lumen Prize winner.
“I use AI, computational and cinematic art to delve into post-colonial narratives. My projects are deeply influenced by my cultural heritage, ancestral myths, and how my family history is entwined with the anti-colonial war in British Malaya, now Malaysia and Singapore. I have been grappling with colonialism’s lingering effects, such as my grandfather’s death fighting the British colonial government in 1949 and the subsequent forced displacement and incarceration of other family members.
I see my role as a guardian of these ancestral memories and an advocate for the marginalised people, like my grandparents who resisted colonial rule. I use AI as an artistic medium for ‘critical fabulation,’ a term coined by Saidiya Hartman for the speculative reimagining of historical events. By exploring the latent space of machine learning, I believe we can uncover glimpses of the past that are inherent in neural networks and speculate on potential futures.
Lately, I’ve been informed by the Buddhist idea of karmic returnings and synthetic genealogy. I see my family tree not as vertical but rhizomatic structure and history not as a linear progression but as a circular. I believe in the power of speculative narratives to fill personal and geopolitical gaps, challenging fluid notions of identity, power dynamics and subjectivity of memories. My journey thus far is a journey to transcend my own understanding of the weight of family karma and the echoing impacts of colonialism across generations.”
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