Polymerized Heritage

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Polymerized Heritage
• Fyerool Darma (bio)

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Close up of P ♥ rtraire Family (featuring rawanXberdenyut, Aleezon, Tuan Siami, A.I.den and Lé Luhur from the exhibit “Radio Malaya: Abridged Conversation About Art,” National University of Singapore Museum, South and Southeast Asia Collection and Autaspace. Photography by Jonathan Tan.

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[ Fri • 9 Jun 2023 • 01:15 PM • Telok Blangah • Singapore ]

2023, Singapore—The city-state played host to a series of conferences bringing together blockchain technology and art; yet digital exclusions persisted within and beyond its geographical landmass. Is it not ironic when art becomes a stream that hosts the ambitions of the Green Plan against this Smart Nation? What did I take from the advice, “màn màn lái~”¹? How can these intricate circuitry hint to the collaborators or are they traces of colluding crests?

There is an energy shield that dissolves into a fibrous hue of chrome. It brought me to my heritage—the polymeric surface—“Am I minimizing my ecological footprint with this material? Why should I bear the burden of responsibility when it is the negligence carried forward by my parents, their post-Merdeka generation, and the ones before? What happens when artists employ these fossilized detritus? Lao Ban Niang,² your grandchild of the Plastic Age, explored these cues that were once utilized as military equipment—I am repurposing it as a razzle dazzle camouflage against a heritage. What can you decode of these surfaces? Could its verso hint at formations or are they compressions of oversampled marks from the saturation of our heritage that you love? Whose heritage? What heritage?”

Polyvinyl decals are a heritage of the present. They are cues to a sonar measuring the intricacy and intimacy of metrics for the materiality of the digital born and physical labor. They are slippages of overlooked heritage in the digital depth that underlies industrial legacies to systems that continue into our digital age. It is a portal where the digital wades. They are traces to energies of the bodies that mined precious minerals—processed, grinded to powder, suspended onto emulsions of CMYK and tattooed onto surfaces. Vinyls carry evidence of manual, intellectual, and creative labor. They are cues to the co-production between society and automotion. As soon as it is applied to a surface, the energy of the labor evaporates from the cache. Can polyvinyl decals resemble self-fashioned textiles? Do they carry the incantations of tattooed weavers and loom makers? What material possibilities arise amidst this obfuscation? These thoughts explore data waste’s societal impact. What happens after its optimized use? Easily discarded. They are a material that highlights the digital-physical divide. Can it be seen as the pulse of art, [End Page 101] science, technology, and digital surfaces that delve into heritage and industry crevices? Whose heritage? Which industry? My heritage is of artificiality, polymerized through these forms of complexities.

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View full resolution Figure 2.

Close up of P ♥ rtraire Family (featuring rawanXberdenyut, Aleezon, Tuan Siami, A.I.den and Lé Luhur from the exhibit “Radio Malaya: Abridged Conversation About Art,” National University of Singapore Museum, South and Southeast Asia Collection and Autaspace. Photography by Jonathan Tan.

Polyvinyl decals and textiles symbolize our consumer culture and commodification. In combining them, conventions are shifted, and a subversion of dominant and dormant narratives of heritage and consumerism are displayed. What implications does this interplay have for art, technology, commerce, and society? What does the use of polymeric vinyl between heritages to historical materials such as clay, wood, bamboo, gold, bronze, silver, or oil pigments in cultural objects like lantaka,³ kasut manek,⁴ creese,⁵ ceramics, tikar, batik, songket, limar, and paintings reveal to us? These screen-shots are dead links from those cues. They are conversions [End Page 102] of energies from the mining of minerals and carbons, they are toils of the Lé Luhur.

We have witnessed the presence of polyvinyls adorning the bodies of tuk-tuks, its intricate cuttings on the #ex5dream that harmonizes with the chirps and silenced cosmos. Billboards and glass doors are blanketed in vinyls. They are gastronomic guides to...