ArtScience Museum Head Honor Harger Embracing Technology

Executive director of Singapore’s ArtScience Museum New Zealander Honor Harger is embracing interactive technology such as touch screens and mobile apps in order to retain visitors and draw new ones, mirroring a trend in art capitals such as London and New York.

Harger, who was formerly curator at London’s Tate Modern, also headed Lighthouse, a digital culture agency in Brighton specialising in art and technology.

During a tour of the ArtScience Museum she points out various displays in ongoing exhibitions that reflect the museum’s ethos of marrying art, science and technology.

These range from a sprawling digital bricolage by performance artists Chicks On Speed, an art installation that imposes multiple images over one another, to video projections and ultraviolet lights that evoke the bioluminescence emitted by deep sea creatures in its latest exhibition, The Deep.

Harger says that efforts at marrying art and technology here are still nascent compared to other cultural capitals.

“The museum scene here is sophisticated and dynamic, but young compared to other cities in the world.”

Nonetheless, “both the Government and private sector have put a lot of effort into growing infrastructure in the past few years … there’s an agility that other cities would find hard to match,” she says.

Original article by Lee Jian Xuan, The Straits Times, June 10, 2015.