by Kathleen Ditzig and Ryan Ho
Image: Amanda Heng, Let’s Chat Further, 2025, installation view. Photo: National Gallery Singapore
November 13, 2025
I started the project by sharing my artwork Let’s Chat and learned, in the process, the importance of listening.[1]
How does one read a mind? In the lab, accurately capturing a test subject’s perception, expectations and even decision-making is commonplace. Devising an experimental method for doing so, however, requires a combination of engineering, psychology, ergonomics and even something akin to sleight of hand. It’s ironic that while our experiments looked no different from what you’d expect to see in many other laboratories—test subjects festooned with electrodes, assistants wrangling reams of data, and so on—designing them was nothing short of an art form.[2]
It is cliche now to say that AI is shaping our daily lives. With the ubiquity of AI software in the applications that we use every day, the technology is systematically defining our relationships to one another, to work, to how we regulate the human body, to how our societies are governed; it is determining what we know and perhaps even our legacies after we die. Our lives and futures are now inextricable from this rapidly developing technology: Cultural and industrial production are increasingly being mediated by AI technologies. Their development is being driven by geopolitical competition and environmental constraints impact our everyday lives.
Yet culture and technology are cybernetically constructed. As the philosopher Yuk Hui describes with his concept of cosmotechnics, technologies are embedded in the cosmology of the cultures that create them. He defines cosmotechnics as “the unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities” such as craft-making or art-making.[3] Hui advocates for an understanding of technology as being based on local technological systems embedded in distinct cultural traditions, in which art and craft are more ecologically integrated into and morally aligned with society. By this logic, the cultural feedback loop that has contributed to the construction of AI technologies reflects our global culture. What, then, is this culture? And what possibilities are there for its redesign? What are the unique roles and demands of museums and archives, as custodians of shared culture, heritage, and social history, and as representatives of national, regional, or world order in this cybernetic relationship between man and machine? What are the urgencies that can define a museum’s venture into this technological dynamic through the commissioning of AI projects, specifically artworks that are based on the interrogation of the development of this technology?
The standardizing impulse of AI aesthetics is what Hito Steyerl terms “mean images,”[4] a reference both to the AI program Stable Diffusion’s propensity to render “correlated averages” and to the “image” as morally mean—in that the technology relies on “infrastructures of polluting hardware, menial and disenfranchised labor, exploiting political conflict as a resource.” Steyerl describes the output of these systems as “documentary expressions of society’s views of itself, seized through the chaotic capture and large-scale kidnapping of data.”[5] However, to say that AI technologies reflect the moral fiber of our culture and society is to hold space for a second possibility—one that has been well articulated by philosophers, researchers and academics who operate in both the Chinese and American technological stacks of AI development.
Pat Pataranutaporn, art technologist and codirector of the MIT Media Lab Advancing Humans with AI research program, has cultivated a community of technologists in Bangkok who have worked with artists across Southeast Asia to produce AI-based artworks. He has also worked to advance a theory of cyborg psychology.[6] A researcher of AI and human-computer interaction, he studies and develops AI systems that support what he terms “human flourishing.” In his work, he broadly advocates for AI systems that encourage various aspects of “socially positive” characteristics, including reasoning, decision-making, learning, and self-development. His research on AI-generated characters exemplifies how generative AI can support human learning by emotively motivating people to become more empathetic and curious about the world around them, in turn making them more socially robust. Diagnosing the impact of pervasive algorithms in determining our agency, Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik described our present moment as a postcontemporary time complex, wherein the present is a predicted future, thus making the future the only horizon from which the issues of the present can be addressed.[7] Pataranutaporn’s ongoing project Future You allows for a digital avatar AI chatbot of an individual’s possible future self to speak to an individual in the present. The project—as the website claims—“reduces anxiety and strengthens users’ connection to their future potential,”[8] in effect addressing our postcontemporary time complex by empowering individuals to reimagine their futures and present choices through an imagination of an algorithmically produced future.
Similarly, in his recent publication The Prehistory of the AI Civilization, AI researcher and political scientist Zhang Xiao Yu posits that AI technologies represent a new epoch in human development. He states:
The fundamental characteristic of this new epoch is that intelligence is no longer taught and cultivated based on nature’s creations, but is designed and mass-produced; the designed and mass-produced intelligence may even surpass [that of] its creators.[9]
However, he concedes that “the new epoch will not disregard logic and laws”; rather, “we must learn to speak according to its logic, act according to its laws, and discuss the questions it cares about.”[10] Of utmost urgency to the construction of the new epoch, then, is ensuring it is steered toward human-centric ends—which involves the cultivation of a speculative imagination of the future and both a pragmatic and an empathetic understanding of historical evolution. Zhang suggests that this orientation would enable us to recognize the historical moment we are in as a “prehistoric species” caught up in petty calculations and conflicts between tribes, societies, and nations.[11] Pataranutaporn’s research and Zhang’s theorization of AI’s impact and development alongside a prehistorical human consciousness grappling to understand what it is making may be considered different articulations of a human-centric artificial intelligence.[12]
Written from the epistemological and infrastructural differences of the China-aligned and United States–aligned technological stacks, these approaches are derived from different networks and histories of cybernetics and computer science.[13] Yet they both make possible what is implicit in Yuk Hui’s formulation of cosmotechnics: If technology reflects the cosmology and morality of the culture that produces it, then culture is capable of changing, molding, or guiding the development of technology. This thesis and its investment in art correlate with the history of Southeast Asian futurism as articulated by the linguist, and possibly Southeast Asia’s first cybernetician, Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana, in 1966. He noted that art objects not only reflect the values of a society but influenced personalities and, at scale, influenced society and culture through our encounters with them.[14] Expanding on an idea he proposed in the 1950s when he first spoke about the museum as a medium of mass education, and continuing through the Art and the Future futurist conference he organized in Indonesia in 1978, Takdir advanced the idea that the artistic process—as an embodied process of collective making and encounter—could reshape individuals’ values. This transformation, he argued, could be scaled up to guide a human-centered future in the face of rapid, ecologically unsustainable technological development.[15] The proposition that art can change culture and thus modulate technology entails the possible role of art in building a human-centered future in the age of AI. It also situates the art institution at a critical threshold in the work of future building. The modern museum is a constellation of culture and industry, both a repository of critical sociohistorical context and a generative mechanism for the industrial creation and imagination of new futures. This dual role makes it a valuable and generative “dataset” of culture. The museum thus emerges not only as a source for technological development but also as a site of world making: a place where futures can be imagined and shaped by marshaling its potential and ideological significance at a moment when the future of AI society and human subjectivity is being discursively constructed.
What would it mean to approach the construction of AI from the perspective of embodied experience, rather than from the perspective of the disembodied, detached, and powerful human intellect? As “curated” datasets become increasingly valuable, what is the role of the museum as custodians of generational history and cultural legacies?
Deep learning is the most recent approach to AI—starting in the first decade of the 2000s, when researchers realized that it was possible to train artificial neural networks to solve complex problems using large datasets. The goal of building these networks was to create intelligence that learns from experience. These networks emulate and ultimately surpass the physical thresholds of human intelligence. As technology allows for more mutable systems and dynamic models of learning, it opens up new means to challenge inherited epistemological narratives and frameworks, including those that have shaped our understanding of art and art making. What does it mean to make art and be with art? Is human creativity or experience computable through a series of protocols? Can an artwork be made without an artist? Can performance art outlive an artist?
If datasets are a historical artifact, then AI is a historical medium as much as it is a “future” orientated one. To operate by the logic of prediction based on learned data is to construct the future through frameworks of the past. As engineers and theorists increasingly call for human-centered AI, these questions gain particular valence in the context of Southeast Asian history of data colonialism and futurism. While Southeast Asia is among the world’s greatest producers of data, the ownership of and development of AI software and infrastructure largely resides outside the region. A human-centric approach brings to the fore enduring inequalities that color the region’s relationship with the development of emerging technologies. How, then, might commissioning new AI works based on archival data address these histories and contemporary dynamics? How is an art commission a process for both industry and cultural institutions to untangle complex dynamics and shape the fundamental social and human contracts we are building with AI? Who might an institution collaborate with to ask such questions, and what important values and principles might guide this practice?
In 2022, National Gallery Singapore set out to commission the performance artist Amanda Heng for the exhibition Singapore Stories: Pathways and Detours in Art (2025–30), the museum’s second staging of Singaporean art history since its opening in 2015. The exhibition focuses on the recovery and inclusion of lesser-known narratives and minority artists’ perspectives in the nation’s art history. Heng’s commissions bookend the exhibition, replacing the museum’s “social table,” a digital interface that allows audiences to access and engage with the museum’s collection through a networked visualization of its artworks. The curatorial intention to reimagine this technological interface with an artist was both to continue to hold relational space for public engagement with the national collection and to privilege and emphasize the importance of artists’ perspectives in the writing of art history.
Amanda Heng’s Let’s Chat (1996) is a durational performance and participatory artwork in the museum’s—and thus Singapore’s national— collection. Its first performance was organized by the Necessary Stage as part of the program October at the Substation, in which Heng re-created her mother’s gatherings with friends at the void decks of Singapore’s public housing estates.[16] The iterative artwork brings together tables, chairs, and domestic tasks to evoke the settings where informal, everyday social encounters take place. Rooted in casual conversations over shared tasks like plucking the roots off beansprouts and drinking tea, Let’s Chat creates moments of communal exchange and bonding. The work has since been realized in a myriad of contexts around the world, including at the 1st Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, organized by the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in 1999, where the performance was organized as part of a residency and presented in a shopping arcade. Described by the artist as a social space for chitchat, these third spaces position art as part of everyday life. Originally developed in the 1990s, Let’s Chat draws attention to the acceleration of a globalized contemporary life and the erosion of informal social interactions caused by urban development.
The museum commissioned Let’s Chat Further (2025–30) and Retired Singirl (2025–30), artworks that employ advanced technologies—AI and holographic telecommunication devices—to extend the participatory and social themes present in the significant works of Heng’s live art practice: Let’s Chat and Singirl (2000–). While she also makes images and objects, Heng is committed to live art—performance-based and process-driven work wherein the artist is a convenor of shared space, exchanges, and experiences. Developed in collaboration with digital-human developers Pantheon Lab and social-design studio Lekker Architects, the two commissioned artworks are based on a series of conversations developed by Heng that interrogate Singapore’s art history and identity, as well as how people rather than national policy form collective identities.
Let’s Chat Further is a series of digital and live performances planned to take place at the museum from 2025 to 2030. It sees Heng telecommunicate with the museum through a holographic platform presented through a holobox. The holobox is a display device that presents Heng in 3D and allows her to interact with audiences. It records the audience and transmits both sound and image of the audience to Heng in a separate studio setting, enabling a real-time but virtual connection. Recorded conversations from these performances are the basis for the second artwork, Retired Singirl, referencing the ongoing project Singirl which is based on Heng donning a kebaya identified with the Singapore Girl an icon associated with Singapore Airlines air stewardess and marketed to represent the country. Singirl has also included the online project Singirl Online Project which began in 2009, with the artist inviting all Singaporean women to be part of her Singirl community in order to form a contingent of one hundred women who could participate in the National Day Parade. Women would participate by submitting their details with a picture of their bottom to the artist’s website (https://singirl.online/). The project today exists as an animation of marching bottoms. The project, in its marshaling of a community-created archive, its meditation of the virtual translation of the human form, and its resistance to the standardized ideal of a female beauty (a logic that permeates the building of AI) anticipates some of the logics of Retired Singirl. In Retired Singirl, Heng’s aspiration is that the AI-based digital avatar can facilitate collective discussions with audiences at National Gallery Singapore through the holobox when Heng is not telecommunicating; it is also meant to serve as a communal construct, as it evolves in response to ongoing audience inputs over the five years of its public presentation.
The commissioning of these two works was informed by the museum’s commitment to the ongoing archiving of the artist’s practice, which itself is a complicated process that has been developing since 2022. The conception and execution of Let’s Chat Further and Retired Singirl can thus be read as being at the nexus of archiving a significant live art practice in Singapore’s art history, the museum as public institution holding space for civic exchanges between individuals and artists, and the construction of histories and narratives by which we understand the value of art in our lives and society. For the artist, the commissioning and making of Retired Singirl are interrogations of how AI can relate to live art practice and its archiving. Perceiving AI as a medium, in some ways not much different from photography, Heng approaches this project as a platform to raise critical questions rather than find technological solutions. Is it possible to use AI to build a living archive? Can it hold both collective and individual experiences of art? What are the different agents that undertake this work, and what relations are at play? She sees the commission as a platform for deeper questions about live art and how it can capture and represent a life experience in all its complexity.
In this regard, Heng aspires with Retired Singirl to produce a certain simulacrum of her practice, through specifically developed datasets and a series of prompts designed to sustain conversations. These datasets include recordings of her likeness, recorded conversations that make up Let’s Chat Further, its own conversations with the public, and archival material that Heng has selected with the museum about her practice. This simulacrum, however, is not an actual copy of her artwork and her ability to hold conversation because the AI will grow with the public and evolve beyond the preset framework that Heng has created. Yet, in the aspiration to create the simulacrum the AI as art medium holds with it a necessary contingency that is an important kernel of Heng’s practice: The holding of individual agency to shape the collective; and the transmission of cultural and intergenerational exchange through a lived experience of connection.
The making of the AI however is predicated on a process of archiving and cataloging Heng’s works that is a laborious process of data cleaning─ the classification and consolidation of her archive and its information into data that can be efficiently processed by an AI─that necessitates the artist’s intervention and decision-making. This process of data curation is based on the artist’s negotiation of the museum’s resources, her relationship with Pantheon Lab, and the insights she has gathered from her own reading and studies of AI discourse. In addition, over the five years of the commission, the AI will shift and be informed by the types of conversations that participants have with it. Thus, the artwork—as commissioning process, exhibited artwork, and opportunity for social exchange—is an expansive object in Heng’s live art practice that includes the entire collaborative process of making the artwork—from the conceptualization of the commission to Retired Singirl’s collaborative becoming, facilitated by the public’s engagement.
Amanda Heng has been a full-time art practitioner since the late 1980s, following her departure from a career in tax accounting in the civil service. A significant artist in Singapore’s art history, Heng was involved in the founding of two artist initiatives in Singapore: the Artists’ Village in 1988 and Women in the Arts in 1999. Her artworks blur the line between art and reality; they are also often made in collaboration with participants from different backgrounds. According to the artist, this approach is driven by a desire to democratize access to and appreciation for art. Heng’s emergence as an artist aligned with the globalization of Singaporean contemporary art in the 1990s, a complex environment wherein performance art was both temporarily censored in Singapore (1994–2003) and Singapore’s art scene saw unprecedented governmental efforts to cultivate art and cultural production to participate in a neoliberal market–based world order.[17] This political and historical context is important to understanding the core principles of holding space for chitchat in Let’s Chat and Heng’s practice more generally, which prioritizes personal agency and community, even as her works interrogate identity and memory.
Agency—understood as a dynamic, cybernetic process—is important to consider in relation to this practice. Yet the museum’s role as a public institution to hold space for such agency and to safeguard the integrity of Heng’s artistic process is complicated by the complexity of AI technologies, which range from questions of data ownership to the historical controversies of theft upon which large language models (LLMs) are built and the entanglements of third-party contracting. Leaning into pertinent contemporary discussion around AI and digital twins,[18] Heng’s decision for Retired Singirl to outlive her challenges the traditional framework that live artworks are tied to the mortality of the artists who produce them. This requires the museum to project its role of care speculatively into the future, to rethink the nature of the artwork commission and what fundamentally an art work and cultural asset can be. Is data a form of cultural production that should be ascribed value? New developments like OpenAI’s Sora, an AI software launched in October 2025 that produces what are essentially deep-fake videos, raise new questions about the cooption of copyrighted material and the likenesses of individuals. In this context, collaborative, long-term commissions like this one—between an institution, artist, designers, and technologies—are experiments as much as they demonstrate the need for new models of art-tech development. In the face of these technologies being normalized and shifting our culture, National Gallery Singapore—by taking on this commission and committing to caring for and presenting it beyond the artist’s lifetime—affirms the role of the future Southeast Asian museum as a critical nexus for art and industry.
Data colonialism in Southeast Asian history requires deeper study. The logic of the colonial census in framing colonies and buttressing empire extend to technology companies current modes of operation: They are harvesting user data and developing algorithms to mold users as subjects that go on to define communities and political alignments.[19] Karen Hao’s journalistic account of the development of AI in Empire of AI makes the case that the current milieu of AI development is modeled on colonial capitalism’s methods of extractivism. In an interview, she explains that
empires of AI [are] not as overtly violent as empires of old because we’ve had 150 years of moral and social progress. So they’re not going to be using the kind of same violent methods to do the exploitation and extraction. But they are still exploiting lots of labor around the world […] they’re also seizing up a lot of resources to continue fortifying their empire. They’re seizing up land for their data centers. They’re seizing up data that people put online without the realization that it would be commoditized and used to turn a profit. And we have to be extremely cognizant because if we follow this path to its logical conclusion, democracy cannot survive in a world where the vast majority of people no longer have agency and say and control over their own lives.[20]
How, then, do cultural institutions engage with these technologies that are developed through complex layers of ownership and are necessarily— because of their scale—built on systems of extractivism? What does it mean for a museum to commission an artist to make an AI-based artwork? Does the museum have to be cognizant of the build of the technology? What if part of the artwork is based on data scraped from another museum’s website for images of artworks from its collection? Even if copyright infringement has not happened and any liabilities are limited to civil claims between artists, do museums have a responsibility to learn about the historical stakes of the technology they commission and take a position on how data is valued as a form of cultural production? Can the act of a museum commissioning an AI project then become a litmus test for other broader issues that AI brings up about ownership, representation, and, more importantly— as Heng’s interventions and live art practice point to—individual agency as it relates to the collective? AI technologies, after all, are fundamentally a form of collectivizing at scale.
The construction of ethical AI calls for multistakeholder participation that gives equal voice to historians, linguists, social scientists, artists, and creatives alongside the policymakers and the industry players who construct its technology.[21] An ethical AI would also require addressing fundamental issues of unequal access, ownership, and literacy around the data and technologies central to AI development. This is the rub of resisting the logics of standardization that these technologies embody when thinking of them as mechanism as seeing, thinking and producting at scale. Most AI development in the region is based on software and models owned and developed outside Southeast Asia. What does that mean for the knowledge, cultural, and industrial production that these technologies are developing and enabling? What does it tell us about the cosmotechnics of these projects? How do artists and cultural production from specific spaces and places resist the homogenizing logics of the technology?
Responding to these complexities, National Gallery Singapore’s commission has necessarily included collaboration with policymakers—namely, Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange (KOFFICE) and the ASEAN Foundation. Together with cultural consultant Ben Hampe, we organized a workshop with artists and policymakers from across Southeast Asia in May 2024, held at ASEAN’s headquarters in Jakarta, Indonesia. Framed as a Creative Economy workshop for ASEAN and the Republic of Korea, the workshop included Amanda Heng, Pat Pataranutaporn, and Pichet Klunchun, who worked on a series of AI projects related to Southeast Asian dance legacies; digital artists such as Rimbawan Gerilya and Chantivear Khouch; curators such as Sudjud Dartanto; senior policymakers such as Asa Piwkhum from the Thailand Creative Economy Agency; and Sybilay Souvannasing and Othevadeth Jounlamany who were senior officials invited from Laos and Viandira Athia from the Asian Creative and Digital Economy Youth Summit. The workshop defined and advanced principles of human-centric AI development—a framework for AI that prioritizes, rather than diminishes, human agency. This finding is not a platitude, and is particularly interesting as one to come out of a Southeast Asian context.
Pat Pataranutaporn and Pichet Klunchun’s project Cyber Subin (2024) includes creating a digital dance archive based on “Mae Bot Yai,” 59 poses that form the basis of a traditional Thai dance, Khon.[22] The expanded project has enabled Pichet to dance with the machine’s extrapolations upon the form – a 60th pose. Cyber Subin can be interpreted through a Buddhist cultural heritage perspective, where human knowledge is not an asset to be owned and therefore is not limited by the understanding of intellectual property but rather a living process of evolution. This open-ended articulation of the technology is similar to Heng’s own approach to hold contingency and to see Retired Singirl as a method of sharing her practice with future generations. This ethos of advancing cultural evolution, however, is complex to actualize as a system of contracts and managed liabilities within traditional institutional frameworks, especially as intellectual property becomes not only lucrative but a dominant imagination powering the development of industry.
Learning from these findings, the museum has considered new frameworks of commissioning that prioritize artist agency in the development of AI works that may outlive the artist. To do this, the museum has consulted and collaborated with specialist lawyers to develop new contracts that manage risks associated with third-party development and to outline ways of licensing the artist’s data. Heng’s data in the form of her likeness and her archive are licensed to the museum to operate the artwork. In turn, these contracts assert that data is a cultural product with value. Moreover, these contracts frame the museum as an interlocutor between artist and industry and as a bastion of fundamental human-centric values we want to safeguard in the face of AI’s rapid and complicated development.
Returning to the cybernetic futures and cultures of AI and the role of the museum and art imagined by Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana in the 1950s and 1970s in shaping individual personality and thus society, if we are to take up Yuk Hui’s assertion that the morality and cosmology of an age is in all technology, then museums as public and cultural institutions have both the opportunity and the responsibility to be interlocutors between the individual and the collective as well as between artist and industry. The art commission is no longer the production of an art as an object, asset, event, or experience. Rather, as Heng has long intuited in her practice, it produces a series of relations. In turn, it is these relations that can divine our shared future in the age of AI.
Kathleen Ditzig is a Singaporean art historian and curator. As a curator at National Gallery Singapore, she researches art histories of technology from a Southeast Asian perspective and works on projects related to advanced technologies. She recently co-curated Diplomacy and Desire: Basoeki Abdullah in Singapore at National Gallery Singapore (2025–26).
Ryan Ho is the head of Innovation & Experience Design at National Gallery Singapore. His work involves the evolution of the museum’s future experience, the development of audience-engagement tools, and new art × tech commissions. Outside of this, he also teaches new designers and creative problem-solvers across Singapore’s local institutes.
[01] Amanda Heng, We Are the World, These Are Our Stories: Amanda Heng, exh. cat. (Singapore: STPI, 2017), unpaginated.
[02] Li Fei-Fei, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI (New York: Moment of Lift Books, Flatiron Books, 2023), 121.
[03] Yuk Hui, Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Concept of Technology in the Anthropocene (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2021), 2. Hui further notes that:“The detachment of technology from [a broader] reality has resulted from the desire to be universalizing and to become the ground of everything. Such a desire is made possible by the history of colonization, modernization and globalization, which, being accompanied by its history of economic growth and military expansion, has given rise to a mono-technological culture in which modern technology becomes the principle productive force and largely determines the relation between human and non-human beings, human and cosmos, and nature and culture. The problems brought about by this mono-technological culture are leading to the exhaustion of resources and of life on earth and to the destruction of the environment, which are central to the discourse around the Anthropocene. It is also in this social and political context that it seems urgent to re-open the question of technology and the question for multiple cosmotechnics.”
[04] Hito Steyerl, “Mean Images,” New Left Review, no. 140/141 (March–June 2023).
[05] Ibid.
[06] Pat Pataranutaporn, “Cyborg Psychology: The Art & Science of Designing Human-AI Systems that Support Human Flourishing” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2024).
[07] Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik, “The Time-Complex: Postcontemporary,” Berlin Biennale, January 29, 2016.
[08] “Say Hello to Future You!”, MIT Media Lab, accessed October 9, 2025.
[09] Zhang Xiao Yu, The Prehistory of the AI Civilization [in Chinese] (Beijing: CITIC Press Group, 2025).
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Li, The Worlds I See, 300. Li Fei-Fei, a computer science professor at Stanford University and founder of the nonprofit AI4ALL, introduced the term human-centered artificial intelligence as both a practice and a descriptor for her work. The term refers to AI “committed to humanity as it’s always been to science. It should remain collaborative and deferential in the best academic tradition, but unafraid to confront the real world.” A fundamental aspect of this idea is enhancing human capabilities rather than competing with or replacing them.
[13] See Mi You, “A Different Endpoint: Qian Xuesen’s Computation Paradigm and Cosmotechnics,” in Machine Decision Is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence, ed. Benjamin H. Bratton, Anna Greenspan, and Bogna Konior (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2025). As illustrated in her historical account of aerodynamicist Qian Xuesen’s contribution to Chinese cybernetics, the development of Chinese AI has a different ideological genealogy than that of the West—the key difference being that West- or US-aligned AI development grows out of an epistemology of cybernetics based on anthropological and behavioral sciences. The definition of the human as an engineerable subject thus has different nuances in Pataranutaporn’s research and Zhang’s theorizing, even if they share a similar premise.
[14] S. Takdir Alisjahbana, Essay of a New Anthropology: Values as Integrating Forces in Personality, Society, and Culture (Kuala Lumpur: Malaya University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1966).
[15] Kathleen Ditzig,“Exhibiting Southeast Asia in the Cultural Cold War: Geopolitics of Regional Art Exhibitions (1940s–1980s),”(PhD diss., Nanyang Technological University, 2023), 179–238.
[16] Void decks refers to the ground floor of public housing blocks in Singapore that have been designed as open, sheltered space, where people can gather.
[17] Eugene Tan, “Tang Da Wu’s Audacious Performance ‘Don’t Give Money to the Arts,’” Frieze, no. 200 (2019).
[18] A digital twin can be a virtual replica of a person or process that simulates its behavior. See “What is digital-twin technology?”, McKinsey & Company, August 26, 2024.
[19] A clear example of this is the scandal resulting from Cambridge Analytica’s supposed connections to Bongbong Marcos. See Sofia Tomacruz, “Bongbong Marcos Asked Cambridge Analytica to ‘Rebrand’ Family Image,” Rappler, July 16, 2020.
[20] Steve Inskeep, “Journalist Karen Hao Discusses Her Book ‘Empire of AI,’” NPR, May 20, 2025.
[21] Elina Noor and Mark Bryan Manantan, Raising Standards: Data and Artificial Intelligence in Southeast Asia (Washington, DC: Asia Society Policy Institute, 2022), 14.
[22] P. Pataranutaporn et al., “Human-AI Co-Dancing: Evolving Cultural Heritage Through Collaborative Choreography with Generative Virtual Characters,” MOCO ’24: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Movement and Computing, ed. Laura Karreman (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2024), 1–10.
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