Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Jamie Lee

Note: Diary of an NUS Museum Intern is a series of blog posts written by our interns about their experiences during the course of their internships. Working alongside their mentors, our interns have waded through tons of historical research, assisted in curatorial work, pitched in during exhibition installations and organised outreach events! If you would like to become our next intern, visit our internship page for more information! 

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Jamie is a year 4 Southeast Asian Studies student at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.  As our Exhibitions Intern for our South and Southeast Asian Collection, Jamie assisted in the research and programming for our prep-room project 'Sites, Stories and Subsequence' and an upcoming exhibition 'Seni'.



Here’s a show-and-tell of the various rabbit holes I fell down while working on the Southern Islands prep-room and Kent Chan’s upcoming Seni exhibition, along with reflections where relevant. It might make more sense to consider this a visual diary of my experience at NUS Museum. 

Aura photographs of the Southern Islands, Video, 39 seconds (LINK TO: https://youtu.be/H9p-oF_ldbw)
Comprised of aerial photographs by the British Royal Air Force, taken between 1940 to 1970s, from a collection held by the National Archives of Singapore. These photographs were originally monochromatic, so I utilised an algorithm-based automatic colourising program to recolour the photographs, and then arranged them into a video sequence based on linear mathematic guidelines. 

What is an aura photograph? A photograph that is intended to capture one’s electromagnetic field or ‘energy’ - that is, to visualise one’s invisible characteristics.

Why were aerial photographs taken during the colonial era? Sight is information, information is power. 

In Aerial Photography and Colonial Discourse on the Agricultural Crisis in Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930–1945, David Biggs writes,

“In response to [the 1930 global economic crisis], French civil servants, agricultural engineers, and social scientists spent much of the 1930s formulating new approaches to the agricultural crisis in Cochin China. Of all the tools used in their analyses, none were more effective in shaping public opin- ions and proposed solutions than aerial photography. In particular, aerial photographs comparing the abandoned terrain in the Mekong Delta to densely parceled landscapes in the Red River delta were very effective in shaping colonial policies. […] Besides the catalyzing effect that this new “view over the village hedge” offered in an era of populist and reformist support for family farming, aerial photographs also were instrumental in hardening late colonial perceptions of traditional agriculture and the Tonkinese peasant in colonial research. (p. 109-110)”

What kind of view is the view from above? The perpendicular gaze is ostensibly objective, authoritative and (literally and figuratively) unclouded. It enables the drawing of maps, borders, and plans. It has a motive.

How does a computer program perceive and interpret an aerial photograph? Where does it draw borders? Can it even tell the difference between land and sea? (obviously not)

Composite photograph of the Southern Islands
Comprised of aerial photographs by the British Royal Air Force, taken between 1940 to 1970s, from a collection held by the National Archives of Singapore. All the aerial photographs I came across promised a panoptic perspective of the Southern Islands. I wanted to see if I could push the medium to create the most generalised view of the area. 

Note: I’m not sitting on this box of valuable books, just hovering over them. This was the most photogenic spot in the resource library, where I spent most of my time.

This is more or less what my desk looked like the whole time I was working here. Included are notes/brainstorming sessions for various programmes, doodles, stationery and other ephemera. I had a really hard time packing things up on the last day of internship. My virtual desktop was no better.

Family portrait, tracing paper, coloured pencil, watercolour, black printer ink. Courtesy of Asia Research Institute and the villagers from St. John’s and Lazarus Island. 

After doing some preliminary research in preparation for Seni, I grew interested in the idea of a ‘tropical aesthetic’ - or, more specifically, biological and natural forms. The way fungi and bacterial cultures grow; moss under a microscope. You also have more geometric forms - honeycombs, romanesco broccoli. 

Photographic prints decay over time, especially in our humidity. Kept in a careless stack, a glossy print will melt and become stuck to the back of the one before it. The image peels off, leaving a blank spot that we might consider a loss of information. The effect of time on the process of recollection works in a similar fashion, obscuring and accentuating portions of our memory, and completely rewriting others.

Working with the ex-inhabitants of the Southern Islands really gave me an opportunity to understand this phenomenon firsthand, and it was a challenge for me to see how I could appropriately express their longing for a place that only exists in memories and relationships. I’d like to thank NUS Museum and my supervisor, Siddharta Perez, for giving me the opportunity to explore and express myself creatively during my time here. This internship has motivated me to grow both as an academic and an artist, and I’m altogether happy to have been able to work with them.

References

British Royal Air Force (1951). PART OF A SERIES OF AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHS FROM EAST TO WEST SHOWING: ST JOHN'S ISLAND AND LAZARUS ISLAND [Photograph found in Aerial photographs by the British Royal Air Force between 1940 to 1970s, National Archives of Singapore, Singapore].

Biggs, D. (2011). Aerial photography and colonial discourse on the agricultural crisis in late-colonial Indochina, 1930–1945. Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and Their Environmental Legacies, 12.