Debbie Ding – 2017

Visiting Artist 2017

Debbie Ding is a visual artist and technologist working between London and Singapore. She reworks and reappropriates formal, qualitative approaches to collecting, labelling, organising, and interpreting assemblages of information – using this to open up possibilities for alternative constructions of knowledge.

Inquiries are sparked off by the unexpected discoveries and hidden labours of amateur explorers – whose voices are often concealed by the contemporary professionalisation of academic disciplines.

Prototyping is used as a conceptual strategy for artistic production, iteratively exploring potential breakthroughs and dead ends faced by amateur archaeologists, citizen social scientists, and machines (programmed to perform roles of cultural craftsmanship) in the pursuit of knowledge.
Works take the form of computer-aided investigations into archaeological and historical finds (such as the former island of Pulau Saigon, 19th century colonial shipwrecks), studies of changing features within urban geography, and informal approaches to collecting and mapping.