Opening with footage of an accident captured from a dashcam, Singapore-based artist Ho Rui An’s performance lecture DASH considers how the accident – or crisis – becomes legible within a risk-managed and financially-hedged era. While the dashcam was originally designed as a device that bears witness to the accidents that happen to the vehicle to which it is fitted, its proliferation in recent years has inadvertently yielded a contemporary index of the accident in the form of the vast accumulation of crash footage on the Internet.

In DASH, Ho takes the dashcam as a point of departure to consider the logic of ‘horizon scanning’ that underpins the foresight programmes of the Singapore government, which combine big data and scenario planning as tools for ‘surprise anticipation’. As a crucial node along the electronic circuits of global finance as well as the sweaty regional routes crossed by disenfranchised migrant labor, Singapore is considered here as a privileged site to attend to the disturbances or ‘weak signals’ that crop up on the horizon. From this limit-space where one can never know what might come at you, a fantastic speculative economy – populated by the likes of ‘black swans’ and ‘dragon kings’ – is produced to affirm some narratives while extinguishing others.

Following the performance-lecture, Ho will be in conversation with artist and writer Zach Blas.

Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. He writes, talks and thinks around images, with an interest in investigating their emergence, transmission and disappearance within contexts of globalism and governance. His recent research considers questions surrounding liberal hospitality, participatory democracy and speculative futures. He has presented projects at the 2nd Kochi-Muziris Biennale (Kochi), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Haus de Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Hessel Museum of Art and CCS Bard Galleries (Annandale-on-Hudson), NUS Museum (Singapore), Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center (Manila), Serpentine Galleries (London), NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Para Site (Hong Kong). He was Artist-in-Residence aboard the Tara Oceans Polar Circle Expedition in 2013 and at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2016. He is also the Singapore desk editor for ArtAsiaPacific and has contributed to numerous publications.

Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice confronts technologies of surveillance, security, and control with minoritarian politics. Currently, he is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Blas has exhibited and lectured internationally, recently at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; e-flux, New York; and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City. His current project Contra-Internet is supported by a 2016 Creative Capital award in Emerging Fields. Blas’s artist monograph Escaping the Face will be published by Sternberg Press and Rhizome. His work has been written about and featured in Artforum, Frieze, Art Papers, Mousse Magazine, and Art Review.