In the Ether • Arts Science Museum
In the Ether — The Rise of Sanctuary Technologies is the ArtScience Museum's third science-and-technology festival, taking place from 3 October to 6 December 2026 across various levels of the lotus-shaped museum at Marina Bay Sands. Centered on the concept of “sanctuary technologies”—which explores how technology can enhance choice, autonomy, and collective wellbeing—the festival presents a hybrid of art installations, scientific research, workshops, films, and interactive experiences, rather than a traditional exhibition.
Concept and Curatorial Framework
The festival’s core theme is humanist and timely: in a world where AI systems increasingly influence decisions, attention, and creativity, “sanctuary technologies” explore how technology can be designed and used to safeguard agency rather than diminish it. The program is organized around three actions—Imagine, Investigate, Experiment—guiding visitors from questioning technological development paths, through research-driven projects examining societal impacts, to hands-on activities with open-source hardware and microchip design.
This approach positions the museum more as a laboratory for public learning than a repository of completed artworks, where oral histories from technologists, student prototypes, and open-source toolkits are displayed alongside gallery-ready installations.
Key Artworks and Installations
The festival extends across walkways, lobbies, and dedicated galleries, creating a “festival of festivals” atmosphere that feels more like a series of activations than a singular, tightly curated narrative. Notable works include:
Simon Weckert, Google Maps Hacks (2020) – A mixed-media piece where the artist creates a fake traffic jam on Google Maps by dragging a trolley of 99 smartphones through Berlin, highlighting how digital mapping systems can be manipulated and how they shape “reality” for millions.
Sputniko!, Drone In Search For A Four-Leaf Clover (2023) – A two-channel video where image-recognition software autonomously searches for lucky four-leaf clovers, exploring the implications of outsourcing play, curiosity, and serendipity to machines.
SERIAL CO_ (Jake Tan & Ernest Wu), BIOS: Living NFTs – Bonsai Specimens (2022) – Digital bonsai generated on-screen for each visitor based on parameters like leaf density and bark color, linked to blockchain-based “living NFTs.” The work contrasts the slow, cultivated life of a bonsai with the instant, immutable logic of digital tokens.
Google Creative Lab, Quick, Draw! – An interactive machine-learning game where visitors doodle and an AI guesses the drawing in real time, demystifying AI through play and making the technology accessible for all ages.
AI Create, The Dream Creator – A pink, touchscreen-driven installation that transforms text descriptions of dreams into AI-generated visuals, creating a constantly changing wall of images. It’s engaging but leans more toward Instagrammable spectacle than deep critique of authorship or homogenization.
Shavonne Wong, Meet Eva Here – An AI companion bot with whom visitors can type intimate messages; one observed interaction involved a stranger sharing their grief, creating a strangely human moment mediated by a machine in a public space.
The Ethereum Foundation’s To the Infinite Garden and Beyond adds an educational dimension: an information board with oral histories from key community members, marking one of the first times Ethereum’s history has been presented in a museum context in this form. It’s text-heavy and more archival than artistic, but valuable as living documentation of a rapidly evolving technological ecosystem.
Workshops, Talks, and Public Programs
A significant part of the festival’s value lies in its participatory programming. Recurring Make Your Own Chip workshops (on selected dates in November and December) invite participants with no engineering background to design a simple chip on a laptop, demystifying semiconductor design and emphasizing open-source hardware as a form of technological autonomy.
Additional workshops and talks explore open-source technologies, computational finance, and design-AI innovation, featuring voices from organizations such as Vesa (open-source microchips), Ethereum Singapore, NTU’s Centre for Computational Technologies for Finance, and SUTD’s DIVE program. These sessions reinforce the “Experiment” pillar: rather than passively consuming tech, visitors are encouraged to deconstruct, rebuild, and reimagine it.
Because the festival spans multiple levels and public corridors, the experience can feel scattered if approached as a traditional exhibition. Works appear in lobbies, near cafés, and along circulation paths, interspersed with activity stations and research displays. This design supports drop-in engagement and serendipitous discovery but requires a shift in mindset: consider your visit as a day of micro-experiences—watching a film, joining a workshop, lingering at a few installations—rather than a linear gallery walk.
For photography and social-media enthusiasts, there are plenty of visually striking moments (the pink Dream Creator wall, the glowing digital bonsai, interactive AI screens), though some pieces are more conceptual or text-driven and reward slower, more reflective engagement.
The festival’s breadth is both its strength and its weakness; it serves as a humanist counter-narrative to AI doomism, emphasizing autonomy, open-source culture, and public literacy over hype. The mix of artists, researchers, and technologists creates a genuinely interdisciplinary environment where a German media artist’s map hack can sit alongside a Singaporean student’s chip design and an Ethereum oral-history panel.
Where: ArtScience Museum, 6 Bayfront Avenue, Marina Bay Sands (Bayfront MRT)
When: 3 October – 6 December 2026, daily 9am–6pm (last entry 5pm)
Admission: Free for the festival’s installations and most public programs; some workshops may require registration.
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