Korakrit Arunanondchai’s A Machine Boosting Energy into the Universe explores the togetherness of human, machine, and spirit in 21st century Bangkok, a city where animistic energies and advanced technologies co-exist in everyday life. The exhibition centres around the artist’s iconic large-scale video installation, Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 (2015–16) from the Singapore Art Museum collection. Visitors will enter an environment resembling a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with used electronics, auto parts, mannequins and clothing refashioned into cyborgian figures. A Naga sculpture—an assemblage of electronic waste, discarded clothing, and artificial plants—snakes through the exhibition space, connecting the human, creaturely, and digital worlds. Korakrit invites us to be together, not only among humans, but also in communion with machines and ghosts.

The exhibition kickstarts a long-term curatorial agenda titled, Material Intelligence, comprising exhibitions and digital programmes. It explores how artists today connect longstanding modes of making associated with craft and industry, to speculations about our ecological and technological futures. This inaugural presentation is part of the first investigation cycle of Material Intelligence: Waste to Energy.