Elmo Gonzaga

Abstract

The memory of loss in Asia's leading global cities has been shaped by recurrent projects of urban renewal, which have sought to deliver economic prosperity and social order at the expense of longstanding spaces and practices. Singapore's Golden Jubilee in 2015, which commemorated its triumphant postcolonial development, was accompanied by the proliferation of public expressions of nostalgia across a variety of media platforms. Amid the rise of the participatory culture of media convergence, this article examines how nostalgic longing is no longer necessarily articulated as an antagonistic critique of the precarious present of neoliberal capitalism, which withdraws into a timeless image of a congenial past. Departing from this conventional understanding of nostalgia in the scholarship of Singapore, it explores how the ruling government since independence has reconfigured its dissemination of historical and cultural knowledge to manage its transition from a global city defined by rapid growth to a smart nation reliant on perpetual adjustment by cultivating a form of citizenship centred on entrepreneurship and innovation. Through immersive spatialization, commissioned mobile video games oblige players to internalize the protocols of knowledge and agency of the Singapore Story, the official narrative of economic success and national progress. Two other state-run interactive digital platforms, the National Library's online archive the Singapore Memory Project and the National Museum's art installation The Story of the Forest, are designed to cultivate a new openness to the inevitability of iterations in urban informatics. Helping to assuage popular anxiety over the constancy of change and the failure of risk-taking, the latter frames perpetual adjustment as a vital component of the cosmic cyclicality of deep time, in which vanished realities are recreated with different permutations.

Keywords

Nostalgia, urban informatics, Singapore, archives, interactive art, video games

From: Cultural studies 2019 33 (1)

Editor: Wang Yi