Olafur Eliasson: Your view matter

Opening in November at Singapore’s Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Padimai Art & Tech Studio inaugurates its programme with Your view matter, a virtual-reality artwork by Olafur Eliasson, commissioned by the Studio’s founder, Vignesh Sundaresan. Conceived as an experimental platform for exploring the intersections of art, technology, and social practice, the Studio marks a new chapter in Singapore’s cultural landscape.

Founded by blockchain architect and art collector Vignesh Sundaresan (Metakovan), Padimai Art & Tech Studio proposes technology as a cultural infrastructure—an open system through which artistic experience, memory, and authorship can circulate freely, outside the constraints of centralised control. In Tamil, Padimai suggests an “image,” “form,” or “metaphor”: a reflection of how the Studio envisions its role as both a physical site and an evolving conceptual framework for artists, technologists, and thinkers to experiment collectively on the terrain of art and code. 

In Your view matter, Eliasson extends his long-standing exploration of perception, movement, and the embodied act of seeing into the immaterial realm of virtual reality. Visitors are invited to move through six digital architectures where animated moiré patterns pulse in response to bodily motion. The work situates perception as a relational act, a choreography between body, machine, and geometry. 

Each iteration is singular. Every visitor’s passage through the work generates a unique data file that records their trajectory and visual perspective. These encounters are then preserved in a blockchain-based archive conceived by Sundaresan: a decentralised, physically stored system that maintains the exact digital state of the artwork and can “play back and play forward” each recorded journey. 

Eliasson describes the work as “an invitation to physically grasp how technologies intertwine with our capacity to see and to co-produce what we see—a process of unlearning and relearning how vision works.” Through this interplay of perception and code, Your view matter reflects on the ethics of seeing, storing, and remembering in the digital age. What is archived when an experience occurs in virtual space? How can technological systems register the nuances of human presence without subsuming them to data extraction? 

For Sundaresan, Padimai Art & Tech Studio continues a trajectory of inquiry that began with his deep engagement with blockchain technology and its cultural implications. Since his 2021 purchase of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days, Sundaresan has turned his attention to how technologies can support creative sovereignty, rather than speculation. 

“Your view matter is both a virtual experience and a continuously expanding digital archive,” notes Sundaresan. “It is an evolving record of human perception and participation held within a decentralised network of collective memory. At Padimai, we see technology not as a mechanism of control, but as a framework for autonomy, memory, and imagination, a means for artists and communities to hold, share, and preserve their work on their own terms.” 

This commitment shapes Padimai’s mission. The Studio operates as a hybrid space for residencies, commissions, and exhibitions that trace the shifting relationship between art and technology, where Sundaresan's digital art archive functions as a simulacra, capable of preserving, replaying, and reimagining the total conditions of artistic encounters. In this sense, Padimai gestures toward a future in which archives are not static repositories, but living, participatory systems. 

Padimai Art & Tech Studio opens at a moment when questions of digital sovereignty, technological ethics, and collective authorship have become central to artistic discourse. Located at Singapore’s Tanjong Pagar Distripark, a site that has emerged as a nexus for contemporary art in Southeast Asia, the Studio seeks to position the region as a critical locus for imagining how art and technology might evolve together. 

Through its inaugural exhibition, visitors are invited to inhabit the thresholds between body and data, perception, code and memory. Padimai Art & Tech Studio proposes a space for future imaginaries, a reconfiguration of both exhibition and archive: from spaces of containment to systems of circulation and co-creation.