To celebrate the opening of Singapore’s newest experimental art-and-tech platform, ArtReview spotlights its first work to go on display: Your view matter (2022/2025) by Olafur Eliasson
Singapore’s new experimental art-and-tech platform, Padimai Art & Tech Studio, opens in November 2025 at Tanjong Pagar Distripark with a presentation of Your view matter (2022/2025) by the artist Olafur Eliasson. This self-described ‘artistic laboratory’ positions itself at the intersection of contemporary art, social practice and immersive technologies.
Padimai is the brainchild of collector and blockchain pioneer Vignesh Sundaresan (also known as Metakovan), whose interest in how decentralised systems might reshape artistic agency and archival infrastructures forms the foundations of the initiative. His venture with Padimai frames the studio as an independent site for residencies, commissions, exhibitions and tech-based practices. It is characterised by a decentralised ethos: art supported through blockchain-based archives, artist autonomy and experimental formats – rather than conventional institutional models.
Eliasson’s Your view matter is an ambitious VR environment commissioned by Sundaresan and produced in collaboration with the extended digital platform, Acute Art. The work invites participants to navigate six linked virtual ‘chambers’ based on five of the Platonic solids (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron) and a sphere. Each chamber is animated with moiré patterns – optical interferences triggered by participants’ movements – and accompanied by a minimalist soundtrack composed by Eliasson. The patterns only unfold by virtue of the viewer’s bodily presence and head-movement: meaning, the viewer becomes the activating agent of perception. Your view matter records each user’s trajectory and perspective; metadata is stored and archived via a blockchain-based system conceived by Sundaresan, which in turn locates the artwork within a broader experiment about data sovereignty and collective memory.
Eliasson’s involvement here sits squarely within the longer arc of his practice, which explores nature’s rhythms, cycles and elements via technology. It is one that ranges from immersive light installations such as the mesmerising The Weather Project, 2003, at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, and Symbiotic seeing, 2020, an artwork that features coloured lasers projected against fog, which swirls and reacts to visitors’ body heat and movement, to public interventions including Ice Watch, 2014, an installation of blocks of glacier ice that melted over time, and a VR work on New York’s High Line titled Wunderkammer, 2020. In recent years his interest in technological media, virtual and augmented reality, and digital archives has become increasingly foregrounded. Your view matter is part of that trajectory.
Within the context of Padimai’s launch, this first exhibition exemplifies how the studio aims to test the convergence of art and technology. The structure of Your view matter – seven VR head-sets each mounted within a four-metre diameter arena – permits visitors to move freely, and immersively, while the blockchain architecture allows the recorded journeys to be ‘played back and forwarded’, replicating and archiving subjective perceptual events in a decentralised network. In this sense, Padimai signals itself not just as a physical venue but as an infrastructure-builder: it proposes new systems for preserving artworks and audience interactions that sidestep traditional models of custodianship and gatekeeping.
Padimai’s presentation highlights three aspects of Your view matter that are especially significant. Firstly, the way the VR work foregrounds the viewer as co-producer of the phenomenon of perception, in line with Eliasson’s longstanding inquiry into how we see, and how space and light shape experience. Secondly, the tool-set of blockchain and VR technology becomes embedded into the framing of the exhibition itself – meaning that the technology does not sit beside the artwork but is woven into its logic. Thirdly, Padimai’s positioning in Singapore signals a site for globalised art-tech practice in Southeast Asia rather than reverting simply to Western-centric dynamics; moreover, the choice of an immersive digital work as the opening show speaks to how new platforms are experimenting with boundary-blurring formats.
For audiences and institutions alike the invitation Padimai offers is two-fold: to engage with Eliasson’s perceptual experiment and to consider how infrastructures – from VR rooms to blockchain archives – are part of the artwork’s ecology. At a time when many institutions are indeed piloting immersive and tech-led projects, Padimai places itself firmly in the vanguard of that move, with a clear ambition to explore how art, community and technology can reconfigure one another.
Your view matter will be on view at Padimai Art & Tech Studio, 20 November through end of March.
