When: 7 to 9 October 2026
Where: Aboard OceanXplorer, Singapore

Ten works by students of NTU’s School of Art, Design and Media, selected from twenty-nine student artists, will be presented at the OceanX Summit as part of the OceanX education programme. The Summit is held aboard OceanXplorer in Singapore from 7 to 9 October 2026, under the theme New Frontiers. A New Future for the Ocean.

Liquid Commons Bringing Ocean Science to Media Architecture, was conceived together with OceanX Education and Dalio Philanthropies the curatorial team of the City Digital Skin Art Festival, and developed at ADM across two courses that treat artificial intelligence as a creative and critical medium rather than a shortcut: DM2012 Explorations in AI-Generated Art and AP7055 Art in the Age of the Creative Machine.

The students were asked to work not as illustrators of science but as artists translating it. Rather than explaining data or depicting the sea as it appears, each work reaches towards how the ocean might feel, move, hold time, or exist beyond human perception, engaging with flow, emergence, scale, invisibility and uncertainty. Ocean science entered the studio as material for the imagination: environmental DNA, deep-sea ecologies, the daily life of a research vessel, and the submersibles and instruments that extend human perception into the deep, drawn in part from the exploration work of OceanX.

Four works anchor the presentation. GO! PLASTIC by Jian Wei Hoe stages coral’s genetic plasticity as a laboratory stress test, asking whether adaptation can be treated as an infinite buffer. MICROSCOPHONY by Jiin Ko reads OceanX microscope imagery of deep-sea microbes as a graphic score, making an inaudible depth briefly audible. Museum of the Last Sea by Cheerie Tan Yu Yan imagines the ocean catalogued and preserved, and no longer alive. Saccade Aphotic by Shahma Abdulla sets deep-sea environments against rigid computational processing, materialising the blind spots of digital observation.

The project also runs through Connecting Classes, an international teaching exchange initiated by Susa Pop of Public Art Lab Berlin, linking ADM with Universität der Künste Berlin. Its second session brought ADM students together with a parallel course at UdK led by the journalist and nature writer Michaela Vieser, with students presenting work in progress across the two studios.

The works were composed for large public screens, and their public life continues through the City Digital Skin Art Festival, an international media art competition and showcase presenting work on urban screens across Asia and Europe.

Selected works

The top four will be showcased at large scale on the trifold screen, a gift of Dalio Philanthropies.

• GO! PLASTIC, Jian Wei Hoe
• MICROSCOPHONY, Jiin Ko
• Museum of the Last Sea, Cheerie Tan Yu Yan
• Saccade Aphotic, Shahma Abdulla
  
  Works in selection
• Traces of Life, Giselle Baey Sin Ee
• Currents, Julia Ann Ehlert Nair
• OUTPACED, Michaela Tothova
• Amnestic Archive, Chun Ying Chuah
• Texture of Fragility, Noah Metzger
• FISHMAN, Xinyue Chen
• Sonar, Madison Pang

When: 7 to 9 October 2026
Where: Aboard OceanXplorer, Singapore

Trailer vimeo https://vimeo.com/1216585186?share=copy