Singapore Psychogeographical Society

“Given the transparency of the programme (a national education museum using popular entertainment methods to aimed at educating the masses on issues of military and national defence and stirring patriotic singaporean sentiments), you would think that the architects would attempt to load some kind of symbolism onto the image of the building. But they would rather not, it seems. A prudent decision perhaps.”

From an essay I wrote some time back on the Capitol Theatre: The city, sociologist Rob Shields once argued, is always “a ‘crisis-object’ which destabilises our certainty of the real”. Indeed, cities are sites of constant change. Sanjay Krishnan, a literary scholar, remarked that in Singapore “scaffolding seems the only unchanging feature in a city [...]

“Fortunately, in the last twenty years, Singaporeans and their government have come to the realisation that cultural inheritance is not the only aspect of the island’s legacy.” Positive reinforcement at work? Some excerpts from a guidebook on gardens and parks in Singapore, written in 1992.

The odd way in which people speak of the Blue Hour as if it is a physical space and not a time of day.

Paul Ricoeur writes: “Whence the paradox: on the one hand, it has to root itself in the soil of its past, forge a national spirit, and unfurl this spirital and cultural vindication before the colonialist’s personality. But in order to take part in the modern civilization, it is necessary at the same time to take [...]

The sensation when you are in a moving vehicle and in a seperate vehicle you see a person who is travelling at the same or slightly faster/slower speed than you are so that your motions sort of slide and elide the distance travelled at the same time.