This is the 

portfolio

of Jing Yi Teo,

curator,

writer,
strategist,

producer.



↓



I am a practitioner of interdisciplinary, critical and horizontal approaches towards technology and creative practices.
I believe the most valuable insight and innovation require the dissolving of siloes.

Scrollto learn about how I have transformed organizations and practices through strategy, curation, editorial and more.
Mentorship
⌖ My curatorial approach bridging the theoretical and the applied has nurtured a vast network and reputation amongst artists and creatives around the world. As an independent curator and through affliated organizations as well as through communities like NEW INC and Kernel (Gitcoin), I’ve mentored numerous artists, founders and technologists. 

With artists, my focus is on creating space for them to understand their body of work beyond the conventional circuits of the market, through a relentless belief that good art is art that pays attention to format. Technologists and founders turn to me for advice from macro-perspectives on creative technology like the future of digital collectibles to micro-strategies in communication and fundraising.

I’m fortunate to have worked with many brilliant minds including: 
Rosana Antoli
Christiane Peschek
Lawrence Lek
Parker Heyl
Irem Buğdaycı
Eriko Takeno

In their words:

⌜ I would like to make a transition to gallery work, and these exercises are great for focusing my ideas and intentions. ⌟- Parker Heyl

⌜ Jing has a sharp mind and a critical voice. She has a vast knowledge of contemporary art and new technologies, and a curious and open mind. It is just what I needed for my studio. Jing is collaborating with me for the next months as an advisor, contextualizing and relating my artistic practice with fresh ideas and readings, and offering a continuous dialogue and exchange to push forward the limits of my work. ⌟ - Rosana Antoli


Istanbul - Global

ARTBIZTECH 2020-present

As Co-Initiator, I led: Brand & Strategy Transformation
Creative Direction
Operations
Curatorial
Programming & Content
Workshops
Investor Relations
⌖ In April 2020, I was appointed Co-Initiator of ARTBIZTECH with the task of internationalizing and transforming the company from its locally-based services as a Design Thinking agency operating out of Istanbul, TR.
Diverging from the limited scope of Design Thinking as basis of the company’s main operations, I envisioned a return to its namesake: catalyzing innovation through collaborations with emerging artists. This vision was incorporated in two folds:

⌖ 1 ⌖ Remodeling the consultancy into an expanded Innovation + Strategy consulting scope that focuses on new, creative perspectives to address contemporary challenges.
⌖ 2 ⌖ Establishing a creative and cultural incubator to materialize artistic concepts into products and models.


Istanbul - Global

Transforming the Consultancy

⌖ Shifting from Design Thinking methodology, I led the reformulation of a consultancy framework that relied on critical thinking + listening, original use of language, and exposure to new concepts in engaging with teams and leaders on pressing issues and trends. The aim of the consultancy was now to inculcate the ability to learn from unexpected sources, and ask better questions. TL;DR —
✗ OUT: art-washing, faux ‘creativity trainings’, sticky-note fetishism, buzzwords, standardized solutions.
✓ IN: tangible involvement of creatives, genuine exchange,  interdisciplinary research,  lateral thinking.

⌖ Workshops ⌖
I developed and programmed ‘Circuits’: workshops centred on artistic research intersecting timely, technology-related topics. These workshops ranged in topics from open finance to smart cities and digital gestures. 

These workshops were held at conferences and as a core aspect of consulting engagements with corporate teams, reaching hundreds of participants as a unique platform for artistic perspectives to penetrate the realms of business and tech.


⌖ Newsletter Capsules ⌖
How to share interdisciplinary explorations in engaging, async formats?

A personal favorite, the format of the newsletter seires was remarkably well-received: they read and felt different from the usual promotional or news-led weeklies. Readers loved that it felt like they had a peek into the minds of contemporary artists; how they think, research and imagine.

Each series was designed and written in close collaboration with the invited artist. Through the humble format of the email, we shared a multi-species screenplay, an archival exploration, a speculative life cycle of a digital plant, and more.
Establishing the Incubator
Incubated projects include: an AI-powered VR wellness app, a hand-tracking NFT prototype, and a decentralised welfare network.



⌖ Energized by ideas and synergies emerging from the consultancy while seeking longer-term impact, I built the ARTBZITECH Incubator to support the most creative and sensitive use of technology. I led my team in developing an incubation program for first-time founders, and grew a network of investors who saw that investing in these unconventional but insightful projects would empower the creative industry to become next-generation leaders through entrepreneurship. 

Pioneering the cultural and creative incubator, we covered the fields of web3, AI, VR, gaming, and more — bridging concepts and theories with application and form. It’s some of the most fulfilling work I have ever done. 


Singapore - Global


Artist Development
⌖ I joined SO-FAR in November 2019 as Lead, Incubator Programme to onboard and promote artists between Southeast Asia and Europe + Turkey. While based in Istanbul, I helped expand SO-FAR’s network of artists and galleries, nurturing relationships through mentorship, writing and interviews.
Web3 Strategy⌖ From late-2020 until end of 2021, I advised SO-FAR on its transition strategy from its existing model as an online art gallery and publication towards its ambition as a web3 new media platform with a focus on NFTs and digital experiences. I consulted for the Founder/CEO on aspects from fundraising and investor relations to business plan, brand strategy and first hires. When SO-FAR launched anew, I focused my advisory on mindfully bridging the company’s stakes in web3 (investor expectations, NFT sales and community) with the more sensitive workings of the ‘trad’ art world and academia which SO-FAR had until then built its previous reputation on.
Editorial⌖ In addition to writing, editing and commissioning essays and interviews for the publication, I took on the role of Guest Editor alongside Yin Aiwen for PLATFORMS, a 5-chapter Issue investigating platform design and web architectures. Published in 2021-2022, the Issue unfolded through interdisciplinary dialogues and essays from contributors including K Allado-McDowell, Metahaven, Keiken, Markus Selg, Thiago Martins de Melo, Kathryn Lofton and more artists, theorists, writers and researchers.



Istanbul - Global

As Curator,⌖ I initiated a major shift in the organization’s open call program in 2020, its fourth year. Previously, the program revolved around an open call for Istanbul-based artists with a mentorship program culminating in an exhibition. When I joined bang. Prix as Curator, my focus was to shift the program from one that was exhibition-based to practice-oriented — to create space for deeper introspection into one’s practice, as well as wider fields of research and dialogue. Crucially, I redesigned the program to open its call not only to artists but a wider scope of practitioners at the intersection of art, technology and science.

bang. Prix is the non-profit arm of ARTBIZTECH, which was how I got to know and join the latter company in the following year.

Case Study: EDEN⌖ Christiane entered bang. Prix with an aim of furthering her research on future archeology: how and what future generations will discover about the ways we live today. Surveying past and present archeological methods, her work centers on the traces that will be left behind from an era in which a large part of human activities happen on touchscreens and increasingly, touchless gesture interfaces. 

Through the program, I worked with Christiane on researching introspectively (her practice until then, exhibitions that were and could-have-been, unfulfilled projects, ideas) as well as empirically and theoretically. The outcome was EDEN: a smartphone retreat that transposes the search for a perfect mind-body condition into an audio-visual journey to a conjectured net-based paradise as final destination. The accompanying book was originally published in English and has also been translated into Spanish.

EDEN has achieved critical acclaim, having shown in various formats at exhibitions, symposiums and programmes including NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, Kornhausforum Bern, Singapore Art Week, Symposion Lindabrunn and CIVA Festival for New Media. EDEN has formed a key inflection point in Christiane’s practice and career; its themes and approach continue to be the mainspring of numerous projects that follow.

⌖ From the press release:
⌜ EDEN was conceived as a smartphone retreat as a satire of the digitisation of the wellness industry and the peculiar fate of our age: locating spirituality in the smartphone. Not only do workout app users go about their daily routines with religious fervor, meditation apps and podcasts have proliferated in an extension of the sacralised human condition to the mental state as well. Can we memorialize an on-screen version of ourselves that also embodies our consciousness? ⌟



Image credit: Christiane Peschek. Spanish edition of EDEN published by SED Editorial.


⌖ More info & credits: link.
⌖ Press: Museum of Now (EN), SO-FAR (EN), ArtUnlimited (TR), Saltzberger Nachrichten (DE), Les Nouveaux Riches (DE)
Independent Curatorial Projects
Trembling in Every Direction
⌖ I curated a duo exhibition featuring works of Nina Kuttler and Natasha Tontey held at Sanatorium (Istanbul, TR) between March 18 – April 24, 2022. The exhibition explored the plurality of approaches towards technology through the non-human embodiment of knowledge in anthropocentric environments. Its title references the work of Édouard Glissant who proposed “tremblement”, or “trembling thinking” as an instinct to refuse categories imposed by imperial thought and systems of terror, by embracing the inextricability of ourselves from the world; a call to tremble along with it. With fiction as a method of speculative thinking at the core of both artists’ practices, the exhibition proposes a practice of approaching technologies based on artifacts, anecdotes and archives that entwine history with the fictive in various pathways of knowledge production.

⌖ From the Curator’s Note, ‘Art is Technology: When the Fascination Shivers’:
⌜ I am proposing to think of art not only at the intersection of technology — here, there is no spotlight on new media art practices often at the centre of “art x tech” initiatives — but art as a technology, the stick which we stick into the soil for ants to crawl up towards us, so that we may each be closer to one another. ⌟
⌖ Read the full essay: link.
⌖ Press release: EN / TR


Photos by Zeynep Fırat, Sanatorium
The Complex Relationship Between Two Simple Machines + Death, Infinity and Zero



Album art by Ruben Ramos Balsa

⌜ ‘Physics’ is not introduced as a conceptual overlay or metaphor here, but a counter-interpretation of improvised music as has been theorized, annexed and marketed as of the ‘jazz’ tradition. More fundamentally, improvisation is pursued as a study of interaction, technique, (dis)order, space and time. ⌟

⌖ Full essay: link.
⌖ Press release & credits: link.
⌖ Listen: Spotify | Apple
⌖ Released May 21, 2023.

⌖ In 2022, my practice expanded into a new field: avant-garde music. Working closely with the pianist and composer Armen Nalbandian, who by this point was devising what would follow his previous twenty albums, I stepped into the role of co-producer with the question: how to create music of the highest technical and conceptual calibre, but trapped neither by the dogma of tradition nor counter-tradition?

The first collaboration whose records I co-produced was between Armen, Dave King and Chris Speed. Omitting the bass in an atypical piano-drums-saxaphone/clarinet configuration, the ensemble creates a poetic and cinematic offering that rethinks the possibilities of the genre.

The two records were spontaneously composed. I contributed in aspects of conceptual development, writing, marketing, planning and strategy.





Album art by Jing Yi Teo

⌜ Presence is betrayed by its own articulation; as soon as ‘now’ is uttered it has already passed. Is the sound that reverberates the sound that dwells in the air, or in memory? If it’s not remembered, may it be forgotten over and over again. Before sound there was silence, but when the old man speaks — he mouths sounds, says things — but when he speaks, a word is born — 
farewell. ⌟

⌖ Press release & credits: link.
⌖ Listen: Spotify | Apple
⌖ Released December 8, 2023.
A Spontaneous Breaking of Symmetry
⌖ The second music collaboration that I co-produced was between Armen Nalbandian and Chris Corsano. It takes the form of a triptych, and draws from Andrei Tarkovsky’s concept of “sculpting in time” to frame spontaneous composition anew.

From the press release:
⌜ The piano-drums duo is re-sculpted here in sound, concept and structure, as Corsano’s polyrhythmic, kaleidoscopic delivery meets Nalbandian’s emotive touch and vividly inventive phrasing. Through cyclicality, continuity and fractality, the recording is a study of sound not as expression but as a system for unraveling time. ⌟
Part I and Part II was released in September 2023 and March 2024, respectively.

Part I (2023)
⌖ Press release & credits: link.
⌖ Listen: Spotify | Apple

Part II (2024)
⌖ Press release & credits: link.
⌖ Listen: Spotify | Apple

Part III (2024)
⌖ Press release & credits: link.
⌖ Listen: Spotify | Apple

HORIZONS⌖ For Singapore Art Week 2022, I produced a program commissioned by the National Arts Council, Singapore, a massive curatorial collaboration between SO-FAR, virtual wellness platform AORA and art consultancy Metis Art.

HORIZONS was a 24-hour journey through the possibilities of art, technology and business, traversing timezones throughout the world with a programme that included studio visits, virtural retreats, readings, audio-visual experiences, curator presentations, DJ sets and more.

The program featured a contributors list of leading artists, curators and thinkers including: Benedicta M Badia-Nordenstahl, Gerhard Marx, K Allado-McDowell, Shumon Basar, Lawrence Lek, Shiraz Bayjoo, Harm van den Dorpel, Fatoş Üstek, Barbara Pollack, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Edgar Calel and Jakob Kudsk Steensen.

⌖ Site archive & full program: link.

Image credit: AORA, SO-FAR
Research & Writing
⌖ My research and curatorial interests center on art as technology — an extension of the human. My interest in technology is in its epistemological affordances through beyond the ‘tech’ sector. I often return to the historically dichotomized nature of science and art, where science is taken to interpret events through conceptual generalizations while art makes images with which we experience the nature of things. I seek to distort such dichotomy: could we understand art as the production of conceptual events that interpret generalizations?


Current Research Topics
Art as Counter-ProtocolArt as Counter-Protocol positions to delineate and disentangle the epistemologies that form our bilateral understanding of art, emerging technologies (AI, blockchain), and the systems in which they are emplaced. I am interested in framing political, economic and technological systems from the perspective of protological control, and how art exemplifies resistance against the very protocols they employ. Drawing from the work of scholars like Alexander Galloway and McKenzie Wark, I engage with the “counter-protocol” as a framework for curating artistic modes of production: the simultaneous refusal and employment of protocological modulation. How do composers utilize self-or pre-constructed rules and structures in strategies to introduce new distributions of agencies?
You Are the Clock
You Are the Clock is a web of research that warps and haunts itself in varying recurring formats seeking to dislocate the practice of spontaneous composition from its inherited conceptions of creating in "the now." The project explores spontaneous composition as a generative practice that prototypes new time-based frameworks of collaboration, information, and memory. Where performing a piece of music is the writing of it, information materializes as it is processed as well as forgotten. What is required to create something from virtually nothing, in real-time, and with an other? Presented as an essay-performance in iteration, You Are the Clock unfolds through text, sound and ambience as interfaces for discovering the plasticities of time. There is no making sense of sound, only the making of sound.
Written and produced by Jing Yi Teo and Armen Nalbandian.
Project documentation  Link.
Previously presented at Studio Wasabi (Tokyo, JP) and most recently at Gekkasha Harisyobo 月花舎・ハリ書房 (Tokyo, JP) Link.
The Image is the TechnologyI am interested in the perceptual paradox and affordances of the black hole photographs as a basis for a post-photographic grasping of AI-generated images. I began writing about this in 2019 when the first photograph of a black hole was published, tracing the genealogy of iconic ‘emplacing’ images such as NASA’s ‘Earthrise.’ Borrowing Flusser’s framework for photography whereby all images are as generative as they are analog, I propose that we would be better equipped to understand the current paradigm shift in our media ecology by locating the technology not only in the software but also in the image. 


Essays
2024The Image is the Technology
⌜ In phenomenon and in composition, ‘Earthrise’ and the EHT photograph are polar opposites. One is the all-encompassing image of the world we live in, a convex mirror in which all that we know is contained; the other a picture of unknown, dense and infinite, a portrait of a space and time that even when imaged remains unimaginable.  ⌟
2023Spontaneous Group Composition and Distributed Governance
⌜ Where all ideas are possible we quickly pass through multiverses of possibility; nothing is fixed and every moment is a moving part, always open to chart another course based on the whim or inclination of an individual, yet it requires the collective body to allow these inclinations to manifest, for an idea to be enhanced in synchrony at times and also at times where lines, rhythms or timbres form separately. ⌟

(co-written w/ Armen Nalbandian)
2023The Complex Relationship Between Two Simple Machines⌜ ‘Physics’ is not introduced as a conceptual overlay or metaphor here, but a counter-interpretation of improvised music as has been theorized, annexed and marketed as of the ‘jazz’ tradition. More fundamentally, improvisation is pursued as a study of interaction, technique, (dis)order, space and time. ⌟
2022The Dust of AI⌜ The very act of articulation overcomes the cartesian split: meaning and matter are enchained, a point I recall the philosopher Michael Marder made in a presentation he gave in 2020. Marder was reflecting on dust as a gateway to understanding the correlation between words and worlds... ⌟
2022Art is Technology: When the Fascination Shivers⌜ Fascination is always tinged with an aspect of incomprehensibility, the throbbing swell of an unknown substance. Even though the metaverse, blockchain, social media and AI come to mind when most of us think of technology today, the largest and deepest technological investments are still deployed for military purposes. Uncovering — and even undoing — the crypticness that beholds most of the infrastructure and tools that are held in godly regard could perhaps rewire the sorts of knowledge and literacy we have about and around technology, if we were to inch closer to seeing it as something to be understood at all. ⌟
2021What’s in a Platform?⌜ I wanted to seek out the specific language of different platforms — their intimacies, fun, materialities and ephemeralities — beyond overarching strokes of opposing theories such as the attention economy and surveillance capitalism, of course, without forgetting or diminishing the weight of those criticisms. ⌟
2021The Distance Between Smoke and Fire⌜ The image of fire may conjure the sound of explosions or wood crackling, but combustion reactions do not inherently produce sound. The exhibition’s discernible silence is felt less in the void of sensorial stimulants — a redaction already paradigmatic of conceptual art — than in the way that visitors are exacted into speechlessness by the flush of mathematical equations, symbols and numerical indicators (dates and coordinates) upon stepping into the gallery. ⌟
2019Let’s Start From the End⌜ Even though I was immersed in what urbanists call a ‘ruinscape,’ I was glancing upon  a time-accented space. It is easy to think of an event such as the establishment — and the subsequent desertion — of an industrial site as an anthropogenic one. But standing in the quarries of the past, the spectacle felt less like ‘some people were here’ and more like ‘ the world was here.’  ⌟

Interviews
2022A Thousand Forms of Lifew/ Thiago Martins de Melo and Germano Dushà
2022Traversing the Conspiracy Theory Spectrumw/ Nels Frye
2021How to Work Together?w/ INTER-MISSION and formAxioms
2021See(k)ing Southeast Asian Futurismw/ Syaheedah Iskandar
2021A User Guide to Negentropic Fieldsw/ INTER-MISSION, formAxions, Andreas Schlegel, Debbie Ding, Ong Kian Peng and Zai Tang
2020EDEN: The bang. Prix Diaryw/ Christiane Peschek
202021 Questions with Hothousew/ Hothouse
2020Nakamoto the Media Magnate and Art Collector?w/ Michael Mastrototaro
2020How Do You Crypto?w/ Christopher Fussner and Krister Olsson
2020Navigating Distance, Bodies and Spaces: The bang. Prix Diaryw/ Irem Buğdaycı

Currently,


My focus is on deepening and sharing my research while building Outlyr-e, a distributed strategy practice I founded (with Armen Nalbandian) to create the conditions for creative thought applied to organizations.

I am open to new projects, commissions and collaborations both as an independent and via Outlyr-e. I also welcome teaching, speaking and publishing opportunities, especially ones related to topics outlined in Research & Writing.

Write to me: office.jyteo [at] gmail.com
Follow: Substack | Instagram | Twitter
Based in Singapore + elsewhere.