Located on the grounds of the Asian Civilisations Museum and facing the centuries-old Singapore River, this art bench forges a spatio-temporal relationship between the antique furniture displayed in the former, and the sampans (small wooden boats) which used to ply on the latter.

The design was generated with an artificial intelligence (AI) model specially developed by the artist at the Artificial-Architecture laboratory based in the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). Trained with imagery of furniture and sampans from Singapore’s National Collection, it was later handmade and assembled by artisans working with upcycled wood.

The art bench can be considered part-furniture, part-sculpture and even part-landmark that fuses the characteristics of heritage furniture and sampans in Asia. A kind of urban artefact created from the synthesis of AI, human creativity and craftsmanship — benchmarking the space between artificial computation and artisanal community for placemaking in the Civic District.

Re-Store / Neural Artefact Black was produced in partnership with Ipse Ipsa Ipsum.