Affective Technē: Art, Care and Creative Futures symposium

Event concluded
Date and time

15–17 Oct 2026

Location

Lecture Theatre, Block F Level 2 #F202
LASALLE’s McNally Campus

Registration
The event is open to all and free of charge. Registration is essential
Register now

Event concluded

Date and time

15–17 Oct 2026

Location

Lecture Theatre, Block F Level 2 #F202
LASALLE’s McNally Campus

Registration
The event is open to all and free of charge. Registration is essential
Register now

Event details

Affective Technē: Art, Care and Creative Futures is an international symposium bringing together artists, academics, students and members of the creative industries from across the Asia Pacific to examine the evolving intersections of art, technology and care.

As artificial intelligence (AI), automation and ecological precarity reshape our cultural and communal landscapes, this symposium asks how creative practices can foster new forms of affective intelligence, ethical engagement and sustainable making. Drawing on the concept of technē—the skilled, thoughtful craft of making and a root word for both technology and technique—participants will consider creative futures that are both technologically agile and grounded in care, empathy and ecological responsibility.

Hosted by LASALLE College of the Arts and RMIT University at LASALLE’s McNally Campus in Singapore, Affective Technē invites discourse and dialogue across art, design, education and technologies. Through a series of keynotes, panels, workshops, and field trips, this symposium aims to build transdisciplinary networks and shared practices that advance more caring, adaptive and forward-looking approaches to creativity and pedagogy. 
Download symposium programme, abstracts and bios

Please be advised that photography and video recording will take place throughout this conference. By attending, you consent to your likeness being captured and used by the organisers for archival, academic reports and promotional purposes. If you do not wish to be photographed, please inform the registration desk upon arrival to collect an opt-out sticker.

Symposium overview

Patricia Piccinini is an internationally renowned Australian artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, photography, video and installation.

Born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, she lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work explores relationships between bodies, technology and the natural world, often through hyperreal hybrid creatures that invite questions of care, empathy, evolution and responsibility.

Piccinini represented Australia at the 2003 Venice Biennale and has exhibited extensively internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Kinship at Suwon Museum of Art, South Korea (2026), Holding Tight and Letting Go at Ames Yavuz, London (2026) and Care at Museum MACAN, Jakarta (2024). She is Professor of Practice at RMIT University.

Jaya Jacobo is a trans feminist poet, theorist, scholar and dramaturg. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York through a Fulbright Scholarship and was Postdoctoral Fellow of the Global Grace: Gender and Cultures of Equality programme, supported by the United Kingdom Research Innovation at the Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and the Observatório de Favelas, where she began her work alongside Brazilian travestis and transsexual women in art, academe, and community work.

Currently a Professorial Lecturer of Literary and Cultural Studies at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, she previously taught Literature and Literary Theory at the Ateneo de Manila University, as well as Trans and Queer Studies at the University of the Philippines-Diliman.

As a dramaturg, she has collaborated with Filipina/x/o performers in the Philippines and the Philippine diaspora abroad and was Curator of Discourse at Sincerely Yours, The Philippines: Festival for Dance, Performance, and Karaoke at The Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt, Germany in 2025.

Her book Arasahas: Poems from the Tropics, translated by Christian Jil Benitez and published by PAWA and Paloma Presses in San Francisco, USA, was nominated as Best Book in Transgender Poetry at the 2025 Lambda Literary Awards.

Organised by LASALLE's Faculty of Fine Arts, Media & Creative Industries and RMIT University's School of Art
Organising committee

Prof Adam Knee, LASALLE College of the Arts | Co-convener
Assoc Prof Drew Pettifer, RMIT University | Co-convener

Assoc Prof Cissie Fu, LASALLE College of the Arts
Assoc Prof Jonathan Gander, LASALLE College of the Arts
Assoc Prof Wolfgang Muench, LASALLE College of the Arts
Administrative assistants Clarissa Tan | Symposium coordinator
Nurulain Haji Shaik Ali | Programme administration
Suzanne Lee | Programme administration
Poster design James Sargeant, RMIT University
Web design Ailin Chin, LASALLE College of the Arts
Technical support Division of Information and Communication Technology, LASALLE College of the Arts
Special thanks Prof Kit Wise, Dean, School of Art, RMIT University
Prof Venka Purushothaman, President, LASALLE College of the Arts
Yuen Yee Foong, Director, Division of Communications, LASALLE College of the Arts

Symposium schedule

Coffee and registration
2:00pm–2:30pm
Outside Lecture Theatre, Block F Level 2 #F202
Welcome and opening remarks
2:30pm–3:00pm
Lecture Theatre, Block F Level 2 #F202

 

Prof Venka Purushothaman, President, LASALLE College of the Arts
Prof Kit Wise, Dean, School of Art, RMIT University
Prof Kwok Kian Woon, Vice-Chancellor, University of the Arts Singapore

Panel 1
Introduction to art, care and creative futures
3:00pm–4:30pm

 

Chair: Prof Adam Knee | LASALLE College of the Arts

  • Emylia Safian | LASALLE College of the Arts
    Home is where we start from: Threads of an otherwise pedagogy
  • Assoc Prof Drew Pettifer | RMIT University
    Minoritarian Futures in the Age of AI
  • Adeline Kueh | LASALLE College of the Arts
    Making Home: Craft, Ritual and Practices of Care
Exhibition tour
Affective Technē: The Gentle Gravity Between Bodies
5:00pm–6:00pm
Brother Joseph McNally Gallery

 

Curated by Assoc Prof Cissie Fu | LASALLE College of the Arts

Tour Affective Technē: The Gentle Gravity Between Bodies with artists, curator and student annotations

Opening reception
6:00pm–7:00pm
The Strategy Room
Keynote 1
We are nurtured by breath
7:00pm–8:30pm
Lecture Theatre, Block F Level 2 #F202

 

Prof Patricia Piccinini | RMIT University
In conversation with Assoc Prof Cissie Fu | LASALLE College of the Arts

We are nurtured by breath sees Patricia Piccinini reflect on her practice shaped by questions of care, connection and our changing relationships with technology and the natural world. Through a selection of artworks spanning her career, she considers the strange and tender encounters that emerge between human, animal and imagined forms, and what they might tell us about empathy, responsibility and coexistence.

The presentation is followed by a conversation with Assoc Prof Cissie Fu, extending these ideas through dialogue around art, care and creative futures.

Coffee and registration
9:30am–10:00am
Outside Lecture Theatre, Block F Level 2 #F202
Keynote 2
THERE WERE MOMENTS OF GOLD: Precious Object, Metaphoric Truth, Beatitudinous Detriment
10:00am–11:15am
Lecture Theatre, Block F Level 2 #F202

 

Performance lecture by Dr Jaya Jacobo | Polytechnic University of the Philippines
Introduction by Assoc Prof Drew Pettifer | RMIT University

This excursus commits itself to a fundamental devotion, with adornment not as supplement to beauty but a metathesis of the beautiful particular to the procedures of the poetic. Hence, an archaeology of metaphor’s obsession with the preciosity of an object will be staged through passional reveries within tropical forms that will be exposed to adumbration from continental manoeuvres on the poematic, catastrophising technique to force thaumaturgic figurations to traverse wretchedness, beatitude, and the thresholds of a “formal feeling.”

Despite daydreams on filigree and joya and nacre and tesoro, a decolonial reckoning with the gender of the gem will be confronted when the precious object becomes the remainder of the colonial desire in the perfidious relay between matter, device, and the truth of their amorous relation… what is ultimately cherished in the Poem after all manner of devastation?

Break
11:15am–11:30am
Panel 2
Ecology, food and technē
11:30am–1:00pm
Lecture Theatre, Block F Level 2 #F202

 

Chair: Dr Anna Lovecchio

  • Dr Veronica Sau-wa Mak | Hong Kong Shue Yan University
    Rural Cosmopolitanism: Performing Heritage, Designing Futures
  • Dr Rebecca Najdowski | RMIT University
    Affect and Accountability: Seeing the Environmental Dimensions of Creative AI
  • Dr Francis Maravillas | LASALLE College of the Arts
    Anarchival Speculations and the Epistolary Form in the work of Chu Hao Pei
Lunch
1:00pm–2:00pm
The Strategy Room
Panel 3
Creative care
2:00pm–3:30pm
Lecture Theatre, Block F Level 2 #F202

 

Chair: Dr Pia Johnson | RMIT University

  • Ha Ninh Pham | RMIT University Vietnam
    Country X: Making a Place to Belong
  • Dr Man Lai Tin | Hong Kong Metropolitan University
    The Affective Technē of EEG Shan Shui
  • Zarina Muhammad | LASALLE College of the Arts
    Care as a Practice of Attention: Moving Earth, Crossing Water, Reading Signs
Break
3:30pm–4:00pm
Panel 4
Techniques and technologies: material futures
4:00pm–5:30pm
Lecture Theatre, Block F Level 2 #F202

 

Chair: Assoc Prof Wolfgang Muench | LASALLE College of the Arts

  • Asst Prof Kian Peng Ong | Nanyang Technological University
    Following the Grain: Generative AI as Material, Technique as Cosmology
  • Assoc Prof Peng Liu | Macau University of Science and Technology
    Speculative AR and Creative Pedagogy: Reimagining Ephemeral Graffiti and Street Art in Macau
  • Dr Indra Selvarajah | LASALLE College of the Arts
    Affective Resonance: Music, Embodiment and the Relational Work of Care
Coffee and registration
9:30am–10:00am
Outside Lecture Theatre, Block F Level 2 #F202
Workshop
Making Otherwise – Art, Care and Creative Futures
10:00am–12:00pm
Lecture Theatre, Block F Level 2 #F202

 

Facilitator: Assoc Prof Drew Pettifer | RMIT University

  • Honor Harger
    Beyond Computism: The Power of Embodied Artistic Experience
  • Janet Li, Canna Tang & Dr Wilson Yeung | Hong Kong Expressive Arts Therapy Service Center
    Creative Care and Affective Technē: Making Connection Through Art, Theatre and Technology
Lunch
12:00pm–1:00pm
The Strategy Room
Panel 5
Plenary panel
1:00pm–2:00pm
Lecture Theatre, Block F Level 2 #F202

 

Chair: Assoc Prof Cissie Fu | LASALLE College of the Arts
Prof Adam Knee | LASALLE College of the Arts
Dr Anna Lovecchio
Dr Pia Johnson | RMIT University
Assoc Prof Wolfgang Muench | LASALLE College of the Arts

Closing remarks
2:00pm–2:30pm
Lecture Theatre, Block F Level 2 #F202
Field trip
Optional museum field trip to Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage
2:30pm–6:00pm
Singapore Art Museum

 

Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage is the first monographic exhibition of the acclaimed artist presented by a Singapore museum. Taking its title from visual sensations that linger in a viewer’s field of vision, Afterimage highlights recurring concerns that run through Taniguchi’s practice, including repetition, time and labour.

See here for more information.

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