AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

from e-flux Agenda

September 20–December 20, 2026

Deadline to apply: August 15

Padimai Art & Tech Studio
39 Keppel, #03-02 Tanjong Pagar Distripark
089065 Singapore
https://padimai.net

Padimai Art & Tech Studio invites art practitioners to apply for a three-month residency that explores the intersection of contemporary art and blockchain technology. This residency encourages participants to critically and creatively engage with NFTs as both artistic registers, and as systems of knowledge, documentation and access.

Object-oriented programming is a structure for problem-solving, which creates a re-usable object that can give rise to multiple unique instances. Based on this programming framework, OOPS is set out as a playful site for the exploration of source ideas. This is a proposition to set departures from the four pillars within Object Oriented Programming Systems, as a tool kit to respond to possible meanings in expansive ways, and to seek interconnected relationships as patterns, stimulus or as code.

Key words: Inheritance, Polymorphism, Abstraction, Encapsulation.

Object
The “object” here is central to the structure. It is around this object that OOPS builds its web of relationships. The residency looks to explore the duality in the process of shaping this object. Do ideas expand from the object? Or is it the object that the process leads to? The object could be the beginning to the process or the decisive articulation that can emerge at the end of the process. A set of selected such objects could be identified as NFTs.

Origin Of Primary Source
In reimagining the acronym of OOPS within the context of mapping artistic processes, this residency hopes to identify and showcase source references. It is an invitation to practitioners of technological processes to recognize, shape, translate and perhaps present their references, as a web of prompts arranged around the “object”. These sources can be responses to the presented prompts or further expansions on developing early ideas or present preoccupations. The residency is also interested in how blockchain-based systems can trace creative lineages, including interactions with AI tools, while maintaining visibility of human authorship, intent and contribution.

Padimai’s blockchain infrastructure
Padimai has designed this online international residency as an experimental site for working with blockchain. It aims to foster a network of creative practitioners who come together to critically think about their own modes of working and creating. The residency aspires to archive creative knowledge production.

It proposes to be experimental, playful, discursive and above all to encourage collaborative learning amongst people of diverse ways of thinking. The design of the residency looks to transcend boundaries of disciplines and definitive compartmentalisations, moving towards meaning that emerges from acknowledging interconnectedness.

It invites practitioners to examine, lay bare, and record their modes of working and their creative process; from the events leading up to the germination of an idea, to the manifestation of the artwork. It is also an opportunity to get acquainted with the processes of others, as a way for dialogic contemplation. It can perhaps be a way to create collaborative and shared databases of being, thinking, creating, producing, and communicating.

Padimai recognizes the blockchain as a complex archival tool. It has designed an architecture that acts as an infrastructure to support creative practitioners. It allows them to collate and process source materials locally, store digital artworks, establish provenance and further build their own community for knowledge sharing. The residency looks to support proposals to further imagine the possibilities for this infrastructure, through creative engagement.

Selected artists would work within OOPS as a conceptual framework that primarily touches upon:

–Exploring the role of technology in shaping artistic production as an emotional, experiential, and intellectual expression.
–Investigating blockchain as a tool for documentation and archival practice.
–Translating inspirations, references, and source materials involved in art-making into digital formats.
–Developing individual methodologies and structures for organizing and documenting creative data.
–Expanding how datasets can enable new ways of accessing, interpreting, and experiencing artworks.
–Examining the reciprocal relationship between art and technology, and the possibilities it generates.

At the end of the three-month residency, participants would deliver three NFTs developed during the duration of the residency to Padimai.

We invite proposals from:
–Creative practitioners interested in exploring the intersection of art, technology and blockchain.
–Individuals with prior experience in any of the above fields.
–Individuals who have the rigor to expand the boundaries of NFTs and blockchain technology.
–Those who want to engage in sharing working process, methodologies, and acquired knowledge, contributing to the digital commons.

Residency details
Five practitioners will be selected for the first edition of the residency. It is a remote residency with community engagement designed through online meetings. Each individual will receive an honorarium of SGD 15,000. An additional SGD 5,000 for documentation purposes including audio, video and photography.

Application deadline: August 15, 2026 / Announcement of selected proposals: September 15, 2026 / Residency period: September 20–December 20, 2026. To apply, visit here.

About Padimai Art & Tech Studio
Padimai is an artistic laboratory that enables the registry of ambiguous encounters that is propelled by ideas and artistic practices. Located within the intersection of art and technology, the Studio initiates mediation between artists, thinkers and technologists. The Studio’s expertise facilitates a networked independent digital infrastructure in response to the spectrum of artistic synapses that can be experienced as reflective contemplations through the digital landscape. Exploring blockchain technology through digital inscriptions and Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs), the Studio examines the relationship between art, artistic research, emerging technology and digital archiving. Padimai currently occupies a physical warehouse space in the TPD Building in Singapore. It is currently a site for the engagement of digital experiences physically. Its Founder-Director, Vignesh Sundaresan (Metakovan), oversees the multifaceted digital infrastructure, shaping new ground for the experimental happenings of digital art production.