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Night Festival at the Museum


In conjunction with the Singapore Arts Festival, our national museums have indeed gone ‘hip’, holding an event called the ‘Night Festival’ at the main National Museum, the Singapore Arts Museum, the Philatelic Musuem and the Peranakan Musuem.

On two consecutive weekends in July, (18 -19 July and 25-26 July), there were free admissions to the museums, and there was a raft of stunning and interesting arts displays all around the museum. The museums were also transformed into masterpieces of arts during the light installation event yesterday.

My girlfriend and I went to the National Museum on its open house yesterday. Our National Museum, unlike those in our countries, was not boring. Though there are fixed displays, there is always a roving exhibition at the basement of the museum.

The other time I went to the museum (read my post on 10 Feb 08), the roving exhibition was on Greek exhibitions, this time around, it was on electrical arts.

We gamely don the head set in an exhibit at the roving exhibition, which captured the brainwaves emanating from two persons and project the waves as a series of tones and pictures on a projector screen. It was our first time using our brain waves to form images and sound. The officer in-charge explained to us that if both minds are in sync with each other, the picture formed would be tranquil and the tone emanating from the machine would be of a smooth and uniform pitch. Initially, it was quite hard to get our minds in sync as both of our minds were drifting in different thoughts. It was not as easy as it sound here in my writing, but eventually we managed to synchronise our thoughts on one common item and we have a nice image and sound flowing for few minutes!

Kudos to the organizers of the night festival at the main museum for organizing fringe events around the museum too. I cannot describe in details here all the interesting happenings occurring in and around the museum yesterday: there was an open screening of movies, exhibits by ‘Reform’ where two interesting Caucasians dressed up as traffic policemen ‘arresting’ people who have jay-walked or littered and led them through a reform via the singing of interesting pledge and on the correct use of the pedestrian crossing.

The game stalls featured games of the yesteryears, and it drew throngs of crowds. We gamely tried the ‘bola’ game and had whale of a time, knocking down tins with balls, chasing the balls, etc….it was like a return back to childhood time.

There was a stall offering for free caricatures for interested Singaporeans and the queue for such free caricatures was without a doubt very long; the crowd for the stall could be better managed as there were some queue jumpers.

Overall, it has been an exciting and interesting night! I encourage Singaporeans to visit such places of interests (if hampered by the high admission charges, could visit them on their open houses) as they definitely offer something different from the maddening rows of shopping centres omnipresent in our little island.

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