The collector Vignesh Sundaresan today unveiled a new project space, Padimai Art & Tech Studio, located in Singapore’s Tanjong Pagar Distripark area. Sundaresan, who also goes by Metakovan, is best known for his 2021 purchase of Beeple’s nonfungible token (NFT) work Everydays: The First 5000 Days for $69.3 million, which helped to make NFTs mainstream within the art market.
Sundaresan, who is based in Singapore, says Padimai is a heritage, contemporary art and research institution “dedicated to the question of how technology can function as cultural infrastructure. That means examining how digital works are created, how they survive, how they circulate, and how they shape collective memory.” It is, he continues, “meant to play a complementary, not competitive, role within Singapore’s cultural landscape”.
Tanjong Pagar Distripark is already home to the state-backed contemporary art institution Singapore Art Museum and several commercial galleries. Sundaresan envisions his venue supporting projects that “don’t fit neatly into gallery timelines or commercial expectations, supporting artists to work with technologists, archivists, coders and designers in ways that allow the work to evolve organically rather than being rushed toward display,” and also exploring the preservation of digital works. “Experimentation at Padimai is not about spectacle; it’s about process,” he continues.
The space opens with an Olafur Eliasson exhibition, Your view matter—an adaptation of a virtual reality work the Norwegian-Danish artist made in 2022. It will involve visitors moving through six digital installations which respond to their movement—with each person’s experience recorded and stored on a blockchain-based system devised by Sundaresan. The project “emerged from a shared interest in how technology can deepen, rather than distract from, the experience of perception,” the collector says. It “resonates strongly with Padimai’s ethos because it treats technology as a philosophical tool,” he adds. “The work explores how we orient ourselves in the world, using virtual reality not simply for an immersive encounter, but for examining how we orient ourselves in digital and physical space, how perception shapes experience and how memory is formed.”
An interior view of Padimai Art & Tech Studio
Courtesy of Padimai Art and Tech Studio
Sundaresan hopes Padimai will foster more such collaboration between art and technology, helping to push the boundaries of digital art. “Rather than focusing on novelty or market trends, we are interested in projects that operate at the intersection of embodiment, memory and digital infrastructure,” he says.
Sundaresan says his own collection will inform but not dominate the space. “The Beeple acquisition is part of the story that brought me here, but it is not the programme. If anything, it serves as a historical marker, a reminder of the moment when the art world confronted the idea of digital ownership at scale.”