tocsin
naomi b. cook
Venue: INSTINC Space, 39 Keppel Rd, #03-10 Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore 089065
Exhibition Duration: 18 December to 21 December 2025 | Wed-Fri, 1PM-7PM. Sat - Sun, 1PM-6PM
Opening Reception: 17 December 2025 (Wed.), 5:30PM–8:30PM | RSVP
Artist Talk: 20 December 2025 (Sat), 3-4PM | RSVP
brief
"Tocsin," conceptualized by artist Naomi B. Cook, is an interactive installation and innovative online karaoke machine that explores how emerging technologies shape our experiences and identities. Cook critically examines the "information reorganization revolution" through research into the Enron Corpus, the LAION dataset, and modern image-tagging practices.
The title Tocsin draws inspiration from city warning sirens, referencing France's SAIP (Système d'Alerte et d'Information aux Populations) and Singapore's SIGNAL program, known as "Voice of the Battlefield." The show—like the work bearing the same title—serves as a clarion call, urging viewers to reflect on the invisible forces and narratives shaping our digital world.-
The show is built around the installation "Homeroom," consisting of data-visualizing works taking the form of a classroom, including a desk, a chalkboard, a globe, a library, and an apple. A pennant creates the stage for the "Tocsin" karaoke machine. This work features a cast of luminary musicians, Gambletron, Blake Hargreaves, Tim Kingsbury, and Andy White, who contributed to a dynamic database of songs and is complemented by a stochastic lyrics generator. The words come from the Enron Corpus—valued as one of the few public archives of real emails leaked online by a disgruntled lobbyist and used to train technologies like Siri and spam filters—which underpins the project's research. The visuals draw from the LAION dataset, a massive dataset of images used to train AI image-generation models. Image-tagging practices inform the project's exploration of data-driven systems and reiterations of the Language of Thought hypothesis.
Alongside the "Homeroom" and "Tocsin" installations are two series of drawings: "Watching the Watcher" and "Disappeared Spaces." Initiated in 2022, "Watching the Watcher" is a series that explores data centres through drawings derived from sources like satellite imagery, Google Street View, and internet archaeology. The aim of this series is to critically examine surveillance capitalism and the "panopticon storage" of human experiences—essentially "turning the mirror" on the systems that monitor and archive our digital lives.
"Disappeared Spaces" refers to locations that are deliberately hidden or made inaccessible on common digital mapping platforms like Google Street View. By rendering certain physical sites invisible, these so-called "free, universally accessible" services reveal their own limitations. These are places where traditional forms of visual access are systematically denied. The Disappeared Spaces archive seeks to document these locations, both while they remain online and after they vanish—as a way of bearing witness to the "lost persons" effectively dematerialized through the redaction of these spaces from universal maps.
BIO of Artist NAOMI B. Cook
NAOMI B COOK (b. 1982) lives and works in-between Montréal and Paris, studied art and philosophy at Concordia University, Montréal and received a Master 2 / Diplôme des Beaux-Arts de l'ESADHaR, Le Havre, France. Her work consists of research into large data sets as a way of creating visual representations that reveal embedded patterns and poetry. Her first book — Asterisms, was published by Anteism Books in 2021. She is represented by Christie Contemporary – Toronto and has been a member of CLARK since 2014 – Montreal. She will be an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), Western Sydney University, and her work will be included in the next book, part of the "Low Latencies" series, put out by Open Humanities Press.
Website: https://naomibcook.com/ | Instagram: @naomibcook