Honor Harger

Artist, Connector, Environmentalist, Event planner, Explorer, Idea generator, Producer

Honor Harger is a curator from New Zealand interested in the cultural impact of scientific ideas and how digital technology is shaping society. She is the Director for ArtScience Museum in Singapore. Since, she joined, ArtScience Museum has held large-scale exhibitions by some of the world’s best known artists and thinkers including Leonardo da Vinci, M.C. Escher And Buckminster Fuller as well as presenting significant exhibitions that explore aspects of science including big data, particle physics, natural history, marine biology, cosmology and space exploration. Prior to joining ArtScience Museum, Honor was the director of Lighthouse, a digital arts venue in Brighton, UK. In 2010, she was guest curator of the transmediale festival in Berlin, and from 2004 - 2008, was director of the AV Festival, then the UK's largest biennial of digital art, film and music. Prior to that, she was the first curator of webcasting for Tate, where she also curated events and concerts at Tate Modern. Honor is one of the co-founders of the sound art collective, r a d i o q u a l i a. One of their main projects was Radio Astronomy, a radio station broadcasting sound from space. Honor has given talks at conferences and festivals such as LIFT, TED, SciFoo, Webstock, MuseumNext, Ars Electronica, Innovative City Forum, and World Architecture Festival, as well a lecturing at the European Space Agency, the Centre Pompidou, MIT, California Institute of the Arts, and the American Film Institute and other places. TED Talks 1. https://www.ted.com/talks/honor_harger_a_history_of_the_universe_in_sound 2. https://www.ted.com/talks/honor_harger_how_museums_help_communities_heal http://honorharger.org/

I believe that science is part of culture, and culture has a major role to play in articulating the impact of science on our lives. Therefore, I have built my career at the confluence between the two fields, and much of my work over the past 20 years has been concerned with science communication through culture. For many years, I have had a particular interest in astronomy and cosmology. In recent years have worked on a number of projects that address environmental issues and climate change through art and technology.

“Art, at its most significant [is] a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” - Marshall McLuhan. As Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1964, art has a tendency to anticipate future social and technological developments. Art can “precede the perceptible reality by years” offering powerful insights into how society is evolving, and how new advances in urbanism, science, technology and culture are being synthesized. The notion of art – especially if engaged with science and technology – as an antenna, picking up on weak signals from the future, is of deep interest to the institution I direct, ArtScience Museum in Singapore. We explore the intersection between art, science, technology, and culture. We believe that it is where these areas meet that we see innovation and new ideas. We like to say it is here, at the interstices, that the future is made.

AR, Art, Art and Futures, Art and Science, Climate Change, New Media Art, Radio Astronomy, Science, Sound Art

I gave my first TED talk in 2011 (https://www.ted.com/talks/honor_harger_a_history_of_the_universe_in_sound?language=en). It was about my work turning radio waves from space into sound, enabling us to listen to planets and stars. Later on, I gave talks for TEDxSingapore and TEDxKL. Here's an example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wobzX9N6-eM

Radio astronomy Building radio transmitters