In February 2026, a global research consortium bringing together leading universities, medical research centres, and public health institutes across Europe, North America, and Asia launched a coordinated effort to map the cumulative environmental exposures shaping human life.

It is an extraordinary admission. The environment is not external to the body. It never was. But only now, after decades of acceleration frenzy, has this become a scientific priority.
Does this effort arrive a minute too late.

At the same time, UNESCO is expanding its Futures Literacy initiatives, funding programmes that train policymakers and institutions to model multiple possible futures. The future is no longer treated as something that can be forecast. Looking ahead now requires serious training.

This is the moment we are in.

We have built entire systems on the assumption that more information produces better decisions. That surveillance produces safety. That modelling produces preparedness. It is no longer obvious that these assumptions are true.
If this is the global condition, Southeast Asia is one of its clearest theatres. The region manufactures global electronics and absorbs their waste. Smart city infrastructures expand alongside eroding coastlines. Colonial extraction routes remain embedded in contemporary logistics networks. Forests, data centres, industrial estates - all occupy the same terrain.

Where, then, does art stand.

As it happens, not at a distance.

When we opened this issue on Technology and Ecology in Southeast Asian Contemporary Art, we did not expect how closely many of the submissions would echo these conditions. Through the eyes of the contributing authors, we followed artists across the region measuring, mapping, prototyping, documenting. Some work in labs, others in the field - artists across Southeast Asia are conducting parallel investigations.
When science tries to map exposure, artists examine lived exposure.

When institutions train futures literacy, artists rehearse futures through speculative forms.
When governments expand infrastructures of control, artists appropriate those same tools and test their limits.

We are living through a period in which knowledge is unstable, polluted, and contested. We learn while in the back seat of a cab, while chatting with a friend, while visiting a museum.
There is a difference between producing knowledge about a landscape and producing knowledge in relation to it. Across Southeast Asia, artists are working from within their environments - in relation to their histories, communities, ecologies, and inherited infrastructures. These are knowledge projects. But also truth projects.

This first major issue of RUANG// Journal grows out of that recognition. It brings together writers - established and emerging - who are willing to stay with complexity. The essays examine practices that engage surveillance systems, industrial labour, tropical infrastructures, Indigenous ecological knowledge, and more. Together, they reflect a shared commitment to taking artistic practice seriously as a mode of knowledge production.
With this launch, I hope RUANG// can serve as a platform for sustained critical writing in the region and contribute to building the discursive infrastructure needed to support it.

—
Natasha Doroshenko Murray
Barcelona, February 2026

COVER CREDITS

Thermal image of a herd of deer in the field, still from The Owl, The Travellers and The Cement Drain.
Artist / Photographer: Robert Zhao Renhui
Year: 2024
Courtesy of: Robert Zhao Renhui, Singapore Art Museum, ShanghART Gallery

EDITORIAL TEAM

Editor-in-Chief: Natasha Doroshenko Murray
Editorial Team: Ni Putu Novi Pridayanti, Ni Kadek Intan Pramesti Kencana Dewi

DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

Print layout: Yanar Zuhairtia Adila
Social media: Darlene Elvaretta Anggajaya
Website design and development, content management: Vasya Tvorski, VOLNÁ