With great delight, it’s time to experience the Most SF Future Museum Steph has ever visited; in the Most (Aesthetically) SF Future City Steph has ever lived.

So first of all, the Art Science museum is VERY TRICKY, in that you enter on this beautiful glass ground level, and descend into its depths to reach the ticket counter. First one skinny, one-way, undecorated escalator; then down another skinny, one-way, undecorated escalator. Here, you find people queuing to get into the museum.

The trick: Book online to skip the queue. You can literally do this whilst standing in the queue. Highly recommend this option.

The other highly recommend, especially if you’re a shopping person: get a Marina Bay Sands loyalty card. They’re free, and suddenly your entry to the museum is almost half price and apparently buy 1 get 1 free once every month. I seriously considered signing up for one in the queue, and now that I know about this buy one get one I sort of wish I had.

Anyway, we went for the all access pass, for the three exhibitions on at the Art Science Museum.

There’s the permanent Future World, which is about using technology to create art and was SUPER FUN, highly recommend literally just for this. It included a beanbag room where you watch a very calming video that projects 100 years of sea level rises using WWF projections (so…not calming if you thought about it, just calming if you watch it), a room of animated projections of things you can colour in and scan so they’re animated (!!!), an interactive wall of Chinese characters that allow you to create a mythology landscape and story, and a glow in the dark ball pit.

I visited the last day of Big Bang Data, which was also quite interactiv,e though not as accessible (lots of videos with audio and visual but no subtitles, for example), a creepy moving data room, a whole lot of really interesting mapping projects, and definitely I now have some questions about Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ concept (more than I had already, I mean).

I finished up in the Escher exhibit, which as always was excitingly mathematical and interesting, and included a sequence from The Labyrinth and a room of record covers and other things he designed or inspired.

The shop: The Art Science Museum handily has three separate shops, as well as a cafe. There’s a little shop attached at the end of each temporary exhibition, and then a permanent shop on the ticketing level.

The permanent shop has standard Singapore paraphernalia (the Merlion, etc), as well as some Singapore-specific nano-blocks. I didn’t buy anything here because I can buy that paraphernalia anywhere in Singapore (and I will, because I deserve a Merlion chou chou). The Big Bang Data shop was half off because it was its last day, and I very almost bought a box of post it notes shaped like a floppy disk, but didn’t because I needed to save my cash for exxy lunch at hotpot, and do I really need more post its? The Escher exhibit shop was some very standard Escher paraphernalia, pens and diaries with patterns, etc.

In brief, the shop was not very exciting and I didn’t buy anything from it. Sad face.

Purchased:

• Nothing, waah.

The Art Science Museum

• on the Marina Bay waterfront, next to the Marina Bay Sands
• Getting there: Catch the MRT to Bayfront Station; there are also half a dozen buses that run along Bayfront Avenue. Highly recommend downloading the City Mapper app and plugging it in, it’s currently my favourite PT app.
• Cost of Entry: varies depending on number of exhibitions, between $10-$30.
• Lift, escalator and stairs are available to every floor. Fully accessible, but some exhibits have funny noises and poor lighting. One exhibit in (I think) the Future Worlds exhibit warns for flashing lights.

Overall Score:

Four Floppy Disk Post-It Notes out of Five