Forum On Contemporary Art & Society Alvin Tan is Artistic Director of The Necessary Stage (TNS), a not-for-profit theatre company with charity status founded by Tan in 1987. TNS’s mission is to create challenging indigenous and innovative theatre. TNS is the presenter and curator of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival and a recipient of the National Arts Council’s two-year Major Grant. TNS was also the founding institution and first publisher of focas Forum On Contemporary Art & Society in 2000. In 1999, Alvin launched the Singapore Artscommunity e-group (‘artscom’). With over 2,000 members, the artscom has been the site of sometimes passionate debates at the intersection of Singapore art and society. It constitutes a valuable forum for the free exchange of information and opinion in a Singaporean public sphere where the influence of the government can often be felt. Despite its advanced age (eight years is a long time in Internet years!), and despite periodic jeremiads about the ads-and-plugs to in-depth-discussion ratio, the Singapore artscom is still going strong, and is still the first port of call for artists who want to communicate with their peers or stay in touch when they are overseas. But what is perhaps most remarkable about the artscom is that it is successfully self-policed. Alvin adopts an extremely hands-off approach and has only excluded someone once; yet the artscom has hardly ever seen instances of the ‘trolling’ or extreme ‘flaming’ which have condemned so many unmoderated email lists. In the following interview, long-time artscom participants Lucy Davis and Mathieu O’Neil discuss the artscom’s past, present and future with Alvin Tan. The Network Within: Singapore’s Artscommunity e-group Alvin Tan, Mathieu O’Neil & Lucy Davis