multi-channel video, audio (2020)

Screentime is an audio-visual installation that centers around our experiences in the physical world and the evolving reality of our immersion in the digital realm.

I often feel entirely disconnected from my reality when I’m engulfed by the inferno of the internet. Though I accept my dependence on virtuality, I struggle to situate myself within it. My virtual surroundings often feel like they are crashing and warping into a timeless space where future is no longer a frame of reference for measuring time, but a kind of looped extended present.

In the making of this work, I was questioning “new” technologies and our desire for immediate solutions. The process of digitizing the film left both video and audio irreparably glitched and warped. The incompatibility between “old” and “new” is evident in the jarring clash of technologies that resulted in skewed effects.

Drawing inspiration from Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, I embrace “the glitch” as a form of failure and refusal that can lead to new possibilities and new ways of seeing/being. Here is one of my favourite passages from Russell’s writing: “The glitch is a tool: it is socio-cultural malware. Bodies traveling through the glitch fail joyfully, as currents along wires that vein social machinery, prompting freeze, flounder, a shuddering shutdown.” [1]

To me, art-making is most interesting when it is mysterious for the maker. Here, the presence of the glitch took some control away from me and made me wonder about its many different forms and future possibilities.

[1] Legacy Russell. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London: Verso, 2020), 86.

Photographs by Gladys Lou (Blackwood E Gallery)

video, audio, CRT TV (2021)

We’ve developed intimate relationships with fundamentally non-intimate devices. Technology pervades almost every aspect of our lives.

This installation addresses the non-confidential reality of self-documentation using digital devices. The CRT screen is reminiscent of a time when technology didn’t feel like a compact extension of our bodies.

This work is critical of itself, it attempts to regain control over self-exposure and simultaneously recognizes the monotony of mass self-documentation.

inkjet print on film sheet, collage (2021)

This visual exploration was inspired by Laurie Frick’s talk on using personal data to help people see themselves. She uses her background in engineering and high technology to explore human patterns and visualize them through art. To answer the question ‘why’ she does this, she said: “we are always using external means to try to understand ourselves, to get a sense of who we are [...] maybe all these self tracking devices are a way to reveal a hidden part of us — the stuff we can’t see.”

video, audio, LCD screen, iPhone (2021)

Living in a time where our phones are rapidly eliminating the need for CCTV surveillance cameras, we automatically take on a role of surveillants and thus simultaneously consent to being surveilled.

The idea that we constantly face the possibility of being recorded undoubtedly alters our behaviour in public and private spheres.

video projection, audio, rug, bean bag chair (2020)

A leading futurist and humanist Gerd Leonhard defined a new human right in the context of the Digital Age: “The right to be inefficient if, when and where it defines our basic humanness.”

This installation celebrates inefficiency while remaining mindful of the tension between the human desire to pause from striving for the ultimate efficiency and the pressure to feel guilt for doing so in the context of the commodification of time in a capitalist society.

drywall, crt monitors, video, audio (2019)

The erasure of personal boundaries, in the context of new technology and social media, changes human interactions and distorts our understanding of intimacy.

This space evokes feelings of constriction, voyeurism and immersion. This installation emphasizes the inquisitive nature of human beings and amplifies the notion of boundaries.

collage (2017)

A reflection on Helmut Newton’s photography.

Untitled Quarantine Series

oil on canvas (2020)