ATL-AEQUUS & THE FIVE PHASES

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Fragment of recollective memories into Atl-Aequus. A journey into the mythological world rooted by a fivefold conceptual scheme. Myth-making by reconfiguring symbols and allegories of the past in order to create its future lineage.

Since returning to Malaysia, I’ve been learning more about my Chinese-Malaysian heritage through the esoteric yet mundane rituals practiced by my parents and their friends within the local Buddhist community. This rediscovery has led me to contemplate aspects of identity and the various methodologies that work to propagate mythologies, the latter of which I’ve explored in my previous artworks and will reference where necessary.

As a new media artist, my works tend to revolve around worldbuilding and speculative fiction, often employing elements of astronomy, geography and anthropology to enhance the visual and contextual realism of the 3D rendered environment. This was the case in 27 Years of Lazarian Delights, a curated set design of an explorer workspace upon his return from Somnia XYZ-G, a planetary system with three planets, two suns and three moons. The multi-disciplinary project involved the creation of evidence of these adventures - objects, drawings, maps, and other ephemera.

The artwork I’d like to propose shares similarities in terms of worldbuilding, but rather than imagining worlds lightyears away I will redirect my attention back to Earth. However, in this rendition of Earth, I aim to experiment with the temporal dimension by envisioning a society abundant with future mythologies and prospective artefacts without the constraints of location-specific (dependent) culture, ethnicity and spiritual identity that we are familiar with today.

The artwork will take the form of a video game, where audience members can take turns exploring the mythological world, interacting with surreal landscapes and future artifacts/digital installation as if they are time travellers teleporting to a mythical perspective of Earth. Powered by the introduction of Unreal Engine 5 new core technologies in 2020. Lumen, a fully dynamic global illumination solution; and Nanite, a virtualized micropolygon geometry polygon count. to further question the boundaries between reality and the digital world. Further questioning the boundaries between reality and the uncanny digital world.

The focus of the work will be based on myth-making by reconfiguring symbols and allegories of the past in order to create its future lineage. Acknowledging that future utopias cannot exist in a vacuum as my identity and subjective experiences as an artist will shape the overall rendering of this world. Therefore, my family’s roots in Buddhism, particularly the elemental practice of the five phases (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water), as well as the framework of collective memories, tradition and time may come to light in this exploration.
As with my FAC3D ( https://fac3d.co/ ) exhibition, a collaborative exploration encompassing the idea of the digital self; one that connects machine learning, digital art, and the written word. I’m interested in incorporating an interactive element, which positions the audience as an active contributor, to deeply explore the open-ended simulated narrative’s world. Since I view this artwork as an ongoing exploration of world building, the choices and movements an audience member carries out within the virtual game will be taken into consideration for my next series of artworks.

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HYPER-LINKAGE OF [io] dreams a growing body landscape of identities. Our identity becomes a collective body. Our Body forms the landscapes around us.

There was a time [io] was just an empty plane. The surface was soft like a sponge. On it lies a wall, lined with energy cores that divides the landscape. It charges the air within a 10km radius. you could hear the low pitch hum vibrating from the surface ground, keeping the roaming identities positively buoyant away from [io].

Every full moon, the gravitational shift sends the energy core to a pause. As time passes, the ground absorb the fragmented identities. It started as one, spreading like a virus, the body grows rapidly. A digital presence becomes an ocean of identities. A collective body that’s hyperlinked by the media feed of the identities. Growing into a Body of Landscapes that we come to know as [io].

HYPER-LINKAGE OF [io], 2021

Chong Yan Chuah. 蔡崇彦
Malaysian, b. 1992


EDITION:    1AP+5
MEDIUM:    Giclee print on Hahnemuhle Bamboo
DIMENSION:    841 x 1188 mm
TIME:    N/A
FRAME:   N/A
SYSTEM:    N/A
SIGNATURE:   Hand Signed by Artist on bottom right.
CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICITY:    Included.

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OUR “BUTTERFLY DREAMS”

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OUR “BUTTERFLY DREAMS” explores the Identity, transcendence and the true self of an individual, in a multi complex dream Tower. Epistemological scepticism, we cannot know anything for certain."was I Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly or am I now really a butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang Tzu?”

Our “Butterfly Dreams” is a Tower of multiple floors. We have constructed a vertical city. An infinite elevation so far up that our eyes can see. The technological development has poisoned the air with our digital footprint. Buried here on the ground lies the decay of our digital waste, stored in servers, mined and sold as assets. 

In the center stands a crystal wall, dividing the perpertual pleasure on our social credit points. The inhabitants fights on their right to curate their identities. On each edge of the ground anchors 2 signboard. The advert reads “Our lives are being curated for us from our creations.” Perhaps the AI identity we created are in control of our identity. Perhaps, it’s reminding us of the simulated reality that we’re in.

The abundance of likes, shares, and comments grows as the level increases. Wondering into the unknown peak of the tower, our body transcend into a beam of light evaporating up each level. Our identities and reality becomes distorted. Our body merges together into a chaotic distortion, suspended over the abyss of Butterfly Dreams.

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AT THE DAWN OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM, OUR SPAN OF CONTROL IS ALMOST LIMITLESS

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A PEOPLE THAT IS GRADE, LASTING, AND PROPOGATING.

Diagnosing the malaise of the country, Mahathir announces that we have “come late to the age of industrialisation”. To this, we can only have the “will to make sweeping changes”, to reconfigure our sense of selves, expressed as a mechanical mastery and modernisation over our bodies. Nothing short of a reordering of humanity can exhort this arrival of modernity.

This video explores the figuration of the new Cyberjaya Man of Wawasan by looking at man’s sublimation into the things and infrastructures that his labour built. Through humanity’s absence, the video invokes the uncanny dissipation of man in the accelerated era of Wawasan. Who remains to maintain this modernity? Who, or perhaps more fittingly, what does this blueprinted modernity serve? What does a Wawasan that has displaced Man look like?


Automaton manifesto:
Malaysia's new finance minister has called for Malaysians to embrace "the new normalisation process" and "do as the locals do as you would do anything to be a good neighbour to the locals". Dr. Mahathir exhorted the Malay community to follow a similar trend in “grade, lasting and propagating” their country in comparison to their European counterparts. The world was still to come, and Malaysia must forever be trivial. "Europeans will never be Europeans."

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE DECADE, THERE EMERGED A GREAT STIR AGAIN

Like a glitch, social and economic crises in the accelerated timeline of Wawasan throws systems into disarray. Modernity does not merely stop, its vehicular chassis crashes along the superhighway.

There is another sense in which time crashes, as when we have arrived at the future promised in Vision 2020. As it turns out, the future must be furtively deferred through clever bureaucratese: Wawasan 2020 is substituted with Wawasan Bersama Makmur 2030. But a Wawasan ‘future’ stripped off its utopic projections, is just the banality of hereafter in bureaucratic, developmental time. Without the immanent, utopic future, the ‘now’ we live in is reduced to a static point. The present crashes into a moment of immobility, inaction and stasis.

Wrapped in an endlessly looping video narrating over economic, political and social crisis within Malaysia at the end of 1990s, the video magnifies the intensification of social inertia experienced by the public in the aftermath of Wawasan accelerationism.


Automaton reading:
The Malaysian Government put forward several options for ways to mend the damage made by the "bargain". Some suggested that the government's punitive stance be extended to include any non-Malays who might be attracted to the "Malay" brand. Others argued that the removal of the stigma of "bargain"ability was worth the risk. None of the options were able to capture the attention of the general public more than the U.S. audience. The Malaysian audience was largely ignored by the media, with a notable absence in Thailand where the "Bargain" was signed.

"Why am I being treated to such a debauched dinner (in the morning) when I might have been served a large plate of fish."

At the beginning of the decade, however, there emerged a great stir again when, as a few days earlier, Mahathir had warned a large gathering of dignitaries not to fight in the streets and had not warned the delegates not to join organized labour. It was this great stir that set off a great deal of speculation about the likely link between the two.

THE STATE IS NOW THE MAIN MEANS OF BUYING THINGS, MAKING FURNITURE, SETTING THINGS ALIGHT, AND DISPOSING OF THEM

One of the most understated premises of Wawasan is the thorough reconfiguration of political society.

Modernity is incompatible with bureaucratic inertia—"Every transaction with the Government would take an unconscionable length of time”. The civil service, deemed a stumbling block of Wawasan with their “old attitude[s]” and “unacceptable delays”, must give way for a more efficient system. Malaysia Incorporated, birthed in this atmosphere, sought to break down the boundaries of business and government to achieve a seamless, frictionless unity between private and public. Governed by a ‘tech’-nocratic rationality, with Mahathir at its apex, Wawasan is a political vision and a performance of high authoritarianism.

The video dictates aloud some of the AI-formulated economic policies for Malaysia. Ranging from commentaries on oil businesses, workers’ productivity, mandatory training, resources efficiency, to the role of government, one is immersed in a world that is oppressively prescriptive in its techno-scientifism.


Automaton treatise:
Business elites believe that an economy without oil will be unable to thrive, that an economy built on oil will be unable to thrive, that an economy based on diplomacy will be unable to thrive, and that an economy based on rivalry and cooperation and mutual aid and cooperation and all the arts of diplomacy and cooperation and patronage and all the arts of manipulating the other's thinking will be unable to thrive. They believe that an economy based on rivalry and isolation and dependency and all the arts of patronage and control and all the arts of manipulation and manipulation and all the other arts of causing and responding to the other's effects will be unable to produce lasting change. And they believe that an economy based on rivalry and isolation and dependency and all the other arts of resistance and resistance and all the other arts of survival and growth and progress and all the other arts of consciousness and being and all the other arts of consciousness will be unable to produce either desired or desirable outcomes.

In this collaborative work between (A-Z) Chuah Chong Yan (artist), Lay Sheng (political theorist) and Zhi Wee (creative technologist), we take seriously Mahathir’s forewarnings of the supersession of the human in the time of modernity. We run scholarly exegesis, speeches, advertorials and magazines produced in the time of Wawasan through GPT-3, producing a stream of text that simulates the futurity of 1990s for our times. We submit an AI-automatic critique against Wawasan’s inhuman/inhumane modernism. We relinquish the cherished assumptions of humanism, to imagine new ways of automatic critique at the scale of computational speed. Wawasan 2020—a blueprint for an advanced utopia, a superfluid modernity, a developmental fever, a tech-nocratic high authoritarianism, and a supercorridor of informational highway.Simultaneously an AI-authored manifesto for living, and a world-building project of an oppressively techno-scientific future, our work extrapolates themultiple and sometimes inchoate visions of futurity in 1990s for our times.

The project can be viewed on
www.wawasan.directory

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PRE_DIAMOND is a micro-universe of ambiguous corporeal entities. Leading up to the creation of Diamond Water.

PRE_DIAMOND is a micro-universe of ambiguous corporeal entities. Leading up to the creation of Diamond Water.

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