Catching up with what I wrote at the SVA this past summer. This was a quick piece for Virginia Heffernan’s class 'Writing about Digital Artifacts’

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It’s 5:33 on a Friday evening, I’m still at work. I get a text: “Dinner?” I’d rather refuse, but I don’t want to say no.   I continue working. Ten minutes later, I receive an image. “Dinner?” is in a small, blue balloon, and underneath: “Read at 5:34”

If this had been a letter, it might have been lost in the mail; a phone call, it would have been missed; or an SMS and it could have been ignored. But, both of us have iPhones, both of us use iMessage, and both of us have ‘Read Receipts’ enabled. I had no escape.

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The proliferation of internet-based messaging services have fundamentally changed the politics of how we communicate. The introduction of Blackberry Messenger in 2005, WhatsApp in 2009, and iMessage in 2011 together created the first mass-market, mobile-based messaging network in human history. These platforms offer immediate contact, immediate delivery, and an immediate feedback loop; with senders notified when friends are online, informed when messages have been delivered, alerted when notes have been seen, and prompted when a reply is being composed.

Of all these innovations, the read-receipt—the notification that a recipient has opened a message—has been the most politically disruptive.

All human interactions, at their core, are exchanges of power. When someone is asked a question, they have the power to respond to it or not. Once an action is performed, power lies with the recipient until they react and the cycle continues. In physical reality, much of these exchanges are non-verbal, in digital space they have been generally more explicit.

However, the continuous connection offered by today’s instant messaging services change this. They let senders maintain their power, and give recipients little chance to win it back. A new language of implicit communication—of read-receipts and typing symbols—continuously communicate on our behalf. Their work, just like our body-language in-person, is often unconscious and misinterpreted.

Some might argue that these innovations democratise the platform, barring users from masking the truth. But in practice, all they have done is reveal the extents to which we will go to maintain our enigma: reading messages on lock screens or toggling with airplane mode. Instead, the read-receipt has turned its corner of the internet into a benevolent police state; the very act of reading, of typing, of engaging with the network can now be a surveilled offence.

The luxury of the early internet was the detachment its crudeness afforded: an email or website could be carefully considered in isolation before it was published. But as technology advanced, we built this monster in our incomplete and over-wrought form. While read-receipts allow us to communicate with minimal effort, they are ambiguous and partial operators in a digital world that prides itself in clarity: an all too human imperfection in an otherwise unemotional system. They are reflections of whatever we throw at them, showing us our doubts with unflinching hostility.

I wrangled this piece from a mess of incomplete thoughts in June 2017, when I was tasked to write a 200 word manifesto. Though I’ve scarcely touched the text since, I’ve long mulled over its ideas. More soon. More one day. 

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A nation is a cultural community. Each is based on an ideology—a language, a faith, a history, or even a food—and those who subscribe to it are by definition nationals. We form these groups to comfort ourselves with the knowledge that there are others who see the world the way we do—that we are not alone—then we disseminate our understandings for further corroboration: recruiting new members to join us as we revel in the notion that prevalence is a measure of worth.

With time, these once benign communities start feeding off the validation. Our nations transform from intersectional aggregates into fused wholes, rebuilding themselves in the increasingly refracted images of their own performance. In clamouring for their stereotyped identities—to be ‘American’, ‘Hindu’, or a ‘Millennial’—we entrench our nations in the delusion that if they stopped proclaiming their existence, they would vanish. 

I love every chance I get to step out of myself.

It’s that incredible feeling when you’re listening to music while walking down the street and somehow the world silently choreographs itself in front of you: lights change on tempo, cars speed to crescendos, and a melody is passed from footstep to car horn, construction site to whistling wind. It’s energising, and comforting, and suddenly the uncontrollable, overwhelming frenzy of life has some order to it; I needn’t worry about where the next surprise might come from because the next bar of music would tell me.

Even on a busy subway car - after an exhausting Wednesday capped with a midnight delay - pushed against the train door by rowdy drunks, with hip hop blasting from speakers too close, young men weaving their bodies through poles even closer, and an old man grumbling his disapproval closer still, I found solace in melting through those doors and feeling the steady beat of the silhouetted columns passing by, every few marked with a piano chord played straight into my ears.

Those few moments of poetic bliss serve as lived, real, and physical releases from the now daily onslaught of virtual dissonance.

I have been trying, and waiting, and trying, and not being able to express my thoughts on the unbearable torrent of sensationalised, gut-wrenching, and flippantly grave news that has, despite my protests, seeped through every tired pore on my body to drown me daily. I don’t know what story to tell, because somehow my stories feel so trivial and contrived when compared to the very real ones that those around me are living.

I think that in this never-ending surge of emotional dissonance, the narrative strands that I saw were still so clouded by disharmonies that I couldn’t quite grasp them. I need a chance to step out, to find the music that will let me melt through the walls I have been cornered by and feel the steady beat of time synchronise with that soft piano pulse. I need a kick, not back into reality, but out of it.

However self-destructive my addiction to modernist vistas might be, that sublime expanse looking out over the world and all of its curious eccentricities is helpful. And when that faculty becomes dull, as it seems to be today, my only prescription is to treat myself as the audience I have been testing every time I wear earphones outside.

What my music does is detach me from the emotional narratives of my familiar, physical world, replacing it with those from another. This allows me to see patterns I wouldn’t have otherwise, to see the song in the city around me. Maybe, I can do the same now: splicing together that crazed virtual world to find patterns and stories to string together into something I can articulate and contribute. Something I can say.

The world is often overwhelming.

I don’t mean this in some anxious way, though it surely is that too, but rather I often find myself marvelling at its sheer complexity, impregnability. I think this is why I like travelling, there is a sublime pervasiveness to being when you slip in to that state both within - a part of the flurry of anxious activity - and without, a soft-focus gaze observing the people and motivations that together make the messy network of invisible desire lines and barely manifest passing thoughts.

Flying through the night often conjures that feeling for me. When, somehow, the frenetic coloured flashes on peoples’ faces from personal screens each playing different films can impossibly retreat into stillness. Whether it be the sleep-deprivation or high altitude dehydration, something clicks in those moments and lets me float out to watch the world around me in its preposterous triviality, and be amused by it, come to terms with it, and feel at once both detached and so nostalgic for it.

On one of my many 24 hour commutes from SIN to JFK, when I was (un)fortunately relegated to a window seat, and sick of the tiring din of canned laughter and screeching foley, I turned off my screen, opened my window shade, and looked out. What I was expecting to see was an expanse of nothingness - the night sky at 34,000’ that I had seen so many times before. Yet what I saw, far beyond the gentle pulse of the wingtip’s light, seemingly curving over the horizon, was a lightning storm.

I have told this story many times, but I think that serves to underline how profound this scene felt in its moment. It was almost laughable that on my one side was a landscape of red eyes affixed to over-lit screens, uncomfortable nappers, and jittery smokers; and on the other was this silent, uncontrollable light show, revealing spaces I couldn’t fathom as each line of light lit maps in the clouds that surrounded its upturned base. I felt so small watching it, and yet so large for seeing it.

Ma met my friend L when she picked me up from school yesterday. L was sitting next to Miss Kershaw, because her Ma hadn’t come yet. When my Ma came in to the class, she talked to Miss Kershaw, and watched me playing with L—we were pretending we were in a car in our chairs and closing our eyes and guessing where we were turning. Ma came to say hi but L kept saying she didn’t know what Ma was saying and getting scared and looking at Miss Kershaw. Miss Kershaw said something very softly to Ma and then Ma waved, and then L waved back, then Ma called me and I said bye to L and we left.

Poster Variations 

SG150

For one reason or another, the problem of how memory is stored in our brains has been a thought fluttering about my mind lately. I keep coming to this roadblock of not knowing how memories actually exist, keep having a series of resultant ‘episodes of design’ imagining how memory could be stored, and keep resolving to read more about the actual science behind it.

I finally did, well, sort of. I’m midway through my third article, but the urge to write about the thoughts swirling in head overwhelmed my resolve in that endeavour.

Memories are physical, at least long-term memories are. They are stored as molecular changes in certain cells in the brain. They are not transient visions, momentary pulses of electricity; they are material.

The metaphor there is remarkably powerful to me and my seemingly never ending pursuit to use my extremely limited understanding of other fields to talk about architecture. Yes, there is a notable distinction between the ‘physicality’ of these molecular changes and that of walls, floors and ceilings, but the idea that memory is stored physically makes me think about how we do that with architecture.

I saw this film, fell in love with it, and quickly photoshopped something using the first image I could find. 

‘Singapore’ was invented in 1819 by Sir Stamford Raffles: a tool fashioned to service the colonial world’s insatiable hunger for expansion. It was conceived as a product for the East India Company to capitalise on - not a place, nor country, community, nor home - it was an object to sell, a service to market, a profit waiting to be reaped.

As ever, with that temptation of trade, the world soon arrived on this island; each person hankering for a drink from this fountain of wealth, an opportunity to fill their bottle and return home to water their crop. This was a stopping point, a non-place, nothing more than a way for these people to realise their shared ambitions of progress and prosperity. Ethnicities mingled and cultures learnt to coexist, but always with the implicit understanding that these frictions of difference need not be resolved because they would all be going home soon enough.

Yet, the relentless passage of time often slips from our grasp, and Singapore’s accidental statehood 146 years later shone a light on this unwanted country, uncongenial community and unexpected home. Suddenly this island was a place, and with that it needed to find an identity, a sense of self. The reaction was a remarkably conscious governmental effort of nation-building. ‘Singapore' today is as much a constructed nation as it is a sculpted state: an unabashedly human creation, as it has always been.

However, there exists a disjuncture between human intention and the reality of our creation. The ongoing effort to craft Singapore as a nation-state is as heedless as its initial fashioning as an economic tool. The plurality of Singapore’s purpose, function, and existence has been ignored in the pursuit of some authority’s singular vision for its future - whether it be yesterday’s economic ambition or today’s civic nationalism - and in so doing, the heterogeneity of life and identity has been denied.

The result is a perpetual state of anxiety: a tension caused by the incompatibility of this rhetorical ambition for a singular and its plural reality. Singapore is a nation, but also several nations. A community, but also communities. A home, as well as homes.

The anxiety that stems from these seemingly incommensurable perspectives of reality is a global experience. We live in a world that argues for the primacy of the singular, however our contemporary globalised world - with the fragmenting of formerly geographically specific cultures, the perceived simultaneity of spatially distinct experiences, and the resultant accelerated re-formation of cultural landscapes - cannot afford that. These tensions are typical of this epoch of human life; and Singapore has served as a microcosm for them since its invention.

Humans are a product of the places they have been and the places they have become in, but our society has been raised to believe that both we and those places that (in)form us have singular identities. We/They do not. The reality of contemporary human experience is in embracing community as coevality. We all live simultaneously on a stage where the world’s frenzied life and ideologies are presented to us in a cacophony of belief, and we are each tasked with finding our territory - some semblance of equilibrium - in this whirlpool of experience.

How do we find balance in plurality? Identity in frenzy? Home in homes?

I applied to be the student speaker for Carnegie Mellon University’s Commencement 2016. This is the draft that I auditioned with. 

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I’ve never actually envisioned this day. I mean, I knew I would graduate at some point, but I always thought of graduation as an infinitely distant future, an inevitable milestone, but one that I never needed to concern myself with just yet.

A year ago, I stood right over there as I watched most of my friends with whom I had started CMU, graduate. And in that moment, as they celebrated their diplomas and threw up their caps, as they showed their families their studios and labs, and said goodbye to both the places they’d come to love and those they’d learnt to resent, it hit me.

I was given the opportunity to spend half a decade here, a period greater than a quarter of my life when I began, and it had rushed past me. I had come to CMU this over-excited, over-ambitious, 18-year old who thought he had figured life out. And something in the day-in-day-out routine of sleep deprivation and missed alarms, over-extending myself and competing for the title of busiest, had built these ever growing walls around me that had narrowed my vision to a singular, undefined objective. Almost like a horse with blinders on, I had been racing through those four years, not looking at what was around me, always focussed on an end I never really understood. And in doing so, I had lost track of the time I had, and the places I had wanted to go with it.

And so, the revelation of this finality was… liberating. These walls that I had built for myself, the perpetual busyness that I had scheduled: they had stripped me of my agency to do whatever I wanted to do. And the second I realised that, they vanished, and I was left standing in the middle of an empty field-of-potential that was waiting for me to build whatever I could imagine.

It’s just before 6 o’clock. I know this because the old auntie who lives next to us just started playing her morning prayer songs. She usually gets up very early (Amma says its because when you get older you can’t sleep as much), but she doesn’t do anything until just before the sun rises. Then, she showers, plays her morning prayer songs, and sits on her balcony to watch the sun rise.

I’m not usually awake when she does all of this, she’s in her chair from when I wake up until after I have left for school. The only proof of her routine is the smell of her sandalwood soap that unfailingly fills my room every morning. Amma loves its scent, so whenever she comes in after brushing her teeth, she stands there for a few moments and takes a deep breath, before coming to wake me up.

That’s usually around 6:15. So, when I wake up early by myself - like today - I can just lie in bed until then, listening.

A few moments after the next-door auntie starts playing her morning prayer songs, the rest of the world starts to wakes up. I always like to imagine she’s trying to beat everyone to it, rushing about her empty apartment, getting ready to sit down on her balcony just as the church starts ringing its bells, the mosque plays its call to prayer and the first rays of the sun burst across the horizon. I’ve peered out from my window before to watch her sitting down, and I’m sure I’ve seen her smirking to herself as everyone else starts their day just a few moments after her.

I am trying to find the right metaphor for an essay I am writing on the future of the concept of the nation. This isn’t it. 

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For the last few weeks I have been working on a project: making the perfect tomato sauce.

Tomato sauce is one of those things I always like to have in my fridge. It’s incredibly versatile and allows me to cut my cooking time in half when I’m making dinner during the week. However, getting that perfect tomato sauce that I can use for almost anything is a delicate art. Every Sunday, I go to the market, buy a large bag of tomatoes and then get to work on my next iteration.

Before I started this project, I went through every online recipe I could find, categorising and archiving everyone’s tips, to ensure I had considered all the possible variables before ever pouring any oil into a pan. Then I went to it, testing every combination I could think of: I discovered the ratio of fresh to canned tomatoes I liked best; fell in and promptly out of love with with tomato paste; started roasting my garlic and blanching my tomatoes to remove their skins; left the onions out, and then brought them back in; and constantly played with the seasoning to find the perfect balance.

But it was always missing something. 
 I often add a pinch of sugar to the sauce to combat the tartness fresh tomatoes usually have, but getting the balance of sugar to salt is always tough. This past weekend, while racking my brains and emptying my cupboards trying to make it work, I came across a bottle of balsamic vinegar that I thought might do the trick. So, I added a drop while sautéing the garlic.

It instantly bubbled up and stained the garlic a dark brown, the acrid vinegar vapour stung my nostrils and I almost immediately regretted my decision. I added the tomatoes and tasted the mixture: It was terrible. The balsamic clouded every other flavour. I considered throwing the entire thing out, but felt guilt doing that. So I just left it to simmer, resigning myself to having to eat this odd sauce this week.

When I returned 15 minutes later, I tasted it to discover something of a marvel. The tomato flavour had come out and balanced itself perfectly. I didn’t taste the vinegar any more, just a hint of the sweetness that must have come from it. I had happened across that fated missing ingredient, and I had considered tossing the entire thing out because of it.

It’s kind of a ludicrous proposition isn’t it?

That I can propose an architecture that can reveal an emergent nation; that the architecture, in itself, can be the core of human cultural and societal existence.

However if I were to change that word ‘architecture’ to ‘environment’, somehow it does not sound so in-credible.

We must recognise that our shared human bias - that filters our understanding of our worlds and seeks to distinguish our actions on things from other actions on us - serves to delude us into thinking that the societal and physical spheres are separate, with discrete functions bridging them (the act of building being one of them). If we accept that humans are fundamental actors within the network of our environments, then our social activity and physical actions can no longer stay that dichotomy. It is not a space-time continuum that we can observe as a separate system from our lives, but rather a society-space-time continuum that recognises the fundamental bias we all share in our perception of that former.

That becomes a universal quality of human existence, does it not? That filter of human, sensory subjectivity. We are limited in what we can know by how we know things, and so, some of those ways of knowing are a fundamental connection between us.

During high school I came very close to applying to study Theatre in University, but I decided that wasn’t the right choice for me because this unknown intersection of interests that was Architecture just felt right. The first few years of Architecture school were tough, of course, but I realised that although I loved and missed Theatre, having been given the taste of Architecture I would lament its loss from my life far more, should I have chosen to leave it.

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I came to the idea for this project in the summer of 2014, because it seemed like a fascinating means of working with Architecture at an urban scale (looking at what makes things absolute). At that point, I hadn’t figured out why specifically I wanted to look at HDBs, but I knew I was conflicted about something to do with them and their almost fleeting permanence. They felt like an architectural opportunity lost, a way to explore something more profound.

Fast forward a few months and I had picked the lens through which I wanted to study it - Cultural Identity and the meaning of Home. But at the same time, catalysed by the same thing, a process of un-architecturalising my mind and my work had begun. I did not consciously initiate this, but rather was in a position where that seemed like the only way out. (Anxious) Self-reflection had concluded that all through Architecture school my ideas had been right, but my architecture had not. The rational solution emerged to be “Forget the architecture, Embrace the ideas”. I had many other interests, Theatre and Film among them, maybe they were more fitting a language in which to find my voice.

Something that I had not understood then was that those two things - my ideas and my architecture - were inseparable.