Showing all posts
Revolving Door
An ongoing web novel begun in 2014, Revolving Door is a portrait of my perspectives and imaginings on the existence of humanity and our unique ability to contemplate our place in the universe.
My aims with this novel are numerous and draw on many inspirations:
Through a dozen concurrent stories about characters scattered across time and space, all embodying incongruous genres and worldviews, Revolving Door engages with the notion that we exist in a universe so vast—both physically and experientially—that we will never know more than a fraction of it, in much the same way Andrew Hussie's webcomic Homestuck does.
As with Avatar: The Last Airbender, it also draws together an unlikely cast from across the world and focuses on multiple simultaneous and complementary story arcs, many of them concerning difficult power relations, both personal and societal.
I have always been interested in "justified" anachronism and temporal displacement: stories about history bleeding into the present, or a future that looks like the present day—this novel is also about blurring lines between eras and bringing those incongruous elements together.
Eagles and Swans
A novel about the nation of Astra, a theocratic diarchy where buildings are airborne and almost everyone knows how to fly. It centres on a group of rebel scientists seeking to overturn the law, and one of its members: Ruthenia, a student with a zest for change-making and a grudge against the government for her parents' unjust execution.
With developing the visuals for the world for Eagles and Swans, a sense of historical depth and consistency was prioritised: I wanted it to feel like a place that has seen eras of philosophical and aesthetic movements.
Eagles and Swans is heavily inspired by the work of Miyazaki which also prominently features airborne settings. Accompanying this novel are various tie-in works, including music, animation and short stories.
Compass
An interactive hypercomic, Compass is about two travellers who meet in a port and agree to sail to the edge of the world. Dreams give way to horrific hallucinations, and they begin to dread that something awaits them at their destination.
Compass tells a placeless, timeless fairy-tale about memory and fate. Aesthetically, and in its wandering between picture perfect paradises, it is heavily inspired by Owl City's lyrics. It features a branched narrative, with the reader choosing the characters' route, and their ultimate decisions.
Time and Tide
A music album featuring 12 tracks and 12 illustrations. Each one explores a place as a setting for a musical story: a mountainside, a city, the edge of a black hole's event horizon.
Melodious and mostly upbeat (as is my style), they cover a considerable range of instrumental palettes, although most could be described as synth orchestrals.
Nocturna
A neon goth-themed multimedia project, Nocturna takes the grim subject of death and makes a humorous tale about its arcane inner workings. It concerns a world where Death is a bureaucracy of deities, angels and spirits, and all supernatural trouble on earth results from the ineptitude of those governing it.
It features several connected creative works, including a tie-in comic, Dusk.
Dusk
Voca
A multimedia worldbuilding project created in 2014, Voca is set in the nation of Bel, in the same world as Eagles and Swans, where deities are invoked through a programming language that is parsed by automatic musical instruments. As with Eagles and Swans, a cohesive sense of history and culture was a main concern in visually developing it.
The project follows the life of Amberrule, who delivers these instruments to residents across Bel city. It includes diary entries, faux-non fiction writing, art and soundscape work.
Chordophone Courier, a part of the Voca project
The Banner I Unfurl
A sand animation. A knight pursues a flying monster that has captured her lover.
Ghosts Under Bridges
This project explorers the concept of a locative story: a story that unfolds over the geographical space of Brisbane, unlocked by visiting the settings of chapters. These stories lead the player to the unvisited back-alleys of Brisbane, and recontextualise familiar scenes.
Ghosts Under BridgesAlice in Wonderland illustrations
A set of illustrations to go with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with a loose theme of optical illusions.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has always been one of my favourite fairy-tales, with its wildly surreal universe, and the strong notes of symbolism and recurring imagery even then.
A Retelling of Snow White
This five-page comic takes the imagery of Snow White apart and reconstitutes it with elements from other works.
Zombie Antoinette
I reimagine Marie Antoinette of guillotine fame as a zombie, returning with her neck still severed. Unlikely portrayals of historical figures have always been fascinating to me, and a great amount of research went into making her outfit accurate.
Singapore as a Pokemon region
Singapore reimagined as if it were a region from a Generation 3 Pokemon game. Making use of the design features characterising the maps in the Gameboy Advance Pokemon games, I placed several towns and cities on famous areas and landmarks, and translating public transport routes into in-game walking routes.
Cartographer Symphony
This is a symphony of four movements, each one describing the process of a cartographer drawing a kind of geographic feature on a map, and imagining the lands symbolised by the strokes of their pen. Each piece is a little story, not quite capturing the physical nature of the place, but rather depicting one's emotional reactions to it.
Alienate
A poem inspired by two weeks in New York City.
They don't tell you there are fewer stars
in some places than others.
The city frightens them
with the threat of their obsoleting, and they hide to save
their light. There are fewer stars in places where personhood
is loudest.
They don't tell you alienation is spelled
in unfamiliar constellations. Astronomic signposts dip
out of sight, occluded by some dark enormity
as the jet crew slides the planet
between you and your homeland lights.
You lack context and it shows.
Streetlights here are a strange colour, stirred and filtered
through pigment washes of aged grime, graffiti, someone's
mistake, someone's
purse, the rats—records of changing walkways, a sky
they mirror and defy.
You have been told there are so many lights in every city
that they are visible from space stations–even the highways, traceable
with one's finger against orbital glass. You envy astronauts because
through those interstitial windows, they might still glimpse
familiarity.
Standing deep in the city’s gullet, you clumsily
triangulate the route
of your signal beacon home.
A subway ceiling intercepts it, humming its reply.
Drift
A poem about a loved one who lives far away.
We once thought we could fathom the vastness of the sea
from the lap of an island shore. Watching ships
tip over the horizon, we laughed, knowing nothing
could survive the fall past the edge of the world.
We did not see how, deep beyond the continental margins, submarine
canyons channeled secret rivers onto underwater plains, or how
the abyssal fish slowly went blind, their unseen lights
speckling the cavernous dark.
In our sleep we hear
the seabed groan with the weight of all its shipwrecks,
lift its hem, and settle into a hot embrace
around the mantle, the sulfide pools simmering through its cracks
where it presses close to the magma light.
Here I chance upon the sparkling clasp of a coral reef necklace
tracing a line from one atoll to the next.
Following it I leapfrog dashed borders, beginning
to contrive an idea of you
from the contours of these countless coasts.
The geological record says we are five centimetres closer
every year. In geologic time—perhaps,
if you were a reef and I, an archipelago—we’d meet
at a faultline in the next eon and crumble together, leaving
a new continent where we were before.
Today, we stand knee deep in the shoals, losing ships
to the horizon between us. Salt sifts
between our toes.
When you laugh, it almost feels
like those ten million years have already passed.
All Big Cities Look The Same
A game where you guess the general location of a city based on a photo of it. It's harder than it sounds. A comment on how the homogenising force of globalisation has given rise to a universal cosmopolitan experience. Coded in JavaScript.
Glitchwave Cam
A web app that distorts camera input to make it pixelated in colours reminiscent of the palettes of synthwave or glitchwave games. It draws onboth a nostalgia for the visual style as well as a fascination with destructive visual editing. Coded with p5.js
1 + 1
A sketch comic about the mathematics that governs the universe, and its irrelevance.
Starfield
Crest Maker
Inspired by Disqus icon generators. Generates random symmetrical patterns evoking the appearance of tribal designs. Made with JavaScript Canvas.
Makoto Shinkai
A stridently recurring theme in all of Shinkai's filmography is that of teasing out the subtlety and beauty of ordinary experiences: evenings after school, street corners, trains, life happening against the backdrop of skyscrapers.
The film Five Centimetres per Second in particular, with its attention to detail in everyday life, transformed the way I perceived my own surroundings: it was the first time I had seen an urban space portrayed with the same romanticising beauty as natural landscapes.
Uncrossable distances between people feature in almost all his work, be they the physical distance separating once-lovers who moved apart, or the conceptual distance of mortality and death. Each of them is a quiet mourning for what cannot be, revelling in bittersweet and sometimes downright bitter, hopeless endings, yet without absorbing itself with the major characters, instead lingering on the world beyond them, reminding one that each story is but a single one among multitudes.
It is nostalgic and yet rooted in the present, layering multiple time frames on one, constant place. This is a very true portrait of how I have experienced places and interpersonal relationships, and something I long to become as deft in conveying.
Hayao Miyazaki
Hayao Miyazaki's work, more than the work of any other creative in the fantasy genre, formed the basis of my concept of fantasy fiction from a very young age. I grew up with his films, with Spirited Away carrying particularly fond memories of my childhood.
Miyazaki's work pays great attention to breathing beauty into ordinary things. The architecture, dress and food are ordinary and have the air of being grounded in reality—rice balls, bath houses showing the wear of age, seaside towns, grimy living spaces—and yet they are often altered in ways that stretch the imagination, becoming characters in their own right: from the titular walking castle in Howl's Moving Castle, to the bath house of Spirited Away whose surrounding fields turn into an ocean without warning.
This grounding in realism is intentional: Miyazaki's work also has strong environmentalist and feminist throughlines, calling for a revolution in the way we live and perceive each other, through fables such as Princess Mononoke which features women in leading roles, and a forest fighting back against industrial damage. I have developed a rather similar voice that sits between realistic and fantastical, far-flung and yet grounded in real issues and concerns.
Flight is a common theme in all his films, not just in the form of aircraft, flying beings and levitating architecture, but in the visual proninence of clouds, wind, and billowy fabrics, signifying freedom, change and redemption. Much of my work has inherited that visual sensibility.
Andrew Hussie
Andrew Hussie's chief achievement has been creating MS Paint Adventures, a series of long-form comics that has gathered a cult following among webcomic readers, particularly for two of its installments: Homestuck and Problem Sleuth, which add up to more than 10,000 pages in length in total.
Both aforementioned installments are about testing the boundaries of reality: their plots take place on a surreal and cosmic, sometimes even multiversal, scale, with characters manipulating planets, travelling through time, and creating new universes, all while battling foes as powerful as themselves. The worlds are also unique in that they operate along the rules of computer architecture or video games, with objects being compressible to data abstractions and universes capable of being "rebooted".
For me, it answered philosophical and spiritual questions about existence in ways that took into account the increasing fragmentation and overlapping of our realities, as our lives become increasingly conducted online, and our growing awareness of its indeterminacy, with the advent of quantum research.
MSPA's use of the webpage and the reader's expectations of it is also near unparalleled: it makes use of animation, branching, and interactivity in a coherent and measured language to conveys its narrative about agency and determinism.
More importantly, it nurtured an active fanbase of which I was an active participant for several years, creating fan art and music, and co-organising community projects, in tribute to it.
Les Misérables
The 1980 musical Les Misérables is an adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel of the same title, dramatising as a stage musical the events of the June Rebellion of 1832.
My first encounter with epic historical drama, its story attains unparalleled breadth in the span of three hours, weaving together the tales of a score of individuals into a coherent plot through recurring phrases, motifs and themes. More importantly, it was the first work of fiction I encountered that seamlessly combined several art forms in so notable a manner.
Les Misérables is the bedrock of my love for stories concerning pivotal events in history, particularly of events where participants cease to be individuals and instead become symbols—of a movement, of tragedy, of some greater tide in history. Revolutions and uprisings against power, in particular, came to interest me deeply as a timeless and consistently timely subject.
Les Misérables is rife with symbolism, and structured around its deeply spiritual thematic arcs: two conflicting visions of godliness, as mercy born of sacrifice, and as the arbitration of perfect justice, are represented by the foils Valjean and Javert; love in all its forms, both betrayed and fulfilled; the seeming randomness of cruelty and blessing, and the nobility of an unwavering faith in good, even in the face of injustice. These features, so notable in this work, were foundational to my development of my own use of literary and musical devices, and of stories as bearers of philosophical arguments.
Owl City
Owl City is a synthpop band project by solo musician Adam Young. Then a basement musician who had almost never left his town of Owatonna, Minnesota, he found a following online and had his first big break in 2009 with Fireflies off his second studio album, Ocean Eyes.
With whimsical lyrics recalling childhood fantasies and innovative but harmonious use of synths, Owl City's songs describe a certain childlike wonder about the world, replete with idealised images of places and scenes reminiscent of the way children construct fantasies about things they only ever known through portrayals in media and fiction.
That sense of embellished reality, found in abstract, fantastical descriptions of stirring stars and watching them plummet away (On the Wing) and sewing a hot air balloon from a parachute (Hot Air Balloon), greatly shaped my early writing, prompting me to see art as as space where reality can bend to emotional experiences.
His use of synths and melodic styles, too, influenced my own. It served a stark contrast to much recent electronic music, concerned not with noise and discordant effects, but with producing a pleasant, sweet and sometimes nostalgic sound.
Avatar: The Last Airbender
The TV series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, debuted on Nickelodeon in 2007 and spanned 61 television episodes across three seasons.
A driving theme behind its storytelling is that of telling underrepresented narratives: about women, non-white characters, disabled characters, marginalised groups and refugees, inhabiting a fantasy world inspired entirely by non-western cultures.
Back in 2008, it was perhaps the first time I had seen a cast so diverse. Despite being—or because it was—a fantasy world, it was able to make a statement about our own reality without making direct reference to it.
Irrevocably, I came to see how imaginary worlds could be—besides realisations of fantasies—also critiques of the status quo, subverting the dominant power relations of our present reality, and demolishing the wall between the self and the other—shaping the way I designed worlds myself.