Building a digital castle and ‘(M)across Cultures’
By Rafi Abdullah

'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity, together with my collective TO NEW ENTITIES, to produce a time-based new-media work for a presentation at the inaugural Boulevart Festival in Dubai. In this work, we were interested in exploring recent developments at a societal level and the paradigm shifts that such emergences have brought to the fore. We were thinking about the ways in which we understand and navigate social relations today: from how we ascribe value to things, ideas of common “truth”, and the crumbling of public trust with institutions. In relation to all of that, we were interested in thinking through how communities are finding new ways to congregate and organise, both online and offline.

Extracted View from the work CAST (2023), by TO NEW ENTITIES. Image courtesy of Rafi Abdullah.

Our work was heavily influenced by other art collectives and communities that were navigating this new reality. This included New Models, who were organising as a community and operating (very loosely) through the idea of “dark forests”, or secret groups where meaning and value are locked within and only for the community, away from giant tech platforms. Additionally, we were inspired by another collective, Moving Castles, who proposed a more modular vision based on the analogy of a collectively constructed and steered moving castle that could move and interact with other communities, closing the loop on interoperability and the frictions of concentric circles.

Screengrab of a field from the survey forms collating a collective imaginary of the moving castle. Image courtesy of Rafi Abdullah.

Prior to building our digital castle, following the ethos of collective dreaming, we had reached out to our interlocutors and peers with whom we had collaborated in various previous capacities, to ask them to imagine what a shared castle could look like. Eventually, the castle was composed from those contributions, as well as reused digital assets from our collective’s past projects.

Later on in the year, we embarked on our first experiment and use case of the collective castle, where we invited a musician friend of ours, Mary Sue, to take over the castle as a stage, through a real-time and live virtual-reality (VR) performance.

I am excited and hopeful for the other permutations that we have lined up for the project.This includes a writing that will map parallels between the idea of a moving castle and the presence of collective steering of religious-spiritual statues/structures in rituals in the region.This is part of a collaboration with writer and researcher Leonardo Caldana. We are also taking potential steps towards rolling out token driven governance mechanics for future endeavours that the collective will be working towards.

Extracted View from the documentation recording of the first (M)across Cultures at the collective’s studio, with guest Wassim Z. Alsindi. Image courtesy of Rafi Abdullah.

Documentation shots of the session at TO NEW ENTITIES’ former studio space. Image courtesy of Rafi Abdullah.

Besides that, in the past year, our collective has also embarked on a new series of activations that we have titled ‘(M)across Cultures’.This was to be a new time and volume unbounded series of activations and projects that testbed anime and its surrounding culture as grounds on which novel and new knowledge can be propagated.

Part of our motivation is also the intention to remove barriers around engaging with discourse and critical theory through more accessible entry points like anime. Despite the cartoonish outlook, for us, explorations in anime have raised potent viewpoints that may have been overlooked and at other times, may have even speculated some of the recent and emergent developments in contemporary society today.

“Part of our motivation is also the intention to remove barriers around engaging with discourse and critical theory through more accessible entry points like anime.”

For the first session, we hosted researcher and cultural organiser Wassim Z. Alsindi, for a gathering that looked at the notion of cowboys and the wild west as the grounds from which to interrogate a blockchain future. At our studio, we co-played with visiting audiences, a game-performance produced by Wassim and other collaborators, that looked at a speculative future where Bitcoin proliferates and global sea rises.

To cap the night off, we screened ‘Cowboy Bebop’, an anime series featuring the character Spike Spiegel, a bounty hunter in the space future, and his group of skilled comrades as they embark on bounty hunting adventures across the solar system. We had selected the anime, which premiered in the late nineties, because it had preemptively anticipated a future of bounty-hunting and gig economies.These have manifested into realities today, thanks to tech platform giants and accelerated advancements in technology.

We are really looking forward to sustaining and organising more of these sessions. We have found that people are more open to enquiring and conversing as the setting is more informal, and less intimidating. We are especially encouraged when critical discourse is propagated through things that we thoroughly enjoy and love, such as anime culture.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of A&M.

This essay was first published in CHECK-IN 2023, A&M’s third annual publication. Click here to read the digital copy in full, or to purchase a copy of the limited print edition.

Read all My Own Words essays here.