My Own Words: Odds & Ends
Feeler’s 2025 season
By Alysha Chandra
'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.
Odds & Ends, Feelers' second season. Image by Azure Chaya.
In tropical Singapore, a stable climate makes it hard to perceive the passing of the year. An illusion of constancy obscures persistent growth and decay. Feelers’ seasons began as containers we constructed around our programmes, a way for us to mark the movement of time and the growth of our research. Odds & Ends, our second season, has just come to a close. It grew out of seeds of knowledge from past research, nourished by conversations with our community that budded into earnest questions about art and technology.
As more of us turn to Artificial Intelligence (AI) for immediate answers to questions both professional and personal, how do we grow our appetites for the unknown? As our culture prizes constant innovation and renewal, how do we summon the courage to reach beyond foregone conclusions? Feelers’ response was Odds & Ends, a celebration of miscellany and an opportunity for us to linger in the process of sense-making within a paradigm of clean solutions. With an array of interdisciplinary programmes and writing throughout the month of March, we engaged with artists, technologists, makers, and world-builders we have long looked towards for their willingness to stay with what is uncertain.
I have been a part of Feelers, a research lab of artists and designers, for over two years now. As Marketing Lead, I have had the joy of speaking to the fascinating group of people who make up our audience. Feelers has a dedicated following of artists, but regulars at our events also include software engineers, architects and academics. We have laughed and learned alongside each other. We find community in our shared curiosity around technology both old and new, and in our deep care for the climate and social justice. When thinking of artists working at the intersection of art and technology, most picture those who produce screen-based artworks that engage with “new” technologies, such as AI or Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). With Odds & Ends, it felt important for us to reflect the practices and perspectives we’ve seen in our community by expanding our understanding of technology, and the artists we see working with it.
Feelers' Tech Associate, Ada Adhiyatma, works as a repair technician with Madam Data Sound Labs. In 2024, they ran a repair-a-thon with Feelers, where participants repaired faulty electronics in resistance to a culture of disposability. This season, Ada, together with our Design Lead Azure Chaya, and artist Victoria Hertel, looked beyond repair as a goal. They developed Circuits and Transits, a techno-spiritual ritual of disassembly where participants were invited to take apart their faulty electronics and craft personal talismans out of the pieces that remained.
I chose to turn my long-broken Fujifilm Instax camera, that had once catalogued countless teenage memories, into a talisman of eternal youth. As pine resin incense wafted through the workshop space, I picked up a soldering iron for the first time, and was delighted to discover the mess of miniature metal screws, plastic cogs and circuitry concealed within the casing of the camera. Other participants brought along broken speakers, computer mouses and portable fans. An alarm clock was transformed into a talisman for rest, a printer was remade into a talisman for the written word. We took these devices apart without the pressure of putting them back together. In so doing, we honoured the work they had done for us without expecting that work to continue.
Disassembled camera and talisman from Circuits and Transits. Photo by Alysha Chandra.
Disassembled camera and talisman from Circuits and Transits. Photo by Alysha Chandra.
With Contextual Thread, we explored new nooks and crannies of familiar technology with developer and designer Bảo Anh Bùi. Bảo created a Chrome extension that unlocks the poetic potential of context menus, the nested lists of functions that materialise when we right click on our browsers. We invited three writers, Samuel Caleb Wee, Andrew Devadason, and Izyanti Asa’ari, to write with the extension. The resulting poetry was beautiful. Each piece threaded together words and phrases the writers had gathered while surfing the web, transforming them into a fragmentary, lyric archive of found text. The right click is a gesture I have thoughtlessly performed thousands of times; to witness lines of poetry unfurl from this quotidian gesture was surprisingly moving and suspenseful. Samuel, Izyanti, and Andrew’s poems can be read at contextual-thread.com, and visitors can also download the extension and create their own context menu poem.
With Odds & Ends, we wanted to create opportunities to look beyond existing social, economic and technological paradigms that might feel impenetrable. One of these is the idea that economies have to keep growing. We collaborated with Post Growth Singapore (PGS), a collective I admire for their bold commitment to surfacing alternatives to the capitalist status quo of unfettered growth. Paired with the multidisciplinary artist ila, they ran Open Ending, a two-part session consisting of a critical introduction to post growth thinking, followed by a speculative writing workshop. Spinning out of the ideas introduced by PGS, ila prompted participants to consider how our futures might look in a post-growth technological future. Using the technology of narrative, participants eroded, mutated, and recast the narrative of technology.
In To Dwell A Little Longer, an editorial we commissioned for the season, Teo Xiao Ting profiled technicians at Sim Lim Tower and set-builders whose practices of repair and maintenance live across a scatter of places and modes, ungovernable and unsettled. I had expected Xiao Ting’s editorial to be a swan song for sunset industries, but their interlocutors spoke instead about their choice to stay present and committed to their craft each and every day, adapting to and living alongside the potential for loss in real time.
I was reminded of the quiet power of community through our Delete Parties, casual drop-in sessions we hosted after hours in our office. Spurred by their own tendency to hoard browser tabs, Feelers’ Content and Programmes Lead ants chua initiated these collective decluttering sessions for digital detritus. The parties might have seemed like sober affairs on paper, but they were unexpectedly buzzy, punctuated by occasional exclamations from participants about forgotten screenshots or amusing photos they came across in the process. Amongst the company of friends old and new, I summoned the courage to clear away the hundreds of long-untouched tabs and files I had accumulated on my devices. We kept a running tally: over the course of two sessions, we collectively closed over 1,200 tabs and deleted over 14,000 files.
We ended the season with How To Go On, an annual conversation series where we speak to other collectives and artists about what lies beyond beginnings. This year, we spoke to Jasmine See and Aida Nurellysa, young arts programmers whose work helps us to find ways to weave ideas together. In a discussion moderated by ants, they spoke about how their programming practices continue to emerge, and asked and shared responses to questions of survival and sustainability. Throughout their discussion, Jasmine, Aida and ants spoke about navigating their careers as young producers, their efforts to platform emerging performers, and the communities of support they have built through networks like producers.sg.
ants chua, Jasmine See and Aida Nurellysa in conversation as part of the programme How To Go On, 27 March 2025, Potato Productions Office. Photo by Azure Chaya.
As this season turns, we look towards the rest of the year and what lies ahead of us. This June, we will present the 2025 edition of the School of Alternate Internets, Feelers’ alt-education programme for critical thinking, doing, and undoing around our shared online landscape. Across four Saturdays, we have invited artists and academics to guide us through ways of thinking about the Internet beyond its usual language and logic.
For updates on the School of Alternate Internets, and to find out more about Feelers’ work, visit our website or follow us on Instagram.
About the writer
Alysha Chandra’s work spans multiple creative fields, including writing and theatre. She is Marketing Lead and member of Feelers, a research lab of artists and designers focused on the intersections of art and technology. Her writing has been published in the Pr&ta Journal, and she was the Essays Editor for Singapore Unbound’s SUSPECT Journal. Outside of the arts, she manages NIMBUS, a new network for independent media.
