Textured Zooming is a web-based artwork that explores the experience of texture on a 2D screen desktop environment, created as a response to a study that shows participants in a 3D online art gallery had difficulties in determining the materials of the artworks and wished they could zoom in to see the textures better. In this work, artefacts are only represented by the images of their textures. When the users point their mouse on a texture, the pointer will change into either a fingernail or a coin. They can zoom in and out using the mouse scroll button or the up and down keyboard keys. Whilst zooming, they can hear the sound each texture makes as it is scratched by a fingernail or a coin. The users can guess the materials of the textures on the quiz page. Thus far, people have been able to guess the materials correctly.

‘ChoreoGraphiComfort’ is inspired by a critical reflection on the organicity and corporeality that (e)merge in the thermal space of vernacular architecture. Abstracting the creative notions of choreography, graphics, and comfort, the artwork uses an ethnographic survey of living conditions in low-cost flats in Malaysia during the recent Covid-19 pandemic and an architectural representation of a 300-year-old traditional Malay house called Istana Puteri Bongsu. Centering the use on the issue of thermal comfort, a series of thermal images of the human body in various choreographed postures were filmed against the background of a traditional Malay house. The images were then fed into an AI platform to generate a new set of images that were morphed into each other. This creates a surrealist abstraction of what we term ‘thermal choreography’ that complicates the polemics of organic architecture and cultural wisdom in adapting human thermal comfort to the natural environment.

Digital-Tropical: Venice of the East highlights the significance of traditional cultural wisdom in the contemporary context of global warming. Although the Malaysian climate is different from Venice, however, like Venice, houses in Malaysia are traditionally designed to function around water, and in the rise and fall of river levels due to the monsoon and tides. Traditional Malay houses are made with timber using modular design that can be reused for generations. Although the houses are built high on stilts, there are doors which do not have stairs that are only used during flooding to access boats. In this artwork, a LiDAR video of a 300-year-old traditional Malay house, is juxtaposed with visualization of historical ocean wave height data using light projection. The data were collected near Tioman Island for two years for a renewable energy project. Traditional Malay houses ‘work around’ the natural environment to function in the uncertainties of nature unlike many technologies which arose from scientific advancement that ‘subdue’ the natural world by making irreversible and detrimental changes to it. Renewable energy technology also needs to function in the uncertainties of nature by ‘working around’ it. We need the knowledge of wave patterns to generate electricity. Thus, this artwork juxtaposes the tropical architecture of the old and new technology paradigm, both that ‘work around’ nature, to preserve nature. Malaysia came under Western colonization with the fall of the entrepôt city of Malacca in 1511. The title of this artwork is inspired by Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese explorer, who once described Malacca as “Venice of the East.” With this, we would like to highlight that even though Malaysia and Venice are separated by climate, cultural and geographical distance, we are living together in a warming world which will affect Malaysian cities as much as it will affect Venice.

Sonic Atomic Interaction Radio (SonicAIR) is an ambient awareness technology probe designed to explore how connecting the soundscapes of friends or family members might reduce the isolation of seniors living independently. At its core, SonicAIR instruments kitchen activity sites to produce an always-on real-time aural representation of remote domestic rhythms. This article reports how users in two pilot SonicAIR deployments used the sounds as resources for recognizing comfortable narratives of sociability. Used alongside telecare monitoring, such technologized interaction might enable older people to engage in community-oriented soundscape narratives of shared social responsibility.