The grounds for negotiating the affects of fiction onto material form - as elucidated above by the “Artificial” Intelligence (AI) hive mind that is ChatGPT - is not tethered only to more recent developments of speculative fiction in the contemporary. It has in fact predated any recent anxieties caused by the accelerating zeitgeist of the 21st Century.

What if we follow that line of inquiry that suggests that form follows fiction?

That is the strand - amongst many others that emerge from Brandon Tay’s solo exhibition Form and Agency at Yeo Workshop - which will guide this curatorial text. As a nod to the exhibition’s title, my preoccupations will scope in - with as much restraint and/or zeroing as possible - to the limits of the first half of the title: form [1] . On the other hand, our other interlocutor from the project, media art professor and AI whisperer, Bogna Konior, will attend more to the conceptual underpinnings, as well as theoretical and philosophical currents, as it relates to the notions of the second half of the exhibition’s title: agency.

Brandon’s inaugural exhibition is developed by the artist to be interfaced via three different stacks [2] . The first stack relates to the physical and material artworks in the gallery space. There are five 3D printed sculptures that he has aptly named ‘models’, perhaps quite unknowingly but intuitively as to suggest that they are models from which audiences are to glean new knowledge and thoughtlines from. In our conversations, I had probed Brandon about his choice to work with 3D printing as a medium, and he had shared that it had been a considered and intentional choice. For the artist, working with a medium that is relatively new and novel was favoured, as it meant that he could work with a medium that is to some degree, stripped of a strong baggage of legacy or provenance, allowing for new(er) meanings to be imbued. Plastic as a material also carries an essence of coldness, registered into our psyche as an industrial material relegated to exist as packaging. It betrays the artist/artisanal hand and mark making, as opposed to a material like clay. In such a choice, Brandon has revealed himself as an artist that prefers to be invisible and one that is inclined towards attempts to remove the artist as author.

Brandon had also remarked on how essentially 3D printing is the process of translating and transforming something from a two-dimensional plane into a three-dimensional plane. This he found, was akin to his experimentations for the exhibition, which is on some level the creation of three dimensional objects from four dimensional concepts or vice versa.

The models in the gallery space take on different forms and sizes. Some of them appear slimy and blobby whereas others appear more sharp, rigid and sturdy (albeit still retaining some viscosity at the same time). One would not be faulted for mistaking them as some kind of religious artefact or heavily mutated critters. All of them have been rendered with colours, either monotone or duotone, that somehow feel oddly familiar but alienating at the same time. Brandon had picked these specific colours due to their proximity with colours that we do not and cannot conventionally access, colours that reside internally within our bodies and organs. The artist had arrived at the form differently for each of the models. Some of them he had worked towards with a clear formal idea at the onset, whereas for others, their conceptual reference points had shaped their visual and material forms.

Model C: Marrow Codex, the first artwork that one encounters when entering the gallery space, relates to an object conceptualised as a device used towards biological encryption, the encoding of data into the genetic sequencing of DNA - particularly that of a cloned bone marrow. It stands on five thin ‘legs’ with ‘feet’ reminiscent of the webbed feets of ducks. Its ‘body’ is composed of a honeycomb-like bottom, a circular screen-as-’face’, and four hook-like ‘feelers’. The honeycomb form is suggestive of something mathematical and precise, but at the same time, highly organic - forms often found in nature, as if somehow encoded biologically by the laws of the universe. Although looking otherworldly, the artwork’s form mimics that of relics in ‘this world’ that serve as containers for information.

Adjacent to it is Model B: Orchid Mantis, taking its name from a species of pink and white mantis found particularly in Southeast Asia. The orchid mantis, as its name suggests, is a unique insect that is often mistaken for a flower due to its strong resemblance. It is this unique disposition, to be able to almost jump and shapeshift between states or forms (of an insect and a flower), or to even exist as a hybrid of both at the same time, that was important for the artist. Brandon’s orchid mantis however, is a much lossier version of a plant-as-animal/animal-as-plant thing. A proto-animal or proto-plant, in becoming animal [3] , if you will.

The next artwork that is encountered within the exhibition is Model D: 黑科技 [4] . The work takes on the form of an open sided black box with stray teeths and thorns outlining its top surface. The addition of parts and organs familiar to animals or the human, was for the artist a way to retain the sculptures in the domain of entities with agency, and not merely inanimate materials. When I was first introduced to this work, my mind made an immediate connection to the black boxes of aeroplanes: data recorders often used to extract flight information on the occasion of vehicle failures. However, Brandon’s provincial lore notes [5] seem to suggest a deeper reference to the orientalist tensions of the notion of a Chinese box, “[representative] of a dark mirror to a form of Chinoiserie [6] , in which Western views of the inscrutability of Chinese thought, culture and technology are reflected in harsh and uncanny aggressiveness.” The artist had also shared with me that the idea of a Chinese black box had come to him later on in the process, and that initially, he was inspired by the formal quality of the infamous Kowloon Walled City [7] . Brandon’s first touchpoint to the city was through William Gibson’s imagined version of it in his literary works as a virtual environment. In Gibson’s imaginations, the virtual city is a clandestine space, accessible only via a glitch at the central core that hides the space away from government regulations and mega-corporations. In that sense, Brandon’s black box is a reversal of that imagination, where the secret is contained at the core. Whether the secret is the formula to future technological prowess, or early civilization and ancient wisdom, is left for us to speculate.

In proximity, sits Model D: Nomad Lexis, an artwork that also resembles the form of a hybrid being similar to that of the orchid mantis. This particular work is the artist’s attempt at proposing a material form to the way that AI models potentially perceive things, be it objects, ideas or information. My reading of it, as inaccurate as it may be, is the intention to suggest an abstract and ambiguous form, as a reference to the way that AI models retain much more fidelity in their meaning-reading. They do not discriminate information (between what is ‘fact’/’truth’ and what is made-up or ‘fiction’) the way that we humans do due to our subjectivities and (perceived) rationality. Brandon refers to this fidelity as the “inhuman subjectivity”. In that sense for me, the work then becomes this signifier object of the collapse of human semiotics, a starter pack memorabilia for the forthcoming new arc of what he charmingly frames as “alien glossolalia” [8].

Tucked at a corner is the final model that closes the material makeup of the exhibition, Model A: Adversaries. The last (as introduced in this text) 3D printed artwork takes on a gooey and molten configuration close to that of a brain (an association easily made owing to its pink paint coat). The work is named after the concept of generative adversarial networks (GAN) [9] which is at the same time also the conceptual basis that informs its visual manifestation. Adversaries is Brandon’s conception of GANs in an organic and material form, imagined as a speculative artefact and artificial lifeform that is capable of summoning networks into living beings. Smelted into the artefact are four humanoid-like forms (described more accurately as anthropomorphic lab-grown homunculi in the lore) that act as engines for opposing and symmetrical desire-drives, instrumental in the manifesting process. In the artist’s mind, the work also becomes this allegory for a failed endeavour in shifting from developments of generative AI to a symbiosis of biological computation.

Additionally, a sleek dibond print (Language as Time’s Shadow: A Brief History of Synchrocognition) - made in collaboration with the exhibition designer, Darius Ou, - rests on the opposing wall to the final model. At first glance, the print appears as if to be either some complicated data visualisation schematic or diagram, or a blown up page straight out of an ancient occult grimoire or spellbook. But upon closer inspection, one realises that it is a meticulous visual blueprint of the main and extended thematics surrounding the project - from black holes and black swans, to oracle bone scripts and heikiji - mapped out and connected. Language as Time’s Shadow (...), is perhaps to be read - intentionally or not - as an exercise in fleshing out the highly complex network of connectivity between ideas of intelligence and knowledge. A probe and suggestion that perhaps this processing of gargantuan information networks may very much escape not only the confines of a 9:16 print, but our human comprehension.

The second stack of the exhibition relates to the virtual components housed within the artworks. Each model in the exhibition houses within their respective embedded screen, non-exact digital clones (I think of them as their ghosts or spirits) of their sculptural and material forms. Technical limitations due to their individual forms prohibit the models from having a uniform or elaborate screen interface, with the exception of Model A: Adversaries, which Brandon has given the pepper’s ghost [10] treatment. The approach of suspending two dimensional images in the air three dimensionally is an appropriate one, when thinking of it as an act of channelling (of the spiritism variety) and the idea of ‘submitting’ oneself to an ‘other’. The artist’s intention of the screen as interface is to introduce and contextualise the sculptures as being animate, but I think it also becomes the portals from which the worlds (our ‘real’ one, as well as the artists’ speculative world) travel. They are also for me the link to the final stack of the exhibition.

The third stack relates to the live and interactive game simulation projected between the first two models at the entrance of the exhibition. The simulation that is beamed onto the gallery walls is a live one, meaning to say that at every moment it is switched on, a new instance is activated and played out. Contained in the simulation is a chrome hued alien environment that looks like either the surface topology of a Mars like planet (its giving vast plains, tectonic erosions, impact craters, terraformations and the likes), or microscopic scenes from a heavily utilised petri dish. Within this environment, the digital spirits of the five models roam freely, moving about to their heart's content with free will and agency. They fly about at times, jitter on the spot, and even crash into or float through each other occasionally. The motivations behind creating such an environment for interaction between them is rooted in Brandon’s curiosity into why there is a general lack of interest in visualising ideas interacting with each other [11] . This is something that is extended even to the way we think about things like our ideological positions. The environment then becomes this testbed for inspecting how multiple ideas can possibly interact. Do they engage in skirmishes and consume each other? Do they create offshoots or mutations? Do they leave traces to some kind of map or pattern of relationality? For me, what is really admirable and commendable about this effort by Brandon is in the fact that it is done under the gumption of an extremely inquisitive and curious mind, and as a form of artistic expression and creative pursuit. A far cry from experimentations happening in some secret lab somewhere else in the world, towards a first mover advantage in AGI future forecasting efforts.