Johann Yamin, Angel Wong
6 October 2025–3 October 2027
Web-based Hypertext Game. Accessible at all times.
Spiralscape VII: World’s Healing Sluice is a text-based adventure video game that opens gateways to other universes. Players take on the role of a “stonehealer”, a part-craftsman and part-mage character who hails from a world of statues, navigating ruined landscapes in need of mending. Guided by branching narrative choices, written responses and digital sketches fed into the game, players explore fantasy worlds in disrepair, each defined by a central landmark: a fountain, a bridge and a façade.
Inspired by early hypertext interactive fiction and branching narrative gamebooks, Spiralscape VII prompts players to make choices, reflect and shape their own journey. With players’ consent, their responses are preserved as an archive of their emotions and experiences. The video game features a soundtrack by the collaborative artist group elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ, drawing from their live coding performances that explore Southeast Asia’s sound cultures and shared sonic heritage.
Spiralscape VII uses hypertextual encounters to rearticulate histories of public art as navigations of space and context. It moves towards a dislodge of the world-as-is, echoing artists’ political invocations across time for futures of regeneration, redistribution and sustenance.
Photos
About the Artist
Johann Yamin (he/they) is an artist, art worker and educator. His current research and writing focus on digital cultures from the contexts of Singapore and its broader region of Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on the materiality of communication infrastructures and their entanglement with colonial histories. Responding to the technopolitics of virtual worlds, his practice has taken shape through text-based video games, moving image installations, curatorial work and varied forms of support. He was a 2020 Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow at Eyebeam, New York where he co-organised the online project Pulau Something and a Curatorial & Research Resident at Singapore Art Museum in 2021. He was awarded a Rhizome Microgrant in 2023. He is a PhD student at New York University’s (NYU) Media, Culture and Communication programme.
Angel Wong is a Singaporean creative technologist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Working across various interactive media, from the ubiquitous web and apps to mixed reality, Angel is now drawn to using physical computing to create tangible experiences we lack from our screen-filled lives of today. She uses her work to free her inner child from the confines of her strict upbringing, creating interactive experiences that encourage playfulness. Angel was formerly a user experience designer on award-winning projects in the Singaporean public sector, from TraceTogether (SG Good Design Mark 2022 Platinum Award) to the Ministry of Education’s Classroom of the Future (IDC Outstanding Smart City Project for Education 2022). She is currently a master’s student at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ is a collaborative research-based group consisting of Thai diaspora Bangkok-born, Brooklyn-based artists, Kengchakaj–เก่งฉกาจ and Nitcha–ณิชชา. The collective delves into subversive storytelling by exploring non-hegemonic sounds and visual archives, historical research, decoding and unlearning biases. elekhlekha’s work spans performing documents, multimedia and technology centres to interrogate, experiment, explore and define decolonised possibilities. A Thai word, elekhlekha means dispersedly, chaos, all-over and non-direction to break free our practices from being labelled through a Western lens.
In 2022, they were awarded the Lumen Prize Gold Award. The artists have received grants and development funds from the Processing Foundation, CultureHub, Rhizome, Lincoln Center, National Communication Museum (Melbourne) and more for their projects. elekhlekha was a 2024 Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellow, 2023–2024 AIR at CultureHub and NEW INC Y10 Art & Code track and Y11 Extended Realities track member.