“𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘺 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘧𝘢𝘴𝘵.” — Virginia Woolf, 𝘛𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦 Over the past three months, I’ve had the immense privilege and pleasure to be working alongside peers on 𝙏𝙞𝙢𝙚 𝙋𝙖𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙨.
The participating artists consist of friends, both old and newly made through this exhibition, some of whom I have worked with before and all of whom I have deep admiration and tenderness for — Yeyoon Avis Ann, Victor Paul Brang Tun, Stephanie Jane Burt, Jon Chan, Chong Lii & Christian Kingo, Diana Rahim, Divaagar, Fazleen Karlan, Khairullah Rahim, Mengju Lin, and Ashley Yeo. ila’s work is also lovingly presented in collaboration with Izyanti Asa’ari and co-curated by Syaheedah Iskandar and myself.
Thank you friends and collaborators for passing the time with me and together. A lot of care and energy has been given but I have also felt it reciprocated. I also need to extend my thanks to the team at @singaporeartmuseum who have helped me mould this joint vision into reality.
𝙏𝙞𝙢𝙚 𝙋𝙖𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙨 is showing till 21 Feb 2021, at National Gallery Singapore, Level 3, Singtel Special Exhibition Gallery B. While you’re here, please also take time to visit 𝘼𝙣 𝙀𝙭𝙚𝙧𝙘𝙞𝙨𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙈𝙚𝙖𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙞𝙣 𝙖 𝙂𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙘𝙝 𝙎𝙚𝙖𝙨𝙤𝙣 curated by my brilliant peer and neighbour, Syaheedah Iskandar @jaydahhh . Both exhibitions are part of 𝘗𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘢𝘭𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘕𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭 𝘞𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘉𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨, a collective response by the visual arts community initiated by National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum as a response to the global pandemic.
While visiting the exhibitions, please be mindful of social distancing, take care of your safety and the safety of others around you. If you’d like me to bring you around the exhibition, drop me a message 💌
Ergodic Paths, Open Ends
𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘺-𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘴 weaves together scattered yet kindred coordinates within a 3D printed book. It interleaves the Many-Worlds interpretation of reality as manifold with modes of making, reading, and writing that are themselves multilinear—branching, recursive, and manifold.
Here, the book is approached as a responsive technology: recollective and prospective at once, capable of holding open multiple narrative portals. A reader may follow its serpentine paths or chart their own course [3]. Either way, orientation yields to drift, and drift becomes destination.
Coined by Espen J. Aarseth, ergodic literature [12] is derived from the Greek words ergon (“work”) and hodos (“path”), describing texts that solicit “non-trivial effort” to traverse. In such works, reading becomes movement along forking paths, where plot emerges belatedly, as a consequence rather than a guide.
The narrative of 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘺-𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘴 is bookended by “I” and “you”—“writer” and “reader”—colluding and colliding across parallel tracks, each extant in the substrate of the other. Every “I” writes to aggregate a “you”, and every “you” reads in search of return. Reading and writing are constitutive acts, tethering sentences into a provisional whole. The book’s permutative form relays a sentiment echoed in the arc of flames: that the experience of time is the experience of change. As the prose tells us, “all endings are homecomings, ferrying us to the start” [9].
Book prose @daisyfay . Photo @jonathantyl
Exhibited at ArtScience Museum.
[12] As a prime example of ergodic literature, 𝘏𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘴 by Mark Z. Danielewski is notorious for its labyrinthine layout that bears the mark of the narrative—requiring careful perusal through convoluted typographic passageways and the catacombs of its marginalia. Danielewski also allegedly typeset the book himself, affording words on the page a means of negotiating their reading.
[13] An ending passage details a self-referential book 𝘏𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘴 being burnt page by page so that it can be read in darkness. The book consumed non-metaphorically—text and page so inextricably linked they face the same end.
Multiversal Publishing and Stories
𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘺-𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘴 opens with a two-way divergence, presaged by a pair of numerical strings. From this originary split, the prose splinters into two strands of realities, then four, eight, and ultimately sixteen endings.
Both informed by and informing the book’s format, the narrative unfolds along branching paths. Across separate wordlines, memories branch and ripple like the limbs of a tree or the leaves of a book, ferrying us through an ambiguous spacetime, where past, present, and future collide. Recorded within these pages is a continuum of lived and inherited memories, carried by protagonists occupying different time signatures along divergent worldlines.
The numerical string [3] that opens the book names an instance of this splitting, and it is not incidental. In 2019, theoretical physicist @seanmcarroll , a proponent of the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI), embedded a 50-digit string of 1s and 0s generated by a Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG) within his book, 𝘚𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘋𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘭𝘺 𝘏𝘪𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘯 [4-5]. This sequence implies the existence of other possible sequences, and with them, parallel universes bearing other textual variations of the same book.
Carroll’s QRNG string can be read as an Inter-world Specifying Book Number: an ISBN that locates a version of the book along a specific worldline, and a formative instance of multiversal publishing. Travelling from Carroll’s book into 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘺-𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘴, this binary string becomes a shared coordinate, anchoring one documented worldline, marking our relative position among all possible universes.
[11] Within MWI, the state of the universe (its wave function Ψ) evolves as a vector within an abstract mathematical space known as Hilbert space, a domain where all possible worlds coexist. This locus may be likened to the 3D printing filament spool containing every physically permissible configuration of objects. In the context of 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘺-𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘴, all multiversal possibilities of the book, in principle, reside within a “Hilbert spool”.
Book prose by @daisyfay . Photography by @jonathantyl . Commissioned by and exhibited at ArtScience Museum.
Manifold Formats of the Book
𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘺-𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘴 is a 3D printed book with branching prose that unspools across branching pages, unwinding narratives and worldlines from a single filament spool.
It gestures towards the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI), theorised by physicist Hugh Everett in 1957 and later popularised by Bryce DeWitt. The MWI commits to the strangeness of quantum mechanics, asserting the coexistence of parallel realities that arise from quantum interactions. Though unobservable, these branched worlds are understood to be as unequivocally existent as our lived reality.
Drawing an affinity between the branching syntax of the MWI and the book form, 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘺-𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘴 unfolds through an arborescent structure that echoes the MWI’s branching schematic [4]. As the world thins through subsequent bifurcations, each spread is also 3D printed progressively thinner. Diverging from a centrally bound spine, the book is assembled through a network of decentralised bindings—pages branch orthogonally with fore-edges bound to the folded edge of subsequent spreads through “double-slit” attachments. The end of each page begets iteration, functioning as spines for coextending pages [11].
In a conventional codex, pages are referred to as leaves, and the format itself was named after a caudex (trunk of a tree). Relatedly, the splitting of worlds postulated by the MWI is described as branching. This shared lexicon also situates the branching book—an “arborex” format, a portmanteau of “arborescent” and “codex”—as a native form in parallel worlds, each with its own reality and practices of book-making.
𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘺-𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘴 is commissioned by and exhibiting in ArtScience Museum. Thanks to the exhibition team and Spacelogic. Photography by @jonathantyl
[4] An example of the MWI’s branching schematic from Something Deeply Hidden (2019) by Sean Carroll.
[10] A Primer of Higher Space (1913) by Claude Bragdon, using analogy to conceive of unobservable fourth-dimensional objects, such as the hypercube (tesseract).
[11] A reimagining of Bragdon’s piece, as if from another branch of the many-worlds. The arborex format can be thought of as a hypercodex (tesserex).
32. 🚪 Time runs one way and I look the other way. Here, the slow work of naming, of knowing, of returning. Wind in my hair, threaded through your hands. Flame caught, sheltered. Kindred currents, or twin flames. A promise growing roots. The unhurried labour of closeness. Nothing resists entropy but we do our best to hold the scatter. I know of the nearness between us that asks and answers. With some, there is no need for spectacle. 🪟
Arrive, to say the word precipitates a curling motion, you hold the first syllable on your tongue then expel the final syllable with your breath. Inwards then outwards. 2024 had begun with a sea of expectations, a quiet desire for a linear rhythm that would finally consolidate my life, my dreams, my work, and as the months collected, I realised that this linearity was a myth that bound me to people and places that I had to surrender. I found more dreams as other ones eroded. Time is a movement towards greater disorder or disorder is a marker of time. So every year, our lives get messier and surer. In 2024, I’ve had the most wonderful thought partners and companion practices whose vulnerability, wisdom, and generosity helped conduct me through the fertile clutter of life. This year, so many conversations confirmed and broadened my capacity to feel, think, and to hold space for more questions, and with those questions, more possibilities of being here with each other in a world and timeline that can feel so fractured and yet still remain so faithful. So, here I am at the pier of 2025 with all these pieces, and continuing the work of gathering the pieces. Yes, we have work to do 🧑🚀🧩💞
31. ❤️🖤 🌊 Long story short. Reciprocity feels so sweet. I will try to love what comes next. Loosen my grip, soften my stance, open my heart, close the previous chapters. Every year, I grow older in the orbit and presence of the people I want to continue doing life with.
It’s been a week ❤️🩹
To witness Taylor Swift cycle through her eras is to reach back to all my younger selves who grew up listening to her, all my past foolishness and romanticism somehow alchemising to the vivid fact of the person that I am now.
They say it’s who you think of when Taylor’s songs come on. I thought of my younger selves, my friends, my sister, my past projects, the person I like now, the people I loved before, and my own coming of age. I have given many pieces or whole parts of my heart over the past three decades.
Traveling from the lovestruck enchantment of liking someone “please don’t be in love with someone else” then looking around and realising that my orbit has always been populated by my loved ones “long live the walls we crashed through”, to the trust fall realization of how “he’s passing by, rare as the glimmer of a comet in the sky, and he feels like home, if the shoe fits, walk in it everywhere you go”, and not forgetting the millennial anthem of “you’re on your own kid, yeah, you can face this.”
Those 3.5 hours in concert time was a coming of age sequence. I sung alongside my friends, hugged them, texted them, endeavored to love myself better and to let love go full well knowing it will return to me because it is not a finite resource, I will keep honing a generous capacity for it. To be a lover. And to also be a writer. This concert felt like finding a way to call home all the tender and verbose parts of me. Thank you, @taylorswift 💖 #ErasTourSingapore
🔮 2023 Wrapped 🎀
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1️⃣ The Jeanette Winterson masterclass, she instructed all of us how important it was to make and keep your appointments with yourself. And this year, I’ve made so many plans with myself and the people I love and know, and the people I love and don’t personally know, like...
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2️⃣ Being in Seoul to experience 2PM in concert (other concerts attended: Phoebe Bridgers and The 1975).
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3️⃣ Starting work at the NUS Libraries Writers’ Centre. I want to say it’s kismet I became employed in a workplace that is so deeply aligned with my values, and that teaches and encourages me to put to practice all the ways we try to hold space for creative work, writing, each other, but I have been searching for a while. Within my first month, I knew that this imperfect but incredibly sincere place was more right for me than I ever expected. All along I’ve used my passion as compass, but I think the more accurate measure is my values.
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4️⃣ Being comfortably strong and vulnerable in my own skin, by way of exercise.
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5️⃣ I read enthusiastically, distractedly, sporadically, regularly, and somehow managed to reach the summit of my goal. My favorites reads this year are: Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss, Carissa Foo’s No Wonder, Women, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Sloane Crosley’s Cult Classic. My favorite movies are Past Lives (2023), The Taste of Things (2023), Anatomy of a Fall (2023), River (2023), and Women Talking (2022).
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6️⃣ This year, I’ve laughed more than I cried even if I had a minor heartbreak over a minor figure. I still got anxious several times a month so I journaled every day. I ate so much great food with even greater people that I am starting to like, or have always loved. In that process, I became scared of getting to know new people and the inevitable accumulation of facts about them and worrying that this personal history will be salt to my gaping wound if and when we separate, but I still continued heartfirst because getting to know someone is tender, banal, and very beautiful. I’m heartened to have my people with me this year and into the new year. Steady, now.
A few variations on happiness. Taro bubble tea nails and a bag full of Olive Young on my shoulders. Finding a scent that feels true. The pink and purple blooms that dotted Seoul, and I kept thinking, that’s a piece of my heart, then another in the charming fishmonger who worked in a neon pink apron and bright orange gloves. Walking happily by @kxxyll ’s side to the river when the sun loved us too hard, to meals best shared in pairs, to convenience stores for everything in between, to a vinyl bar that wouldn’t take us in, and finally it was time. I remember the blue quietude of the morning before @real_2pmstagram ’s concert. Then, they arrived, loud, bracing, delicious, and I was there, actually there, because everything was sweaty and delirious. I’m still living in the after. 💗❤️💚💙💛💜
Seoul is a city for pairs, I told @kxxyll , Cupid must be hard at work here. Every meal we had was like a small event, parts had their counterparts. Like, grilled meat you lovingly wrap in lettuce followed with a kiss of garlic, slurpy, dark, expressive jajangmyeon coupled with savoury, warm, bright jjamppong, firm cold noodles touched by strips of jeon. We learnt too that language of pairs, instant noodles by the river shared by two but not without two extra rolls of kimbap. I think eating well together (sharing food, serving food, knowing how the other takes their food, warm conversation by warm food) is a love language, right? 💞🌶️🍜🥢
30 and a day 🦀🔮 Growth will also feel like loss. I’m shedding and reconciling. Not running away but walking towards. There’s a season for everything and love needs a little and a lot to bloom. Sometimes, I offer my hand to another. Blue is a spell I’m still learning to cast. My guardian creatures are always there. I do things from love, not for love. Flowers will always have a place in my home. Courage, courage. I go, witch that I am. I’ve been taking this year to make lots of room. And I’m always thankful to gather the years with @skeletone 🥀