impasse to verbal (2018), aluminum dibond prints, zoning maps, shanzhai t-shirt, cellphone car holders, blue light

impasse to verbal (2018), aluminum dibond prints, zoning maps, shanzhai t-shirt, cellphone car holders, blue light

impasse to verbal (2018), aluminum dibond prints, zoning maps, shanzhai t-shirt, cellphone car holders, blue light

impasse to verbal (2018), aluminum dibond prints, zoning maps, shanzhai t-shirt, cellphone car holders, blue light

Interested in the ‘semiotic thickness’ of Geylang, an area located on the east-side of Singapore where bustling street life, informal mesh networks, covert activities, shifting urban plans, building laws, and data mining protocols are increasingly intertwined, I observed the diffuse entanglements of bodies and surfaces, behaviors and networks. The work is a visual assemblage that merges wall notices, official zoning maps, personal routes, and various extracts sampled from the urban landscape. Through an intricate interplay of stratifications and transparencies, it creates an imploded visual environment where information is simultaneously displayed and withdrawn, revealed and cloaked. Steeped in a pervasive blue glow reminiscent of the light of electronic devices, the signs are left to float and clash into leaky configurations that shatter conventional patterns of readability. This work is borne out of a continued interest in semiotically thick informational ecosystems that exert themselves as a felt disposition, even if they remain opaque and beyond description – an impasse with latent reformulatory potential. 
The work comes out of my continued engagement with the neighborhood and from my speculations on the slippage between what things are, how they look, and what they do—the play between description and disposition, to follow some of architectural theorist Keller Easterling’s terms. 
The title “impasse to verbal” was taken from a 2017 text I had written for a previous project, Horizon99, in which I considered alternative, unrecognized signals as forming a diffuse, other-world, and where acts of relating, receiving, and relaying these signals differently creates a kind of “lo-fi sci-fi”. It follows Lauren Berlant’s exhortation of “living within an impasse”, elaborated on in her book Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011), which is to come out the other way by existing absorbingly within the time and space of a breakdown, where the scripts have gone awry. The impasse is a shadow flight under/between normalcy, close to the skins of both death and life.