Creative Storytime

This storytime presents the timeline of a slice of my creative trajectory that may be of interest to those who want to understand how I come to do what I am doing today (as represented by the different sites I have started to represent the work at various phases of my creative life).

While I have been involved in on-demand creative work while working in a brand-design firm and through dabbling creative writing (fiction and non-fiction) as well as journalistic writing (the writing of features, reviews, and interviews), with a small selection of that endeavor found here and here, I only came to my own as an independent creative when I started on my journey towards the acquisition of a PhD in 2008, as that gave me the space and resources to develop projects I was unable to work on before. Many of the projects I created as a graduate student were blueprints to larger projects that I intend on realizing, going forward. The first one was a webcomic, co-produced with another graduate student in 2009, that was inspired by the then troubled LHC undergoing a 3-year shutdown due to technical problems. That is the first of a series of work I would produce later inspired by a mix of art and science, together with design, with much of the science inspired by the research I was doing on the processes that underlie the pursuit of novel discoveries and ideas in the sciences, specifically physics. 

For a class on visual studies in 2010, I developed the beginnings of an idea that I am pursuing more vigorously now, which is a game walk-through serving as preview to a game inspired as much by philosophical ideas as by real-world implications and applications of data collected through the research process – at the time of writing, I, together with my team, are working on a boardgame centered on the speculative design/design fiction methodology (the first video on that topic could be found here). If I had my choice of an object to explore against the idea of such a game, it would have been a work that dealt with science fiction, which I did through a dual-language audio-textual performative production in 2012.

In 2011, during a period between completing the preliminary exams for advancement to PhD candidacy, and the actual starting of my dissertation process, I decided to take a series of short science fiction stories I have been writing on commission for a web publication by turning it into my first intervention in the arena of creative science prototyping. This was followed more than two years later by a second installation, commissioned by the editors of a special issue on creative science prototyping who had seen my work on the topic. Presently, I intend to revive and complete this work, by marrying both the work of fiction with the speculative design toolkit my team and I are developing I am still working on developing such a toolkit, and that is made increasingly possible with the future projects I am planning out. Returning to 2014, all that work resulted in a PhD dissertation project that also inspired a collaborative undergraduate class offered by my two dissertation advisors. Prior to that, in 2013, I was offered a chance to contemplate on the work I did on art-science thinking through the Scientific American blog. Presently, I am working on an article, as part of a book chapter on design and science, that will showcase on the development of the work since the blog posts a book project tentatively named Media Physics that intends to bring together the history of physics, history of media, artscience, and in an extended way, media arts.

After graduation, I attempted to run a project, in conjunction with a government agency, that would bring science fiction to STEM (this was before STEAM became popular in Malaysia) but that project was pulled without explanation. Therefore, for the next 2.5 years, I concentrated on more conventional academic research (where I engaged in a variety of qualitative research methodologies). When I could, I incorporated (speculative) design-thinking into the courses I taught, particularly the course on media and global Englishes that I was co-teaching with a linguist. In the same course,  I tried to introduce a media-archaeological laboratory component to encourage students to theorize their practices while engaging in thinking about media objects as archaeological artifacts. In May 2017, when I joined a sustainable development center with a focus on research and outreach on a selection of issues relating to the future of sustainability development, I started thinking about how to incorporate design to outreach and project development. However, it was only in 2018, after some birthing complications, that I was able to push forward with the work that I am doing today, the result of which had been published into a collaborative aritcle here. I made a quick response video for an entry for selection to a summer school that was connected to an art-festival, on a topic in futurology. Although I did not win a slot, I thought it would be good to share it here.

During the pandemic, I have created another video detailing the issues of informational asymmetry and informational justice in the Malaysian context, which was published at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science website. In early 2021, I started another chapter of my professional life, in a truly creative sphere, by joining the Faculty of Creative Arts at Universiti Malaya, as an artscience specialist, teaching in the Drama Department. During this very time, I became more seriously interested in media arts (although in reality,  this interest had gone back almost two decades, when I was a young MA student, marking the start of my not-always consistent pursuit of artscience until 2018 made that consistency more possible). I have always been especially interested in the intersection between technology, science, the arts, and learning, even as an undergraduate, although I was less able to articulate the interest in coherent ways until I started maturing as a scholar and creator. Before leaving Universiti Malaya, I completed a grant-funded project on artscience narrative and STEM pedagogy, about three months before I went on leave as a conclusion of my role in the department. As I am now completing my fellowship with the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Aachen: Cultures of Research at RWTH-Aachen University, I am now planning out a series of project while working out my transition plans so that I could realize the kind of projects that had not been realized thus far. More news will be forthcoming through this blog. I have also started publishing short-form articles (though some might be long-ish) on Medium.

 

However, I also retained my continued interest the work from my PhD days; hence, my book project in progress now has the final look that brings together my past and present (from studying physics discoveries in science fiction to looking at various histories of the sciences, speculative design, and futures), while leaving enough material for a second book project (even as I already have a rough conception for a third book project!). I have published across multiple academic journals, trade magazines, and think-tank newsletters. I'd also published a book, which was reviewed here. The rest of my work could be found through the links provided through this site.