Concocting an alternative reality for a country or race, what some call ‘futurism’, has rich potential as a deeply liberating practice. Whether conceived by writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, the envisioning of a futurism integrates elements of a certain nationality or ethnicity into an imaginary world, whether post-apocalyptic, utopian, or mundane. There’s immense societal value to this part-cultural, part-philosophical activity. It’s a chance for nations, races, and communities to apply fresh perspectives on past traumas such as colonisation, enslavement, or war, as well as to address current issues like discrimination, climate change, and displacement.
‘The point of speculative thinking is to make unfamiliar the familiar, and to consider alternate modes of thought in approaching the same problem’, researcher and writer Jaymee Goh told me. Goh is an editor for Tachyon Publications where she reads and edits fantasy and science fiction rooted in forward-facing narratives. She also co-edited The Sea is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia, a 2015 anthology of stories that explore Southeast Asian histories through a lens of disruptive technologies.
The resurgence of Afrofuturism in the last decade from its origins in the 1990s is proof that speculative thinking can be productive in political and imaginative spheres. The movement emphasises Black agency, uniquely Black issues, and Pan-Africanism, and in recent years, its influence in the creative world has been reflected in the work of contemporary pop culture heroes such as filmmaker Jordan Peele, pop stars Doja Cat and Janelle Monae, and author Zadie Smith. This has contributed to a new wave of activism in Black communities globally, which has impacted everything from politics in the United States to the contemporary art market in London. Look at the rise of Athens-Clarke County Commissioner Mariah Parker, who was sworn into office in the southern state of Georgia at the age of 26 with her hand on a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), or at the young artists featured in ‘Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The exhibition, launched in 2021 and curated by Hannah Beachler (the first African-American to win an Oscar in production design for Black Panther), recreated and reimagined life at Seneca Village, a Black community in 19th-century Manhattan.
As with Black communities globally, futurism is an especially valuable tool in Southeast Asia, where societies across a divided and contested region struggle with deep-rooted identity complexes, worries over geopolitical balances of power, censorship, and postcolonial anxieties. Through books, music, paintings, and disruptive technologies, contemporary creatives are using fictional worlds to probe Southeast Asia’s past, present, and unknown future. Southeast Asian futurism is essentially ‘priorities and concerns that examine traditions, histories, aesthetics, and epistemologies to be brought into the future, in interaction with the current global trends’, Goh said in our interview. ‘It’s a love letter to the ancestors, telling them that their presence will be felt in the future’.
The region is diverse from literally every angle – linguistically, ethnically, socioeconomically –so each country has its own distinct take on futurism based on its particular relationship with colonialism, the rest of the world, and each other. Despite these nuances, Southeast Asian interpretations of futurism share one common trait: they explore sensitive political and sociocultural issues through fiction. With freedom of expression stifled by many governments, explosive urban growth, and the region’s sensitivity to erratic weather patterns and threats to food security, the arts offer a rare outlet for locals to subtly comment on current policies. ‘By fictionalising events, censorship can be circumvented’, Jerrine Tan, an assistant professor in the English department at City University of Hong Kong, told me.
In Singapore’s version of futurism, the tone is often darkly comical across contemporary cinema, fiction and other mediums. It tends to have ‘a more insidiously negative effect, where inequality and racism are sanitised or erased through a facade of a techno-utopia’, Tan explained. That is because the wealthy city-state is a technocracy ‘whose cyberpunk skyline has come to serve as a synecdoche for successful late-stage capitalism and neoliberalism through Hollywood films such as Crazy Rich Asians’, she adds.
Geylang Crunk is a video game, audiovisual installation, toy collection and soon to be music album that nods to Singapore’s obsession with smart technology and its long history of censorship and surveillance. Using virtual reality, augmented reality, projection mapping, 3D printing, and other tools, Geylang Crunk offers a tongue-in-cheek look at what it means to be creative in the age of artificial intelligence. The story, set in 2065, follows the beat duo O$P$ and friends in the city-state of Neo-Santara (a play on ‘Nusantara’, a Javanese term for the Indo-Malaysian archipelago) where a centralised AI automates daily life. In the game, players are tasked with delivering precious cargo without alerting the AI. Traversing brutalist architecture and street markets via parkour and hoverboards, the goal is to unleash a creative revolution and fight back against the algorithmic overlords by completing delivery missions and finding hidden musical relics.
Still image from Geylang Crunk by Metamo Industries, an immersive music virtual reality experience. Courtesy Owe Money Pay Money aka O$P$.
‘Real-world Singapore skirts the line between a techno-dystopian vs techno-utopian society unlike anywhere else on Earth’, Geylang Crunk cofounder Race Krehel told me. He’s onehalf of the IRL version of O$P$, a veteran player in Singapore’s underground electronic music scene whose name means ‘Owe Money, Pay Money’– a common phrase used by loan sharks. Krehel and his team want to document the Lion City’s quirks and eccentricities before generative AI actually takes over the world. ‘There is a sense of urgency to stay ahead of the curve and to tell more of our story before it is no longer novel and raise awareness of the realities of living in an augmented world, rather than just contributing to the firehose of procedurally generated content that we find ourselves in presently’, he said in our conversation.
Named after Singapore’s infamous eastern neighbourhood – famous for its red-light district and claypot rice – Geylang Crunk captures the country’s gritty underbelly of society. Just as in real life, back-alley businesses, counterfeit markets and late-night parties thrive behind closed doors while ubiquitous surveillance cameras scour the streets. ‘I find so much of daily life in Singapore to be comically counter-intuitive, where everyone knows what the rules are and how to play just loose enough with them that you don’t get in trouble so long as you aren’t causing a scene’, Krehel continued. ‘Everyone knows what’s going on, but everyone also knows to keep it hush-hush, or you might ruin the party for everyone else. We’re trying to show that juxtaposition’.
The quirks of the Singaporean consciousness are fertile ground for dystopian universes. In Lion City, a delightful collection of short stories from 2018, Singaporean author and queer activist Ng Yi-Sheng, co-organiser of the country’s first-ever Pride festival, IndigNation, applies absurdist humour to unsettling situations in a likely attempt to poke fun at his country’s underlying issues. In one story, the entire island of Singapore disappears, leaving the country’s legacy in the memories of remaining residents. It’s a scenario that speaks to the present-day government’s obsession with economic development rather than identity-building – an area of society that isn’t as supported as material gains, according to critics. What happens when the ports, luxury hotels and efficient transportation vanishes, leaving people with just the idea of being Singaporean? The titular story, meanwhile, recounts the story of a man who discovers that all the animals at the zoo are robots – a reference to the androids in Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and, potentially, a sly observation of Singapore’s law-abiding culture. Another story, Suburbia, is told entirely in the form of a government report, mocking the country’s entrenched bureaucracy.
Across the water, Malaysian authors are also using futurism as a form of critique. Jaymee Goh’s Farid Out At Sea is a utopian tale about a floating city called Marinajaya that embraces universal design, an urban planning concept that prioritises easy access to cities for all residents, particularly the disabled community. Buildings and public spaces in Malaysia’s real-life capital city are meant to follow a universal design code of practice known as MS1184, but wheelchair users often complain about inaccessibility. Marinajaya’s accessibility thus serves as a welcome respite from reality – a utopian work in which the most vulnerable populations are prioritised rather than marginalised.
Farid Out At Sea was part of a project by Project Future Malaysia, a non-profit that encourages Malaysian creatives to design ‘an equitable, fair and sustainable’ country through fiction and art, according to the platform’s website. In 2021, they commissioned writers to imagine Malaysia fifty years out. In the brief, published online, they provided the following prompts: ‘What would Malaysia be like if we were still ruled by the British empire? What would Malaysia be like if we were never invaded? How inclusive will the future be for Malaysians of all colours and creeds? Where will Malaysia’s future food source come from?’ These kinds of questions, according to the organisation, are crucial for nation-building and national identity, helping to push policymakers and citizens into collective action.
Still image from Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong, Krabi 2562, 2019, feature film, 90 min. Courtesy the artists.
In the film Krabi, 2562, directors Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers ask: How will one of Thailand’s most famous islands handle mass tourism? The film’s title doesn’t refer to the year 2562 but rather Thailand’s calendar year of 2019 – the Southeast Asian country uses the Buddhist calendar, which is 543 years ahead of the Christian one. This subtle reference to the (Thai) present and (Western) future is mirrored in the film’s surrealist plot. Time is fluid here as various eras and locations simultaneously merge in a mystical amalgam within one scene. Local characters are often pushed aside (one even disappears in thin air), while animals are turned into statues –indications that local culture is disappearing as an influx of foreign visitors pushes local officials to adopt outward-oriented policies rather than focus domestically.
‘One of the things that I tried to do with this film is to explore this idea of the local community’, Suwichakornpong tells me, who teaches film at New York’s Columbia University. ‘Krabi’s tourism industry started to develop decades ago. Individual tourists come and go, but the “community” of tourists form a significant part of the town – whether or not you like it. In this sense, the tourists (again, not as individuals but as a collective) are part of the “local community”. It is not a binary’. While she agrees that Krabi is growing increasingly homogenised, she doesn’t see her film as a cautionary tale. ‘We don’t have to wait to see what the future holds, the same thing is happening everywhere’, she explained in our chat, referring to tourism-related gentrification as a universal process. ‘It is a question of capitalism’.
How outsiders consume a particular culture is also the topic of The Tree House, a 2019 meta masterpiece by Vietnamese filmmaker Truong Minh Quy. The narrator is a film director living on Mars in the year 2045 who watches his own footage of Vietnam’s Hmong, Kor, and Ruc indigenous groups. In an emotional voiceover, the character draws similarities to himself and US soldiers who filmed their destruction of Vietnamese towns during the American War in Vietnam. He sends some of his dialogues via transmissions to his father on Earth. Delving into the longterm impacts of displacement on ancestral knowledge, Quy uses the past to analyse his protagonist’s present. In an article for the streaming platform MUBI’s website, the director explained the inspiration for The Tree House: ‘to search for a house that has receded so far in the deep holes of memory, but whose afterglow still lingers in one’s body’.1
1 ‘Truong Minh Quy Introduces His Film “The Tree House”’, MUBI, 13 August 2020, https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/truong-minh-quy-introduces-his-film-the-tree-house.
Music, particularly experimental electronics, is also a vehicle for world-building. The abstract nature of synthesised melodies and infinite combinations of distorted effects with samples are especially conducive to presenting alternative lifestyles that shape social possibility. Whether it’s pounding bass or serpentine drum loops, the sheer range of textures and moods in avantgarde electronic music is ideal for creating new environments. In his now-cult 1998 book, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, British writer and filmmaker Kodwo Eshun explains how jazz, dub, funk, and hip-hop used Black diasporic culture and experiences to craft a soundtrack for the future. The genre known as techno, born in Detroit, exemplified that idea in the 1980s. Using novel synthesisers and drum machines, pioneers such as Underground Resistance and AUX88 created icy, skeletal rhythms that challenged conventional notions of dance music at the time.
Similarly, Southeast Asian musicians are revisiting their regional realities to conceive new histories. Java Futurism, a concept coined by Indonesian instrument-builder and analogue synth musician Lintang Radittya, refers to the use of sound art and sound activism among Indonesia’s experimental artists. Sanne Krogh Groth, a music historian from Lund University, and Nils Bubandt, an anthropologist from Aarhus University, have researched the practice heavily. On their joint website Java-Futurism they describe the phenomenon as a means ‘to investigate a past that might have been, in order to imagine and define a future that might be’. Here, Java isn’t ‘so much a place as an imaginary that is at once political, aesthetic, and cosmological’, the duo’s website states.
The Indonesian band Zoo does exactly that with their mind-melting blend of post-punk, experimental rock, noise, and elements of Balinese trance ceremonies. The four-piece ensemble, consisting of Rully Shabara, Bhakti Prasetyo, Ramberto Agozalie, and Dimas Budi Satya, created an ancient civilisation called Samasthamarta that influences their music. They even formed an entire alphabet called Zugrafi and an oral language system called Zufrasi. ‘The scriptures of this lost fictional civilisation tell of a time of impending doom – a lost historical apocalypse that looks very much like our own’, write Groth and Bubandt.2
2 Sanne Krogh Groth and Nils Bubandt, Java-Futurism: Experimental Music and Sonic Activism in Indonesia, https://javafuturism.blogg.lu.se/.
The debut solo album of Bali-based Kasimyn, one-half of the acclaimed rave duo Gabber Modus Operandi, presents an often-sidelined perspective on Indonesia’s violent Dutch colonisation. Released last year under the alias Hulubalang, Kasimyn’s 2023 album BUNYI BUNYI TUMBAL, which the artist translates as ‘Synthetic Feeling for Anonymous Sacrifice’, was inspired by a deep dive into his home country’s war archives, which feature photographs taken by the Dutch. Kasimyn was particularly drawn to the peripheral figures in those historical records – ordinary villagers and working-class families. ‘These secondary characters, devoid of individual significance, bear no names, receive no recognition, and serve as props in the broader narrative of history’, the album’s official description states. Through a lens of skittery percussion, deconstructed noises, and swung rhythms, the record immerses listeners into the world of these bystanders. Recreating the sounds of traditional drums and woodwinds on electronic tools, Kasimyn delivers moments of ecstasy, anger, and victory, as he platforms these forgotten voices.
Ideas of control and power, whether in the context of colonialism or capitalism, tend to be pervasive in most futurist movements. Researcher and Filipino native Chris-Jean Fussner sought to dismantle that trend in 2015 when he launched the Tropical Futures Institute (TFI), a collective that platforms disruptive technologies and design in Southeast Asia. Inspired by a now-famous quote popularly attributed to Canadian-American writer William Gibson – ‘The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed’ – TFI aims to connect like-minded thinkers as a means of decentralising futurism. Supporting early-stage Web3 start-ups and artists, they have helped to put together art shows and fashion collections, as well as a zine festival in Cebu. Fussner, alongside Manila-based electronic music producer Jorge Wieneke, also recently co-developed a compilation of budots, a style of fast-paced dance music that fuses trance, hyperpop, jungle, and gabber, among other high-energy styles. Fussner sees the region’s demographics as a crucial element in the futurist puzzle. ‘Younger populations with access to a plethora of technologies are creating the perfect recipe for continued growth and innovation coming out of Southeast Asia’, he asserted in our interview. ‘The coming years we will see cities, countries, and people transform their realities around them as we leapfrog from technology to technology’. This could produce full-fledged industries and cultures, ‘whether it’s modifying speedboats to race or developing new models of community-positive agritourism’, he told me.
