slow drift

 

2026

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Angsana wood inscribed with spectrogram, soundscape captured with custom-made contact microphones and single-channel video

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slow drift imagines how the seed pod of an Angsana tree, a fixture of Singapore's landscape, might listen to its environment when aided by technology. Custom piezo microphones encased in latex casts of the tree's winged, wind-dispersed seeds, dangle from branches and lie in the leaf litter, capturing sound and vibration in-situ with trees across various sites. From the footsteps of ants to the brush of the breeze, technological and botanical auditory perception come together to create a machine-plant collaborative soundscape. Some of these recordings are visualised and imprinted onto the remnants of a felled Angsana tree, weaving together sonic and arboreal textures.

 

Singapore's treatment of the Angsana tree reflects how nature is instrumentalised in the cityscape. Once planted by the thousands, many were wiped out by the “Angsana wilt” disease between the 1970s and 1990s, leading to mass culling and the species being phased out in favour of sturdier alternatives. Since then, botanists here have developed disease-resistant variants, and planted them in selected past habitats. The Angsana trees in Singapore today have either survived a perilous past or been technologically tempered for the future.​​