Operation Kata-tropical (Aural) Bloom [ÖK(^)B]

Operation Kata-tropical (Aural) Bloom [ÖK(^)B] is a (serious) game, a digital archive, an exhibition, and an artwork. Beginning in the deep future, in the year 26777, the gameplay experience is centred on the forgotten architecture of the historical St. Joseph’s Institution, allowing players to navigate the site as an apparition reclaimed by natural forces. This space also functions as a digital archive of architectural and oral histories, documenting foundational elements of material and immaterial culture. As an exhibition, the virtual space hosts artworks that challenge institutional ownership of these cultural artifacts.

As an artwork in its own right, ÖK(^)B is a para-fictional descent into lost pasts, speculative futures, and alternative realities. Occupied by architectural fragments and immersive sonic events, hallucinated identities and spectral whispers, this meta-artwork engages with historical facts and traumas through possible worlds and persisting objects.

The forest is alive, and as such, ÖK(^)B is always changing. Throughout the game witness the presence of current and past explorers navigating the site. With each visit, take note of the atmospheric changes as real-time weather data influences the virtual environment. Beware the reverse flow of time because as the present moment approaches, entropy erodes the surrounding world and its inherent possibilities.

ÖK(^)B was developed in collaboration with the research lab formAxioms and features contributions from artists Juan Covelli and Hings Lim.

Click here to enter the virtual realm of okab.sg

In collaboration with:

about the collaborator and artists

formAxioms
formAxioms (@form.axioms) is research media-lab established in 2018 in Singapore, by Eva Castro and Federico Ruberto. The design laboratory prototypes installations, games, performances, platforms: physical-digital spaces as interfaces, infrastructures for collective and participatory operations. We work to (re-)discover emancipatory potentials at the intersection of art, design and theory. formAxioms is a curatorial core of the collective Hothouse.

Juan Covelli
Juan Covelli (b. 1985, Bogotá Colombia) is an artist currently living and working between London and Bogotá. A graduate of MA in Contemporary Photography, Practices and Philosophies at Central Saint Martins, London, his practice revolves around the technological potentials of 3D scanning, modelling, and printing to readdress entrenched arguments of repatriation and colonial histories. His work has focused on new materialities generated by the digital era, particularly on the dynamics and approaches of the physical within the digital world.

Hings Lim
Hings Lim (b. 1989, Kuala Lumpur Malaysia) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. He works in an expanded use of mediums that includes video, installation, sculpture, performance, simulation, and situation. His process-oriented practice probes the formation of apparatuses while addressing the multiplicities between historicity, performativity, materiality, and subjectivity of things and their becoming. Lim completed a Master of Fine Arts degree, the Performance Studies Graduate Certificate at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia.