Tongktongktong’s practice is grounded in a reconstruction of the “language of emotion” within the digital era. She integrates a posthuman perspective with elements of nostalgia, metaphysics, and contemporary internet culture, generating through embodied creation, a visual language that is at once intimate and detached, sensuous and transcendent.
Using a real-time audiovisual interaction system based on Unreal Engine, she simulates the process of emotional formation and conducts experimental explorations of perception.
This cross-sensory construction seeks to redefine the social and spiritual dimensions of “feeling,” positioning digital art as a medium that connects individual emotion with collective empathy.
Stills in Video Artwork sinsin, 2025. © Copyright Tongktongktong 2025
Early winter, 10th October, 2025, Tongktongktong performed a twenty-minute real-time audiovisual piece titled sinsin at OT301 Amsterdam. Built with Ableton Live and TouchDesigner, the work weaves generative imagery and emotive sounds into a dreamscape that explores the perceptual threshold between the organic and the artificial.
The performance begins with AI-generated sprouts—images produced through ComfyUI that slowly bloom to the pulse of electronic rhythms. As the visuals evolve, bees emerge, gathering virtual nectar within a digital garden, alluding to the eternal cycle of desire and recurrence.
Stills in Video Artwork sinsin, 2025. © Copyright Tongktongktong 2025
Three vocal fragments interlace the piece, portraying moments of intimacy, loss, and memory. Toward the end, rhythm recedes, leaving only a fragile piano melody. In the imagery, a girl slowly turns and weeps, as if the entire garden descends into a shared, empathetic grief.
In sinsin, the boundaries between life and algorithm, nature and machine, are gently blurred. Sound seems to breathe; code seems to blossom. The work meditates, with restraint and delicacy, on the paradox of “emotional automation”—within a world generated by digital processes, tenderness and transience still unfold in their own elusive ways.
Stills in Video Artwork SNSSK, 2023. © Copyright Tongktongktong 2025
SNSSK is Tongktongktong’s first complete virtual reality audiovisual project, powered by Unreal Engine. Inspired by images of Neptune captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, she imagines the planet gradually collapsing into a neutron star during rotation, releasing a torrent of wild and hallucinatory energy—like the perpetual rebirth of a virtual incarnation.
In the work, moving images intertwine with real-time vocal control, becoming a reflection of consciousness. Through a handcrafted lyre made from deer antlers, Tongktongktong triggers the rhythmic movement of visual particles, transforming space into a perceptible, breathing digital organism—a philosophical exploration of existence, virtuality, and the cosmos.
Stills in Video Artwork Fake Stem Cells, 2022. © Copyright Tongktongktong 2025
Fake Stem Cells is an experimental game created with Unreal Engine 4’s Blueprint system and C++. It combines real-time rendering with background music to evoke the illusion of a virtual being: the viewer seems immersed in a world endowed with life and intelligence.
Yet this “intelligence” is illusory. The animation remains a sequence of pre-rendered frames, existing only as pixel data—incapable of true interaction or spatial generation. Its refined realism deceives the eye into sensing intelligence within, revealing the human subconscious projection that equates realism with sentience: the natural is perceived as cognitively superior to the artificial, while the man-made appears “foolish” yet ornate.
The aesthetic foundation of Tongktongktong’s digital art lies in generativity and perceptual interaction. Rather than simply “creating” works, she establishes systemic conditions that allow consciousness to evolve autonomously among code, data, and sensory experience.
Philosophically, her practice resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of ‘Becoming’ and Gilbert Simondon’s theory of ‘Individuation’, emphasizing art as a continuously transforming field of generation.
Within this ongoing flow of emergence, Tongktongktong’s art gestures toward a perceptual community that transcends the boundary between human and machine—where consciousness, emotion, and technology interpenetrate, forming a new poetics of existence in the digital age.
Words by Tom Oakley
Top image credit
Exhibition shots of sinsin, 2025. OT301 Amsterdam. © Copyright Tongktongktong 2025
