Computer Boy
Aster Pontillas
Under the storm you are a conductor if you were struck by lightning the flash would obscure everything you would feel as if it were only happening to you
Under the storm you are a conductor if you were struck by lightning the flash would obscure everything you would feel as if it were only happening to you
Trigger warning: themes of internalised transphobia and gender dysphoria
It’s loud.
How can a temple be loud? Loud and dark but bright.
It’s so bright that it hurts my eyes and leaves me lost, makes me wonder where I am. The fans are harsh. The neon is nostalgic, “Of a time I never experienced”, as I’ve seen in countless Youtube comments on hours-long vaporwave music compilations. For the first time, I understand them. It’s an unsettlingly fascinating feeling. To feel nostalgia for these neon lights, reminiscent of a digital time you can never go back to.
But aren’t digital things ubiquitous? Don’t things that are on the internet stay there forever? Unlike the physical: fleeting, never staying. Take a picture, it’ll last longer. Post it online, it’ll be there forever.
At least that’s what I was told.
Rel Pham’s dazzling shrine sits in the middle of the room, flaunting—or cautioning me against—a myriad of digital landscapes to get lost in. Neon blue, green, white, red. A sea of digital, neon temples. Neon cityscapes. Neon incense sticks. Neon backdrops outlining digital mountains. I can’t tear away from the warnings they all heed me.
UNDER THE STORM
YOU ARE A CONDUCTOR
IF YOU WERE STRUCK BY LIGHTNING
THE FLASH WOULD OBSCURE EVERYTHING
YOU WOULD FEEL AS IF IT
WERE ONLY HAPPENING TO YOU
Maybe I’ve stepped into that digital nirvana he portrayed, crossed that boundary between what’s real and what’s behind a screen.
I wonder if there even is a boundary? Maybe there isn’t. Maybe there is, and I crossed it a long time ago.
Standing here, I wonder if it was worth crossing.
***
Installation view of Temple by Rel Pham, NGV Melbourne, 2023. Photography by National Gallery of Victoria.
My Father undertook a degree in engineering and was working for Intel throughout my childhood, while my Mother was a professor at a university specialising in I.T. We had a computer at home because of this, a rarity in 2000s Philippines. Most days I still spent outside, picking red santan and skidding my knees on concrete. But the whirring of computer fans has followed me my whole life, my eyes have always been soaked in blue light.
There was something about the digital world back then that was so colourful. Worlds of neon compared to the grey cement of our apartment. There was something electrifying about these worlds run by electricity, as if it was handing me everything I wanted on a silver platter. Telling me about everything I could be.
Outside, I was a regular schoolgirl who kept to herself. A schoolgirl who was quiet. Her handwriting was slow but her thinking was quick. She was gifted, just unfocused. Smart, but easily distracted. She didn’t like the glare of the sun outside. She liked the low lights and the gentle hum of the computer room.
In the computer room, she was a hero. A paladin, an archer, a mage. She was a writer, a creator of her own neon world. She had freedom, she could cast spells and she could save the world. She wasn’t quiet in the computer room; she was the valiant protagonist of her own story.
In the computer room, she could be a boy.
I was a boy in that computer room.
***
I don’t pass.
Pass in the transgender way, I mean.
Physically, I don’t pass as a boy to most people. I wear skirts, tight-fitting shirts. My mannerisms are feminine, my mother won’t let me cut my hair short. People say ‘they’ to not assume, but I know they would never say ‘he’. Not until my physical self fits. Not until they see him. In all his typical masculine glory.
I’ve learned to not mind. I’ve long embraced this feminine side of myself, and the fact that most people in my life think I grew up to be a beautiful young woman.
I’m okay with it, because the boy in the computer room grew up to be a beautiful young man.
What people online see is different. They see him and his beautiful queerness. They see him flaunting, dazzling amongst the blue light of their screens. They don’t see her, nor them—they see him.
Sometimes it feels like I’ve put a blindfold over their eyes, trapped them in an intricate cobweb of glowing neon lies. Internal transphobia is hard to get rid of, even harder externally. (Oh look, another Tweet from a TERF. Scroll away. I said scroll away. Scroll a—). What would happen if
one of them met me like this—if they met her? Would they change? Would they feel betrayed? Would they rip off the blindfold and call me what they see? The beautiful young woman my physical world thought I grew up to be?
I look at myself on the screen. Pham’s TEMPLE dims into black. I look at myself in the mirror. I am split into two, disjointed in my own eyes only.
CROSS IT.
THAT BOUNDARY.
UNDER THE STORM
YOU ARE A CONDUCTOR
(I’ve learned to not mind—)
Maybe I lied.
***
I’m back in the temple. It’s bright.
Bright but loud. The utter opposite of tranquillity.
“I am drowning in the neon lights, encompassed by the sea of noise that surrounds the temple, surrounds me. I grapple for an anchor. I’m clutching at straws. It pulls me closer to that boundary. That boy on the screen.”
The whirr of the computer fans pierces through my earphones, and their noise-cancelling features prove to be no match against the unsettling hum of the temple. Ominous sounds ring through the installation, the pulsations of all its noise pushing me through a computerised ocean, my arms thrashing against pixels that threaten to fill my lungs. Lightning strikes and blue screens flicker for a moment.
This is not the nostalgia that I felt when I first came here. It’s even more unsettling now. Maybe it’s in the way it surrounds me, the way the storm seeps its way into my body. The rumble of the fans rattles my bones, the screech of the digital storm leaves goosebumps all over my skin.
The sound makes it feel tangible. Makes it feel real. It’s overwhelming, nauseating. But I let myself get swept away.
Once upon a time, I was separate from this art. Now, unbeknownst to the artist, I have become part of it. I’ve played right into his hand, without either of us knowing.
I am drowning in the neon lights, encompassed by the sea of noise that surrounds the temple, surrounds me. I grapple for an anchor. I’m clutching at straws. It pulls me closer to that boundary. That boy on the screen.
Lightning strikes.
***
There’s a special kind of comfort in tuning out the world around you. In putting your earphones on and turning off all the noise surrounding you.
Granted, I’m a person who gets easily overwhelmed. I’m sensitive to sound and frequently jump at sudden loud noises. I avoid balloons at parties and hide in my room when the clock strikes a new year. Noise can infiltrate every corner of my being with ease and rattle it senselessly, leaving me unnerved and uncomfortable.
That’s why these earphones are the best purchase I’ve ever made.
Noise rarely disturbs me when I have them on, now everything in the real world is muffled sounds and soothing hums of white noise. I don’t hear much of what everyone around me is saying.
Not that I mind. I’ve learned not to.
I turn the noise cancelling earphones on and I’m swept away in a sea of calm, in the lull of lo-fi music and video game instrumentals.
I don’t hear the thunder rumbling in the distance.
IF YOU WERE STRUCK BY LIGHTNING
THE FLASH WOULD OBSCURE EVERYTHING
(‘She can’t hear us again, can she?’ Dad says, exasperated. ‘Those earphones are glued to her ears.’
‘Leave her be,’ Mum sighs, “It’s not like she needs to know about what we’re talking about, anyway.’
‘Still, it would be polite if our daughter could join in on the conversation from time to time.’) I look at myself on the reflection of my dark phone screen. I turn it on.
I press play on the song I had paused.
(And the temple drones on, shatters through my earphones.
I drown, again and again, because I find it harder to breathe when I’m over the surface.)
***
I saw TEMPLE by Rel Pham on the screen before I saw it in real life.
There’s something ironic about how I first saw it on Instagram, from recommended reels and friends I had once known, posing and walking in front of the temple not like it was a place to behold, but a place to look like a spectacle to behold.
It’s not like I had any deep qualms about it. It did look intriguing from the pictures. No phone influencer had captured the flashing lights or adjusted the exposure well enough to show the exhibition in its probable physical glory.
That’s exactly why it looked intriguing to me.
Exhibitions, nowadays, are Instagrammable.
I don’t blame the curators, nor am I even necessarily angry at them. Who goes to an art museum to appreciate art, anyway? Nerds? Definitely not enough of them in the world to make a reasonable profit, they probably think. So most large-scale art exhibitions are picture perfect photoshoot locations for you to wear your best outfit in and look at the artwork description for
two seconds. I’m not an exception to this. I spent half my time in teamLabs Tokyo trying to film the perfect Instagram reel.
But why was TEMPLE so hard to film in for these people?
I didn’t get to find out for a while. I didn’t have the time to visit TEMPLE nor Melbourne Now and I live too far away from the city to just go there on a whim outside of classes. So of course, I felt a sense of accomplishment when those same classes brought me to Melbourne Now, face to face with the illusive TEMPLE that was so hard to capture on camera, in hopes to find out why. Why was it so dark, and yet so glaringly bright? Wasn’t it loud with all those computer fans?
As soon as I crossed the boundary between the rest of the exhibition and TEMPLE, I immediately understood why.
***
I try to swim up to the surface, my virtual limbs kicking and flailing as I beg for air to breathe, for an anchor to hold on to. But I keep sinking. I’m drowning and I’m losing all sense of boundaries, all my senses. I see thunder and hear neon lights, see the pulsations of noise and hear the warnings they tried to heed me.
Lightning, lightning, lightning. My eyes soak in blue light.
The boy on the screen is laughing at me and I can hear him. I can see him, pointing, but I can’t reach. He laughs like he knows he’ll never be attainable, not physically. He knows I’ve tried. Neither of us talk about it. I don’t cut my hair that short anymore.
He’s stopped laughing. I vaguely hear him speak, but it’s a muffled sound. The uncomfortable hum of white noise makes me strain my ears to pick up what he’s saying. The pixelated clap of thunder makes my skin jump.
‘I said,’ he repeats himself, exasperated, ‘If you’re not that beautiful young woman and you’ll never be me, then who are you? In real life and in the digital world, who are you?’
My back hits the surface. The flash of lightning obscures the boy from my view. Who am I?
***
TEMPLE by Rel Pham takes the artist’s previous work of Electric dirge (2021) and brings it to the physical realm, constructing the temple from Electric dirge into real life with four archways surrounding a central Bagua. Pham redefines this Bagua to symbolise ‘an historic ‘computer’ depicting and translating the physical world’.
He intended to blur the line between the physical and the virtual with TEMPLE, highlighting the connection between the virtual world and the hardware that runs it.
Lightning, electricity.
I found it electrifying.
Pham was born in 1990, making him part of the last generation to experience a world without the internet. This echoes in all his work and his practice. They view the internet like it’s a physical world, and logging on means meeting up at the town square.
That boy. On the screen.
I want to be him.
Did he intend for his work to be so terrifying? To be so all-encompassing, so strikingly eye-opening, that I’m left sitting here writing about it weeks later, still drowning in that pixelated sea, wondering who I am and why I can’t be who I want to be?
YOU WOULD FEEL AS IF IT
WERE ONLY HAPPENING TO YOU
But maybe it’s just me.