xyh tamura

bio-art poem · digital interface & living punctuation

A poem done on black gulaman and mung bean sprouts as well as an interactive digital poem that isolates only the commas from José García Villa's work and replants them as sprouts using a stencil technique onto a dark slab of black gulaman. Moving Villa’s classic imagery of a cultivatory miracle into a domestic act of munggo germination, the project acts as a small, temporary ritual for the agricultural and water anxieties of the developing 2026 El Niño. The browser interface maps the coordinates of the physical text, allowing users to wipe and fade dynamically between the original typographic punctuation and its temporary, living transfer.

International Conference on Timbre · presenter

Examines how timbre is constructed in virtual instrument design. Rather than treating timbre as a fixed acoustic property, this research argues that timbral identity emerges from an assemblage of materials, mediation technologies, bodily cues, and culturally trained listening. Using physical modeling synthesis as a case study, the paper explores how virtual instruments make "commitments" that prioritize specific facets of experience—such as physical fidelity, spatial mediation, or computational efficiency—framing synthesis not as a neutral reproduction of acoustic objects, but as a media-specific practice for constructing new timbral worlds.

Artem Research Collective · Zine 3

An autotheoretical essay that understands haunting as both cultural memory and technological mediation. Bringing together Derrida’s hauntology and Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics, it argues that ghosts appear through specific bodies, rituals, histories, media systems, infrastructures, and habits of recognition rather than returning universally. Moving across Filipino multo, Japanese yūrei, vaporwave, Hiroshima’s algorithmic resurfacing, U.S.–Philippine colonial asymmetry, and Ringu’s videotape curse, the essay proposes “hauntotechnics” as the co-mutation between ghosts and the systems through which they circulate: an uneven ecology that shapes what societies notice, repeat, aestheticize, forget, or call common sense.

A browser-based poetic art game and text-based terrarium, modeling a nocturnal balcony at the edge of an impossible post-cyberpunk city. The work combines WASD traversal, click-to-inspect textual specimens, movable world elements, randomized distant vistas, changing weather states, and an interactive sound engine to create a compact, living ecology of terminal life.

An experimental play set in a pandemic-era hospital biopsy room, where three forgotten tumors (Glioblastoma, Meningioma, and Hematoma) become conscious and begin performing the roles of doctors, patients, administrators, and hospital staff. As their abandoned biomass grows into a living hospital of flesh, wires, mold, and paperwork, the play moves through medical realism, absurd bureaucracy, and body horror to explore how individuals become locked into social roles inside complex systems of care, debt, migration, and public health.

A collection of interactive, browser-based audio-visual instruments built with HTML canvas and the Web Audio API. Each piece stages a small 2D ecology of playable bodies whose visual properties are mapped directly to sound generation: size, brightness, geometry, motion, contact, pressure, tension, and environmental data determine pitch, resonance, damping, friction, and decay. Across the collection, the user seeds, strikes, bows, plucks, drags, presses, or disturbs animated entities while each instrument maintains its own physics, synthesis model, and wet/dry spatial control.

short film · music composer

Composed for a short film that incorporates cleaning materials as sound sources, blending Southern California influences with modern orchestration.

Won Best Pilot Script at The Comedy Film Festival (Austin, Texas) and Official Selection at the HollyShorts Film Festival (Glendale, California).

Confound the Time: Reception in Medieval & Early Modern Studies · academic conference presentation & paper

Tabota is a post-MIDI experimental composition tool and notation language for microtonal, polymetric, and time-based media. The project combines a JSON-based score format with browser-based editors: a piano-roll interface for drawing held tones, glides, freehand pitch contours, and voice assignments, and Cycla, a subdivision grammar builder for designing recursive meters and exporting .cyc time maps. Tabota models a score as a set of translatable temporal and axial regimes: beats, seconds, unordered cues, frequencies, note names, categories, and performance instructions. Its relationship to Scala is expanded sideways: where .scl files describe tuning systems for pitch, Cycla’s .cyc files describe tuning systems for time.

An interactive web timeline and timekeeper presenting a Filipino adaptation of the Japanese 72 microseasons (七十二候).

Quezon City Biennial · with Krus na Ligas residents, the LGU & UP Institute of Biology

A research-art and poetry installation that reimagines the street map of Krus na Ligas as a living plant assemblage. Roads recreated from color-inverted images of local flora, printed on acetate and suspended over a window — cyanotype-like glyphs, lightboxes, talismans, x-rays of unseen city blocks.

Long, looped ambient videos made from non-explicit transitional footage in archival gay adult media from the 1980s on — isolating rooms, hallways, pools, beds. Shifts attention from action to atmosphere, anticipation, and disappearance; on queer temporality and the ephemerality of worlds that may no longer exist.

live score for a short film by Bea Mariano · live scorer, sound artist, composer, writer, vocal performer

A live score performance integrating sound art, music, and vocal performance. Digital vocal pieces, field recordings, microsound, and ambient music.

A media art algorithmic poem generating an archipelago based on special Unicode characters and scripts of cultures with precolonial contact with Manila.

with Bea Mariano · live score

A collaborative short film and videopoem stitching shipwrecks, Manila skylines, construction sites, archival photographs, handwashing footage, microorganisms, and oceanic imagery. The title evokes the ship manifest, ghostly manifestation, the making-real of the future, and the Pacific reach of manifest destiny.

Philosophy & Digitality · academic paper

*From Interiority to Interaction* reframes debates around AI, robots, and large language models by shifting attention from whether these systems are conscious or “really” intelligent to the social roles they already perform. Drawing on Japanese robotics, technoanimism, relational personhood, and examples from AIBO to LLMs, the paper argues that technological personhood emerges through interaction, as artificial partners reshape intimacy, communication, ritual, and the boundaries between tool, companion, and person.

Feeling Formal · Nanyang Technological University · academic and literary/artistic presentation for a workshop on theories of emotion · researcher, participant, presenter

Examines how emotion and personhood operate beyond Western models of the private, bounded individual. Centering Filipino concepts such as loób and kapwa, the project traces affective phenomena like hiyâ, kilíg, and húgot across literature, interviews, autoethnography, oral traditions, teleseryes, fandom, memes, social media, and Of Another Shore, framing Filipino affect as a living set of relational circuits that produce shared feeling, ethical responsibility, and collective forms of selfhood.

Saliksik-Musika II · University of the Philippines · academic and musical/artistic presentation for an international forum on music · researcher, participant, presenter

A presentation on an experimental pop composition that asks how the singer-songwriter form can expand through intermedial practice, bringing together contemporary music, poetry, electronic sound, and Philippine cultural memory. Developed as part of *Of Another Shore* and inspired by *soliranin* and *indolanin*, the work reimagines rowing and work-song rhythms within an urban transit setting, treating pop song as a site of transpractice where voice, text, timbre, polytonality, asemic vocality, and electronic transformation generate meanings unavailable to music or poetry alone.

Mono by Phono · conceptualizer, event designer, performer, composer as Cyberpaean

A Filipino vaporwave and hauntology event series tracing Philippine history through 90s OPM, 80s ballads, Martial Law-era disco, Manila Sound, Golden Age cinema soundtracks, folk songs, vintage commercials, and archival footage.

Serial digital poem with web 1.0 aesthetics.

A web-based poetic sequence about body porosity in the 2000s Philippines, framing electricity as life-force, infrastructure, weather, media, empire, and nervous sensation. A Filipino-Japanese neuroqueer speaker whose body becomes a conductive membrane for television, dial-up, typhoons, ghosts, floods, voltage, and history.

Atipan+ General Workshop 2025 · intern, artist-researcher, developer, translator, facilitator

A participatory "Affect Atlas" — a menstrual-awareness workshop method using storytelling, word-image mapping, and performance across Panay and Guimaras. Personal output: a critical essay and digital installation on how humor, mapping, and performance make stigmatized topics discussable while producing qualitative data.

Three textual-visual drawings fusing maps, diagrams, and manipulated photographs with poetry, prose, and asemic writing.

A web-based image processing system that reconceptualizes hue as a relational, topological medium. A user-defined anchor hue transforms colors through attraction, repulsion, inversion, compression, and expansion across the color wheel, without touching saturation or luminosity. HSL or OKLCH; CPU or GPU.

An intermedia suite of electronic literature, experimental pop, videopoetry, web art, glitch art, conceptual performance, and music. Structured as a decentralized hypertext network linking poems, songs, videos, scores, simulations, and interactive texts into a constellation of personal, cultural, geological, virtual, and speculative worlds.

Drawing from Filipino-Japanese heritage, family history, multilingual poetics, deep time, dreams, death, and digital media. The suite treats the present as a porous shore between inaccessible pasts and futures.

An interactive collection organized around the seven metalloids, presented as a digital periodic table. Each element's properties become a generative constraint for New Weird fiction, slipstream, body horror, kinetic poetry, science writing, and prose poetry — termite symbiosis, programmable skin, undersea cables, metallic wolves, radioactive decay.

The British Academy · researcher

researcher

LLMs and the Patterns of Human Language Use · Denkwerkstatt Berlin · researcher, participant, presenter

Shook is an ongoing suite of electronic literature, videopoetry, docupoetry, and web art about the afterlives of disaster from a Filipino-Japanese perspective. Anchored by the 1990 Luzon earthquake, the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, and the 2020 Taal phreatic eruption, the work uses browser-based poems, archival video, movable windows, blackout editing, and Windows XP-inspired interfaces to examine how geological rupture intersects with national history, family memory, digital media, economic anxiety, and inherited trauma.

An LLM co-authored hypertext lyric essay presented as a continuously scrolling academic paper. Through recursive writing, footnotes, and AI-generated language, the work examines language, documents, humans, environments, and LLMs as surface-based archives shaped by bias, extraction, historical debris, and collaborative knowledge production.

A hypertext digital collage poem composed from images and text fragments that link outward to academic papers, public-domain archives, found media, recordings, online forums, discarded materials, and commercial packaging. The work examines identity as a citational structure shaped by academia, plastics, capitalism, virtuality, globalization, and ecological crisis.

researcher, developer · policy research

Developed the Makwela — a geographical, participatory, and photovoice-driven storytelling method with an interactive map.

The Second Congressional Commission on Education · documenter, researcher · policy research

Resident DJ, fashion designer, event coordinator, 3D mesh artist. Curated genre sets (vaporwave, exotica, electro swing, seapunk, EBM, noise) as temporary worlds — designing posters, building sets, changing skies. Plus avatar fashion impossible in physical space: dresses made from floating pearls, leaves, blobs, dandelion particles. Blender · Substance Painter

science advisor, graphic designer, composer, social media assistant

streamer, video and audio editor, music composer, social media assets · actual play TTRPG group

music composer, sound designer, sound recordist · documentary

Three-piece outfit inspired by the namesake cultivar: pants, innerwear, and outerwear. Plus a crafted iridescent cockroach ring.

short film · music composer

A warm, narrative film score with a more traditional animation-film sensibility, inflected with Filipino timbres such as gongs, bamboo instruments, and guitars.

Film nominated for Best Director and Best Cinematography at the Las Vegas Filipino Short Film Festival 2025.

short film · music composer

A Manila interpretation of neon-noir: a synth-driven soundtrack using field recordings, noise, and rougher textures, moving away from glossy slickness toward something grimier and more unstable.

Awarded Best Short Film at the FilAm Creative Film Festival 2023. Film nominated for Best Editing and Bahaghari / LGBTQ Award at the Las Vegas Filipino Short Film Festival 2025.

Crooked Tree Records · lead singer, music composer, producer, mixing & mastering, album artist

6-track synthpop/vaporpop album.

Re.Doubt 2 · Belfort and Bastion Publishing · contributing author · fiction

High Chair, Issue 16 · contributing author · poetry

keyboards, secondary vocals, arrangement

Filipino Freethinkers · contributing author · non-fiction, science writing

Filipino Freethinkers · music composer · introduction music

music composer & glass harp performer · concert with audiovisual sections

Music composed from non-human nature sounds.

Asian Composer's League

Instrumental electronic music based on simple waveforms, Philippine gongs, and vertical composition.

Meralco Theatre · librettist, songwriter, lead actor

A full-scale musical conceived and written at age nine, staged with Fides Cuyugan-Asensio, Bernardo Bernardo, and Monique Wilson.