xyh is a Filipino/Ilonggo-Japanese creator working through intermedia art, experimental pop, electronic literature, science, technology, and its studies, theory and philosophy, and social action. Their work orbits issues of selfhood, media, posthuman relations, ecological-technological worlds, and the ways cultures metabolize systems.
They are currently based in Manila, Philippines. They hold a BS in Physics from the University of the Philippines Diliman and are currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing. They are actively working in music, from composing film scores, audio engineering, and being a session musician.
DriftHam is an internet-radio drift device: a generative listening toy that wanders through live stations from the Radio-Browser community database. Housed inside a breathing glazed ham interface, it lets users drift, hold, savor, annotate, and export a session as a tasting log.
An event-domain granular MIDI generator that turns input note-ons into seeded clouds of grain-events while preserving each original note as a pinned anchor.
A suite of custom file formats architected explicitly for databending, mojibake text-editing, and substrate-specific data corruption. Moving away from standard optimization metrics like compression or speed, goopCodecs protects essential file headers while leaving structural bodies highly vulnerable to direct byte manipulation. The resulting errors translate directly into continuous, analog-organic artifacts rather than traditional rigid, grid-based digital crashes.
A warped Voronoi-cell image codec that constructs territory boundaries from scattered seed coordinates.
A continuous space-filling Hilbert-thread image codec utilizing DPCM color deltas.
An aesthetic philosophy and a tech suite[cite: 1]. Sgueltch is a word between squelch and glitch[cite: 1]. It moves away from traditional glitch art's rigid, pixelated, mechanical disruptions and toward fluid, continuous, biologically-inspired distortion[cite: 1]. Sgueltch asks what digital error can become when it begins from other substrates: ooze, tissue, silt, weather, viscosity, lesion, flocking, breath, and growth[cite: 1]. It values asymmetry, unpredictability, embodiment, and mess-compatible media as a counter-infrastructure and a counter-erroring for an alternate digitality[cite: 1].
Pixel sorting as biological infection: lesion-like forms spread across an image like lichen or slime mold[cite: 1].
Shader-based CRT decay reimagined beyond the pixel grid via Voronoi tessellation, turbulence, chromatic bleed[cite: 1]. Inputs and outputs image and video[cite: 1].
A collection of browser-based image, video, and colour-field formats built for databending and substrate-specific visual damage[cite: 2].
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.
A collection of “un-live” audio and video effects that work from the whole file rather than the passing instant. This treats static media as already-readable temporal objects, the suite explores what becomes possible when an effect can respond before, smooth backward, optimize globally, and act with full knowledge of the piece.
A web-based acausal precognitive granular delay effect that uses one audio file to anticipate and shape textures from another file, or itself.
An un-live dynamics processor that turns a sound file into a manipulatble histogram instead of modifying playback through standard compressor thresholds, ratios, and attack windows.
An acausal video feedback field that functions as visual reverb or preverb for video.
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 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.
Media is a gelatin poem made from cut-up documents collaged through the gel layers so that fragments of text show through, obscure, and alter one another. It has an interactive web counterpart that allows readers to move through layers of text.
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.
A percussion environment where visual cell bodies act as membrane resonators to produce gong-like strikes shaped by size, drift, and collision.
A fluid acoustic environment where live marine data such as wave height, period, and current velocity directly dictates the harmonic detuning, spectral tilt, and resonant breathing of floating cellular bodies.
A modal-synthesis instrument that generates glass-metal clusters by mapping acoustic traits to nonliteral visible properties like lightness, jaggedness, and hue.
A playable connective graph where drawing and plucking fibers translates structural tension, friction, and topological strain into string and reed-like sounds.
A generative geological interface that translates real-time global tectonic data into bathyal sub-harmonics and physical collisions.
A flocking simulation that generates a shimmering network of oscillator pings through proximity and collisions, actively tuned by live atmospheric conditions.
A pressure-sensitive aerophone colony of pore-like entities that exhales autonomous, randomized breathing sounds governed directly by live weather data.
A browser-based formant-synthesis instrument in which drifting IPA glyphs act as sounding bodies, generating speech-like syllables from a vocal-tract model so that the output seems to be language.
A browser-based video feedback processor for creating frame-accumulation, motion-smear, and video-reverb effects from uploaded footage. It utilizes adjustable parameters for memory decay, frame opacity, drift, zoom, rotation, chromatic split, edge inscription, brightness persistence, and softening, with options to preview, snapshot, and export.
A specialized Kontakt vocal-organ virtual instrument built entirely from custom, self-recorded vocal samples and custom script controls.
A browser-based visual-physics instrument where FM-synthesis plankton generate complex sound layers through physical motion, color properties, collision dynamics, and rippling microtonal fields.
A browser-based WebGL image-warping tool that subjects any uploaded photograph or graphic to a continuously animated noise field, featuring layered controls for lens distortion, chromatic aberration, seamless tiling, hue and saturation shifting, and real-time audio reactivity via live microphone input.
A procedural creature-sound engine and browser toy. It generates chirps, murmurs, droplets, and filtered grains for imaginary digital critters. Functions as an interaction-audio module for a robot-toy to convey systemic states (thinking, transcribing, crafting) and standalone as a playable web interface to modulate garbage-bot vocalizations.
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).
voice & keyboard synthesizer · with bower gra! & blend.earth · organized by Joee Mejias
Live free improvisation performance.
Confound the Time: Reception in Medieval & Early Modern Studies · academic conference presentation & paper
Combines multiple files into a single *.txt. Web and Windows desktop versions.
An interactive web timeline and timekeeper presenting a Filipino adaptation of the Japanese 72 microseasons (七十二候).
Diana Aviado's Kaos Magick · with Tusa Montes (Saronay, Kulintang, Tambi)
An intermedia project exploring the primordial Hadean eon through atonal music, custom tech, generative video, and live audiovisual performance. Queers the idea of the stable sun by drawing on the physics of unstable plasma and early earth and moon formation.composer, performer, tech
Digital-organic soundscape from manipulated '90s and Y2K OS startup sounds, linking primordial creation to digital initialization.
Starts with the synthesizer palettes of Dungeon Synth but subjects them to with atonal, arrhythmic, spectral, and microtonal principles. culminates in a noisy climax featuring processed samples of Filipino indigenous instruments (Saronay, Kulintang, Tambi).
Voice, synth, and drum piece sung from the perspective of the colliding protoplanet Theia — microtonal melody, guttural vocalization, voice-electronic hybridization.
Browser-based WebGL generative visualizer and live tool: an audio-reactive noise field driven by a fully configurable gradient system.
Antemelos is a hertz-native, scale-free melody generator for creating monophonic vocal lines that remain singable while sounding unstable, primordial, and unresolved. Built as both an Eosforos instrument and a Tabota emitter, it treats `.tabota` as the lossless home for continuous pitch contours, with MIDI as a secondary projection..
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.
Wrote the exhibition text for Ang Paglaho ng Bagong Mundo sa mga Araw ng Nakaraan. art writer
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.
An audio poetic monologue.
A media art algorithmic poem generating an archipelago based on special Unicode characters and scripts of cultures with precolonial contact with Manila.
Physical installation with Orange Pi and monitor. Curated by Dayang Yraola.
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.
Full-length album and live A/V performance on the 1986 People Power Revolution and the early-90s earthquakes.
Chanidae is a web-based slide poem presented through animated text fragments, blue gradient backgrounds, and cinematic subtitle-like compositions. The work is navigable through arrows, swipes, or keyboard input, creating a paced reading experience across screens.
An algorithmic poem based on the ILOVEYOU virus, written through its creator's imagined persona and a postcolonial reading of internet access and desire. Its words are replaced one by one with ILOVEYOU until the phrase overtakes the text — the poem performs its own viral collapse.
A lo-fi spoken-word poem recorded on a phone during an early-morning walk — shaped by breath, footsteps, and traffic; a roadside animal death against an eroticized vision of a runner.
Animated asemic writing short.
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.
Web-based audio visualizer crossfading between two images.
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.
Self-reflexive essay, generative affect weaving, and interactive map.
Presented for Day of Action for Women's Health.
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
Pop ballad.
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
End credits piece built from melodic fragments of Ilonggo folksongs.
Three-piece outfit inspired by the namesake cultivar: pants, innerwear, and outerwear. Plus a crafted iridescent cockroach ring.
Experimental song with granularly synthesized harps and ocean field recording.
IDM experimental pop.
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.
Electronic experimental chamber pop.
Vector-based self-portrait.
Crooked Tree Records · lead singer, music composer, producer, mixing & mastering, album artist
6-track synthpop/vaporpop album.
Total serialism song.
Tumblr blog for experimental menswear.
Odd-meter shoegaze/dream pop with reggae elements.
Experimental chamber pop.
Re.Doubt 2 · Belfort and Bastion Publishing · contributing author · fiction
High Chair, Issue 16 · contributing author · poetry
Drone/noise with chant.
keyboards, secondary vocals, arrangement
Filipino Freethinkers · contributing author · non-fiction, science writing
Filipino Freethinkers · music composer · introduction music
Piano pop song.
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.