Art writing is the work of a trickster. 

I mean the craft of re-searching and re-telling stories about art requires a certain maneuver, deliberately divergent like a spirit of trickster. If you walk deep into the margins of any culture, you will find this archetype roams (most likely) around liminal spaces where unconfined spirits are treated as wealth.

Tricksters are witty and mischievous. They could be tuktuk drivers who give you a quick overview of Bangkok city, and drop you somewhere you don’t even ask for. They could be your grandpa and your grandma who have all the time in the world. They lure you with some sweets, and tell you a series of uncanny stories about mythical creatures and obscure places. You know that you couldn’t care less, yet much later did you realise what those events really meant. Sometimes, you feel dumbfounded. Other times, you are agitated. Their ways of playing give you eerie sensations, whether you like it or not, the spirit of trickers stirs something inside you. 

No, I’m not saying all art writings are made out of the trickster’s playbook — they don’t have to. In the art space, textual materials work in layers of purpose. I’m not concerned about standardised texts, like exhibition statements, press releases, work lists, etc. for they know exactly why they’re right there and what they’re supposed to do. (Well, not entirely true now, some critics started observing, through the rise of AI slop, textual materials getting more and more meaningless – as Andrew Berardini called: technically sophisticated, semantically hollow.) I’m here wandering after the writings that seep between the cracks of space they can’t properly integrate — and perhaps, never will. I see this type of writing to diffuse the plot, how you really want to ride with art will determine your relational positions with them.

Bibliosentience is a contrapuntal writing project about the archival gap, unfolding in two pieces. The first one, Tilling for alive intelligence (published in […] ellipses: Unlearning Intelligence) challenges the techno-messianic narrative and symbolic order of artificial intelligence as an apex of knowing — asking what kinds of value, system, and perception have already been built upon — and come to define the frontier of ‘intelligence.’ The research sketches a scene of alive intelligence with an initiation for future discussion. The second piece: Rooting into the Subterranean (forthcoming), excavates the hidden yet powerful grounds of knowledge and knowing beyond the semantic realm. The research contests the extractive logic of data mining and extends an inquiry toward sensory and intuitive capacities — asking what visual-spatial intelligence might become  if we could be open to receive memories from the richness of the subterranean terrain.

The term ‘bibliosentience’ is a neologism to describe a space where world memories, that exceed what data-technology can archive or access, survive to be fully told and transmitted. The research draws upon the audacious imagination of historical and ongoing scientific experiments (whether they failed or flourished), including literary and anthropological works.

Bibliosentience is a contrapuntal writing project about the archival gap, unfolding in two pieces. The first one, Tilling for alive intelligence (published in […] ellipses: Unlearning Intelligence) challenges the techno-messianic narrative and symbolic order of artificial intelligence as an apex of knowing — asking what kinds of value, system, and perception have already been built upon — and come to define the frontier of ‘intelligence.’ The research sketches a scene of alive intelligence with an initiation for future discussion. The second piece: Rooting into the Subterranean (forthcoming), excavates the hidden yet powerful grounds of knowledge and knowing beyond the semantic realm. The research contests the extractive logic of data mining and extends an inquiry toward sensory and intuitive capacities — asking what visual-spatial intelligence might become if we could be open to receive memories from the richness of the subterranean terrain.

The term ‘bibliosentience’ is a neologism to describe a space where world memories, that exceed what data-technology can archive or access, survive to be fully told and transmitted. The research draws upon the audacious imagination of historical and ongoing scientific experiments (whether they failed or flourished), including literary and anthropological works.

Tilling for alive intelligence is structured into INTRO: The Legend of the Smart Arse; PART 1: The Fiction of Singular Reality, and The Folklore of the Machine; PART 2: The Blind Keepers and The World Storytellers

A year before I coined the term ‘bibliosentience,’ I reunited with my childhood love of science while being reminded, in the same breath, of why I had abandoned it during my teenage years. It was never science that repelled me. It was those who speak about science as though they are science — claiming reality, fact, proof, measurement in the coldest, most rigid of manners. Their austere expressions were synonymous with rigour, and their rigour synonymous with truth, and it was as though ‘the only truth’ that one could hold in a measuring cup. If that’s the case, my measuring cup must severely be leaking. 

But is this really the spirit of science — or even of intellectual integrity? Or, is it merely a poverty of imagination in disguise? 

On 12 January 2013, Rupert Sheldrake was invited to give a talk at TEDx Whitechapel — an event explicitly titled Visions for Transition: Challenging Existing Paradigms and Redefining Values. In his talk, named after his book The Science Delusion, Sheldrake openly challenged the scientific dogma that most ‘educated people’ all over the world uphold as settled truth. In his own words, this dogma rests on several foundational assumptions. First they believe in nature’s mechanical or machine-like nature. The universe is like a machine. Animals and plants are like machines. We’re like machines. In fact, ‘we are machines.’ ‘We are lumbering robots,’ in Richard Dawkin’s vivid phrase. With a brain that is a genetically programmed computer. Second, matter is unconscious. The whole universe is made up of unconscious matter. There is no consciousness in stars, in galaxies, in planets, in animals, in plants.  He pointed to ‘a conflict in the heart of science’ between science as a method of inquiry based on reason, evidence, hypothesis and collective investigation, and science as a belief system or a worldview. 

The spirit of science in Sheldrake’s term is alive intelligence. In this kind of world, I believe, one can watch the sky winking back to them. Isn’t this also the spirit of art? I imagine a mad scientist and a relentless artist (these titles didn’t even exist until modern time, right?) shared the same laboratory, wandered in their audacious imagination, inquired into what seemed unreasonable, and experimented as though they had a whole lifetime to fail.

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Critics need more than a platform. They need conversations — someone who talks back and dwells with the text. Despite claiming to ‘redefine the role of art criticism in the digital era,’ the project amounted to little more than routine descriptions of artworks — too inert to provoke, let alone redefine, anything. […] How about a critic starts asking: what does it mean to continue to write art criticism in THIS ERA if it simply generates a descriptive, derivative text, in the way GenAI could tirelessly produce? What is the point of writing in this time if words don’t breathe, tremble, stutter, in the manner that only living organisms can do?

[…]

To tend to the practice of art criticism, it needs time for discernment through ways of looking inward–outward, of thinking back–ahead. Without generosity of time, art critics cannot prosper.  

Just like the meme satirises how people broadcast the man, while keeping him stranded on the barren island as ‘content’, the absence of art criticism is a familiar lament in many parts of the world, yet scarcely given the close, patient attention the practice needs to take root.

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Art experience often occurs outside the semantic zone, like horror that exists at the edge of the utterable. A neat justification based on theoretical, sociopolitical, philosophical context is the secondary message—the weaving process of a critic. So I believe art proves its meaning when it invokes experiences that are incommensurable, in a way we can’t access elsewhere. Or perhaps, it disturbs what we think we know, unsettles our preconceptions, or urges us to revisit what we take for granted. In this very same sense, shouldn’t art criticism be a way to open a door for meanings, instead of restricting them?

[…]

A report on the place where one works and lives, to me, is also a binding gesture of a critic’s inner landscape — or ‘[sub]liminal zone‘ where lived experiences may reconfigure or fall apart. Though the contemporary exhibition readily adopts the rhetoric of ‘diversity,’ criticism seems to remain confined in a narrower circle. In this situation, why don’t critics continue reporting on how art is felt, understood, and spoken, however minor its impact may seem, until what we call ‘art criticism’ no longer mimics the old, singular formality, but instead creates from wherever a critic stands?

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Some say that once you experience one death, more deaths will visit you. Is it true?

On 7 June 2025, I received a phone call from my mum telling me that one of my cousins had committed suicide the night before. Her body was found. My mother knows I have been the only daughter in the family who talked about death since I was a little girl. She tends to assume I can handle such things.

I was about to go to bed. It was the night of the waxing moon in Scorpio, a full moon is just two days away.

How did she die?

I asked. She drove to a suburb of Bangkok. Parked the car, and smoked herself inside. She kept the phone numbers of two people in her pocket — planned for her body to be found. That’s all she left. The rest was unknown. Her mobile phone wiped clean.

“I was concerned about her, so I want to know why she killed herself,” my mum requested. I refused to help — and did not explain my reasons.

But – what really concerns my mum? And how would knowing the motive of my cousin help anything at all? 

In the name of love and care, we claim the right to extract from someone else’s life — to compile our own version of who they are, rather than listen to them. Is it an act of care, or of appeasing our own anxiety before the unknown and the unknowable?

No one else can know the real why. That’s what she wanted. 

I insisted to mum.

The real why is never a straight line, isn’t it?

A whole why cannot be found in literal reading.

After many years, that night I felt connected to her again.