antara: Voxel Reconstructions of a Singaporean Memory
2025–2026
Spatial Memory, Publication Design, Sound Design, Voxel Architecture, Autoethnography
antara n. —
between; in the middle of; in the interval. intermediate space; interior. [from Malay/Indonesian antara, from Sanskrit antarā (interval, interior), from Proto-Indo-European h1enter- (within, between).]
Memory does not preserve a place. It does something stranger, more tender: it arrives unannounced, bypasses will, and becomes sensation long before it becomes name. antara contemplates the shared spaces of a Singaporean life: thresholds that hover just beyond geography. Through voxel reconstruction and fabricated atmosphere, the quotidian is rebuilt as recollection holds it — quantized, abstracted, rendered strange. The familiar is made unhomely. These environments can no longer be found on any map, yet they return with the gravity of somewhere you have never been, carrying the residue of use without the use itself.
And if they belong to one person's memory, why do they feel like your own?
Listen at: antaraaa.cargo.site
Overview
antara translates four shared spaces from a Singaporean childhood: the HDB void deck, the MRT platform, the public pool, the childhood playroom, through voxel rendering into a technical manual, a photobook, and an ambient album. antara: The System codifies the project's four-tier construction logic (Voxel, Primitive, Module, Assembly) in a cold, doctrinal register, treating the architecture of memory as an indifferent machine. antara: The Image renders the same four spaces as photobook chapters, Pulang, Next Station, Chlorine, Dahulu, full bleed and locked to a 4:3 ratio. antara: The Sound carries four ambient tracks and four spoken threshold recordings onto a dedicated website. The same argument runs through all three: built at maximum specificity, a childhood memory becomes recognisable to people who never lived it.
The System
antara: The System is a technical manual codifying the project's four-tier construction hierarchy: the Voxel, the atomic unit of the grid; the Primitive, a compound aggregated from Voxels; the Module, the unit executing spatial functions (corridor, stair, column, threshold); and the Assembly, the scale at which discrete units dissolve into one continuous environment. The manual is written in a captured-theorist voice: cold, procedural, anti-humanist, describing the rendered spaces as a machine, not a site of memory, and performing the eerie it describes, no acknowledged author, cataloguing a space with no acknowledged occupant. Every measurement in the grid is dyadic, divisible by two, except for a narrow class of sub-dyadic residuals at trim, fixtures, and seams, described in the manual as "the sole concession the grid makes to the seams it cannot otherwise resolve."
The manual is organised into eight sections: an opening overview, definitions of the Voxel, Primitive, Module, and Assembly tiers, a combinatorial logic spread, nine configuration spreads pairing a diagram with a short block of text, and a colophon. Measurements throughout the grid are dyadic, divisible by two, except for a narrow class of sub-dyadic residuals at trim, fixtures, and seams, the grid's only exceptions, occurring at its thresholds: the same interval, antara, that gives the project its name. Every dimension is also calibrated against the human body: the standard corridor passes the body through untroubled, the half-height wall stops at mid-chest. "The grid never fits the occupant. It contains them." All diagrams were modelled and rendered in MagicaVoxel, chosen for its native voxel workflow and its flat, evenly lit output, suited to technical diagrams rather than atmospheric scenes. The manual is set in Neue Haas Grotesk Display 57 Roman, with technical accents in neue Vektor CNC, and printed in a cohesive palette of warm greys.
The Image
antara: The Image is a photobook of voxel renders sequenced across four chapters: Pulang (going home, expanded beyond the void deck to hawker centres, traffic junctions, and carparks), Next Station (the MRT platform and its thresholds), Chlorine (the public pool), and Dahulu (before, the childhood playroom). The choice of render over photograph is itself an argument. A photograph claims to document something that existed exactly like that; a render admits its own construction. Memory works the same way, reconstructing rather than replaying, which makes the less indexical medium the more honest one for what the book is actually doing. The sequence works the way memory does: a moment means nothing when it happens; its meaning gets assigned later, from a vantage the moment itself didn't have.
Each chapter opens with a threshold spread: the chapter title paired against a spoken memory fragment, before a single image appears. The book opens with a bilingual Malay pantun by Ali Yaakub; the final chapter closes on the phrase pulang dahulu, I'm going home first, echoing the pantun and closing the book's sequence into a loop. Renders run full bleed on the recto throughout, with no margin or frame. All renders were modelled and rendered in MagicaVoxel, then post-processed in Lightroom with a Cinestill 50D film emulation, chosen to soften the render's native precision toward something closer to a photograph without erasing the blocked, quantised quality that marks it as built rather than captured. Printed at 16×12 inches in a linen hardcover, set in Diatype, and locked to a 4:3 ratio, closer to a medium-format negative than a cinema frame, chosen to hold detail and favour memory over spectacle.
The Sound
The three artefacts escalate in what they ask of the viewer: the manual gives you rule with no image, the photobook gives you image with a caption, and antara: The Sound gives you neither, only atmosphere and whatever attention the listener brings to it. It comprises four ambient tracks, roughly six minutes each, interleaved with four spoken threshold recordings (memory fragments read aloud before each chapter begins) for a running time of about twenty-nine minutes. The work lives on a dedicated website, antaraaa.cargo.site. The site runs dark and largely monochromatic, a near-black ground with a single accent pink, in a split-screen layout: a static left panel holding the project title against a grainy gradient, a right panel scrolling through the trailer, the tracklist, and each chapter in turn. A kaleidoscope-treated render sits atop each chapter page, its pattern shifting as the visitor's cursor moves across it. The project statement sits at the very bottom of the site, reachable only after the visitor has moved through the whole work.
Specificity, Recognition, and Nostalgia
The Backrooms is an endless suite of sallow yellow rooms, damp carpet, a fluorescent hum that never dims, no windows, no exit but more of the same room. Every part is recognisable. None of it has a purpose. antara runs the same mechanism, aimed the other way. The Backrooms' uncanniness comes from deviation, features missing, features misplaced, patterns repeating without variation. antara commits instead to one exact remembered configuration and refuses to generalise it: a void deck's pattern of pillars, an MRT platform's tiling, the chlorine-blue of a neighbourhood pool. Recognition happens at the level of the body before language: a corridor's proportions, a step's height, register as physical fact before they register as cultural ones, which is why a space built this precisely can be recognised by someone who has never set foot in it. That precision is the whole claim: specificity travels further than the generic does. That paradox, anemoia (a nostalgia for a place you never knew), sits behind every image in the photobook and every corridor in the manual. The distinction is agency, not mood: nothing in the Backrooms was built for anyone in particular; every space in antara was built for someone, remembered from the inside, independent of and ahead of the A24 film. The project doesn't claim these spaces are anyone else's memories. It only asks whether they could be: not universality, but transferability. Whether that counts as recognition or projection, whether the viewer is remembering something or being persuaded they are, is a harder question the project doesn't resolve, and probably shouldn't.
For more on the Backrooms and liminal spaces:
Wikipedia
SlashFilm, on the liminal horror genre
PBS Monstrum, "Lost in the Backrooms"
Context
Anonymous — The Backrooms (4chan creepypasta, 2019)
Augé, M. — Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995)
Bachelard, G. — The Poetics of Space (1958)
Böhme, G. — Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics (1993)
Boym, S. — The Future of Nostalgia (2001)
Chua, B. H. — Political Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore (1997)
Diel, A. & Lewis, M. — Structural Deviations Drive an Uncanny Valley of Physical Places, Journal of Environmental Psychology 82 (2022)
Fisher, M. — The Weird and the Eerie (2016)
Koenig, J. — The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (2021)
Merleau-Ponty, M. — Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
Parsons, K. (dir.) — Backrooms (A24, 2026)
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