Curator’s Introduction to South Beast Asia

This South Beast Asia release comprises thirteen videos that collectively depict a fictional future Southeast Asia haunted with AIs distributed into all sorts of embodied forms, supported by an introductory video trailer, expository essay, and dozens of imagined artifacts and concept imagery.

With the exception of the trailer and essay, all other exhibits were created during the five-day Khlongs & Subaks protocol design fiction workshop co-hosted by Seapunk Studios for a few dozen researchers in April 2025.

These are not polished, final exhibits — there are glitches, hallucinations, skips, and bugs. They were, after all, created by a mixed group (with limited experience with video production or AI-generated video) over the artificial ‘sprint’ timespan of a few-day-workshop — five days, out of which, only the last day or two were really available for writing and creating videos. So we are sharing these as rapid concept art (remarkable under the constraints), not polished final output.

Rather, we chose to release these as, rawness and edges notwithstanding, we still found them richly evocative and provocative, especially in the context of our workshop’s focal themes — imagining future Southeast Asias along the frontiers of open distributed AI and blockchain protocols. In these videos, we found ourselves pushed to confront and consider vectors and logics of AI distribution, inspired by Southeast Asia, that we would not have generally expected to encounter (as articulated in the expository essay).

We hope these videos give you a taste of the blend of research, imagination, and possibility that Seapunk — a collective research-and-imagination endeavor anchored in a search for fresh authentic solarpunk Southeast Asian futures — hopes to help make more of in the world.

Enjoy South Beast Asia — and don’t hesitate to reach out and let us know what you think!

Sam Chua Founding Curator, Seapunk Studios Facilitator + Co-Organizer, Khlongs & Subaks Workshop

🛠️ How South Beast Asia was made

🌄 Original premise and intention of the Khlongs & Subaks workshop

South Beast Asia is the co-imagination of a few dozen researchers at the Khlongs & Subaks workshop, co-organized by Summer of Protocols, CMKL University, GCC, and Seapunk Studios.