HULUBALANG X BRANDON TAY is a live visual performance system created in collaboration with Indonesian musician Kasimyn. Drawing from an ahistorical archive of colonial-era Indonesian imagery, the work runs this material through a pipeline of machine interpretation — using CLIP analysis to generate LoRA-adapted representations, which are then animated through OpenPose — to produce visuals that accompany Kasimyn’s sonic work in real time.

The project engages the colonial archive not as historical document but as raw material to be processed, misread, and returned to motion. By routing imagery through vision-language models trained on contemporary Western datasets, Hulubalang foregrounds the friction between machine perception and the cultural weight of what it is asked to see. The animated body that emerges is both a product of that encounter and a way of working against the stillness that the colonial gaze originally imposed.