The relationship between technology and ecology has returned to the centre of contemporary debate, particularly in light of the environmental consequences of industrial modernity. Yet technology and ecology have never been separate domains. From the moment humans began modifying their surroundings, techniques of making and systems of production have shaped ecological life.

The issue, therefore, is not their separation but the terms under which their relation has been organised. Under colonial and industrial modernity, technology was increasingly abstracted from situated practices and recast as a universal instrument of extraction and control. Technique, understood as embodied know-how rooted in specific environments, gave way to technology as an institutionalised system of production operating at scale. What had once been relational became hierarchical.

To speak of “decolonising technologies” in this context is not merely to dismantle infrastructures inherited from colonial rule. It is to question the epistemic framework that positioned technology as neutral, universal, and external to the environments it transforms. Colonial modernity embedded divisions between human and non-human, centre and margin, civilisation and nature, and naturalised these distinctions through technological systems. Decolonising technology entails re-situating it within the ecological and social contexts from which it emerges.

The practices examined here unfold within Southeast Asian territories historically shaped by extractive economies. Rather than rejecting technology, these artists rework its function, exposing its colonial entanglements while repositioning it within relational ecologies. Through their work, technology and ecology appear not as opposing categories, but as co-constitutive forces whose relation remains open to redefinition.
Bagus Pandega: Reconfiguring Technological Agency

BAGUS PANDEGA: RECONFIGURING TECHNOLOGICAL AGENCY

Bagus Pandega (1985, Jakarta) grounds his artistic research in the interaction between natural and technological systems, primarily through electronic and mechanical installations. His latest solo exhibition, Daya Benda (2025), currently on view at the Swiss Institute in New York, extends one of his central concerns: the exploitation of natural resources in Indonesia under capitalism. The project addresses the disruptive consequences of these extractive processes on communities living in endangered territories, particularly Indigenous groups who depend on the forest for their livelihoods. As the artist explains, the title Daya Benda, derived from Old Javanese, means “power object” and refers to the capacity of natural agents to sustain and regulate life, including human life.

One of the works within the exhibition, Hyperpnea Green (2024), was conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic as a personal response to the public health emergency. The installation consists of three metal circular structures tied together and suspended at mid-height in the room. Hanging from their lower edges are glass jars containing minerals immersed in a transparent liquid, connected by clear tubes. Above them, a purple light illuminates a plant positioned at the centre of the composition, creating an atmosphere that is at once clinical and contemplative.

The term "hyperpnea" refers to a medical condition in which the body increases the frequency and intensity of breathing when deprived of oxygen. As the title suggests, the system is animated by its natural components, which absorb human emissions and convert them into oxygen, while sound is generated as part of the process. In a mechanism analogous to photosynthesis, the output does not result from direct human control but emerges from the plant’s interaction with its surrounding conditions. Technology functions here as a mediating system that translates and recirculates energy rather than extracting it. The machine is reframed not as an external instrument acting upon nature, but as a component within a responsive system.⁴ Rather than reinforcing a binary between the organic as “good” and the technological as “bad,” the work proposes a mode of cooperation in which both operate together.

Another work in the exhibition, transmitting a similar sensibility, is Anim Wraksa (2025), which in Old Javanese Kawi means “The Soul of the Tree.” A 3D-printed clove tree descends into a green-illuminated aquarium whose interior surface is coated in copper and live-electroplated with nickel. As the chemical reaction between the elements begins, oxidation produces a stream of bubbles rising to the surface. The process is simultaneously recorded and displayed upside down on a large LED screen installed on the institute’s rooftop, functioning as a live animation generated by the plant itself. The monitoring process recalls the surveillance of a patient in critical condition, for whom observers bear responsibility. As in Hyperpnea Green, this correspondence emphasises a vital movement that flows from plant to human rather than the reverse, prompting a reconsideration of humanity’s presumed control over resources and the destructive consequences that follow. This reversal of agency unfolds against the broader context of nickel extraction in Indonesia, where reckless and ecologically unsustainable mining has led to deforestation and the irreversible contamination of water and soil.³

The final installation in the series, also centred on nickel extraction, is Putar Petir Racing Team (2025). It presents an imaginary electric motorcycle team equipped with handcrafted two-wheeled vehicles and coordinated suits. Both the vehicles and the costumes draw on the concept of Jamet, a slang term combining Javanese and metal. The term refers to an eccentric, colourful, drag-inspired aesthetic that has become a thriving cultural phenomenon in Indonesia, described by the artist as “super-maximalism.” Here, engineering skill and mechanical components are mobilised to enhance the “rotation of thunder” (Putar Petir), which symbolically drives motorcycle production.⁴

The project points to the long-standing importance of natural resources in Indonesia, dating back to the height of European mercantilism. The historical demand for nutmeg and spices has been replaced by nickel, now central to the production of rechargeable batteries and electric vehicles. Pandega exposes the contradiction whereby materials promoted as enabling green technologies are extracted through processes that remain environmentally destructive.

DEREK TUMALA: CLIMATE, COLONIALITY, AND THE POLITICS OF HEAT

Following a related line of inquiry, Derek Tumala (1986, Manila) is a Filipino multidisciplinary visual artist whose work explores the entanglement of art, technology, and the environment. Combining formal training in fine arts with a family background in design, Tumala grounds his practice in analytical research, often adopting a geopolitically engaged position within contemporary debates.

His project Tropical Climate Forensics (2022) foregrounds the urgencies of the present by investigating the effects of climate change on the toponymy of the Philippines and the challenges of communicating these changes within a local context. At the core of the work lies research conducted during the artist’s residency at the Manila Meteorological Observatory, a historic scientific institution founded in 1865 by the Jesuits to study weather conditions and fluctuations. Tumala describes Tropical Climate Forensics as an infrastructure: a multilevel contextualisation of the climate crisis.⁶

The project responds to a question also raised by critic Benjamin Defensor: “What ails the weather bureau?”6 The work interrogates how scientific discourse can report data without detaching it from the lived variables and contexts that shape weather itself. In contemporary terms, how can one communicate the experience of weather and the environmental transformations brought about by climate change?

To address this question, Tumala constructs a 3D video game–like environment derived from scientific research: a virtual diorama composed of seven biomes that function as archetypes illustrating climate phenomena at a local scale. These explorable biomes include heat, the vortex, the Sierra Madre Mountains, water, the volcano, the observatory, and the community. Through an avatar, the viewer navigates different zones. Upon entering the “heat” biome, for instance, a desert landscape unfolds. Moving through it, in a manner reminiscent of Google Earth Street View, the viewer encounters a sign bearing a sentence in Tagalog drawn from a United Nations Human Rights Office statement: “The Climate Crisis is a Crisis of Culture.”⁷ The gesture situates the work at the intersection of scientific inquiry and sociopolitical engagement, extending its dialogue beyond the art world to activists, policymakers, scientists, and communities.

Among the biomes, the sun assumes a central symbolic role beyond its biological function, drawing on Filipino mythology. Heat, as a primary driver of climate change, acquires layered meaning within this tradition. This symbolism is further developed in Island in the Sun (2025), presented as part of the group exhibition Oracle at the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts. The work features a large dystopian sun crafted from abaca paper, illuminating a darkened space and generating an atmosphere of instability and disturbance.

This ambivalence reflects the mythological figure of Apolaki, the Filipino god of war. The sun thus appears both as life-giver and as a destructive force, mirroring its contemporary role in climate crisis discourse. This duality is also present in the series Eyes Melted God (2025), which enters into dialogue with Island in the Sun. The title evokes the myth of Icarus, invoking the tension between illumination and annihilation, blessing and overexposure. The work suggests a disillusionment with the supposed benefits of colonial modernity.

Comprising three installations—Fire Ants, Forever Burning, and Animal Apocalypse—the series addresses the enduring consequences of colonialism. Beyond establishing an exploitative economy, colonial rule introduced long-term systemic effects that continue to shape the country. In Fire Ants, a video shows a hand covered with fire ants, a species imported from Latin America in the seventeenth century and now invasive in the Philippines. The other installations echo the apocalyptic tone of Island in the Sun, evoking both literal and metaphorical resource depletion. By challenging Western divisions between human and animal, civilisation and savagery, Tumala relocates the artist’s position alongside endangered species rather than above them.

Rather than treating monstrosity as a condition to be feared, particularly where human and animal forms appear to merge, it can serve as a productive starting point for a necessary question: what does “monster” actually mean? The modern project of “civilisation” positioned the white human subject as superior to other species and cultures, naturalising hierarchies between human and animal, centre and margin. In doing so, it severed humanity from its ecological entanglements, producing the forms of alienation that persist today. The figure of the monster offers a way to rethink this liminal space and to unsettle the hierarchies historically internalised through a Western worldview. The abject, as defined by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror (1980),⁸ destabilises established orders and exposes their fragility. In this sense, it opens the possibility of imagining alternatives to the present condition.

Singaporean artist Priyageetha Dia (1992, Singapore) engages these concerns through media art and video installations that explore renegotiations between environments and their agents. Her practice develops what may be described as a multi-ecological discourse,9 questioning rigid distinctions between categories such as organic and artificial. In works such as Blood Sun I & II (2024), monstrosity assumes a regenerative function. Hybrid figures, including a Malayan tiger-human, appear not as aberrations but as mutable identities inhabiting hybrid spaces. Their strength lies precisely in their capacity for transformation and adaptation within shifting environments, drawing on inherited popular beliefs that view metamorphosis as a source of power.

Her earlier work Turbine Tropics (2023) introduces the theme of altered states that recurs throughout her practice. Echoing the title of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955),10 the project reflects on the disillusionment produced by the colonial conviction of a “civilising mission.” The video installation, emerging from a pile of plastic fruit crates, presents an indeterminate perceptual spiral that evokes the process of rubber tapping, central to imperial extractive economies. For Dia, the spiral embodies a double movement: centripetal and centrifugal forces operating within the same structure, pulling simultaneously inward and outward. Through digital media, her critique of resource extraction extends to data extraction, where complex realities are compressed into coded datasets. In both cases, multiplicity is reduced to standardisation, resulting in the erosion of identity and a distancing from memory.

Memory is a recurring motif in Dia’s works, including Forget Me Forget Me Not (2022), The Sea is a Blue Memory (2022), and Spectre System (2024). Here, memory operates as a collective archive through which identity, trauma, and recognition are negotiated. In Spectre System, a computer-generated avatar named Inaivu, merging the Tamil ninaivu and Malay ingatan, both meaning “memory,” guides the viewer through plantation landscapes recalling those established by the British Empire in the Malay Peninsula. The work draws a parallel between colonial extractive economies and contemporary technological forms of exploitation. Memory appears as a fragmented composition, requiring reconstruction through what Roger Bastide described in Mémoire Collective et Sociologie du Bricolage (1970)11 as a process of bricolage. Rather than preserving the past intact, collective memory becomes an active site of symbolic reconstruction. In Dia’s work, it functions less as a static archive than as an ongoing process of assembling and reassembling meaning.

Taken together, these practices reveal how technological systems are historically embedded within extractive and colonial structures. In each case, technology is re-situated within ecological, mythic, and communal frameworks that expose the instability of the hierarchies through which it has been naturalised.

If crisis implies a moment of judgement, it also implies the necessity of re-evaluation. What emerges through these works is an insistence on reconsidering how technological infrastructures operate within lived environments. The relation between technology and ecology is shown to be neither fixed nor impermeable, but contingent upon the epistemic and material systems that shape it.

Decolonising technologies, in this sense, names a shift in orientation. It involves recognising that technological forms derive meaning from the contexts in which they are embedded and that these contexts have long been structured by colonial divisions between human and non-human, centre and margin. Through their interventions, these artists reposition Southeast Asia as a site from which alternative configurations of technological and ecological relations can emerge and circulate beyond the region, opening futures that move beyond colonial hierarchies and restore attention to the material conditions, memories, and environments that shape collective life.