Impermanence and Drift
I took this photograph in 2002.
I remember sneaking into a set of flats due to be torn down. This was near Prinsep Street. I was into photography then. And was going round town looking for things to shoot with my latest toy - a Nikon D100.
This was one of them. A corridor. A rattan chair. A clothes rack. Night. I wondered who sat on that chair when the flat was still alive.
I didn’t know then that I would spend the next two decades drawn to spaces on their way out.
Week 19 of independent life. (Links to past weeks in my newsletter.)
The familiar. A university president I knew from when I started working. A lawyer I am collaborating with. Someone from a financial training institution. Folks from a tech association I am helping write a paper on AI and workforce transformation on. A chief scientist I met from the week before. An ex-colleague doing AI development.
The new. A group of Masters in Fintech students. Strategic planners from a Ministry. A business school professor whose research area overlaps with mine. A startup founder from Australia pivoting from digital assets to Agentic AI.
Impermanence
When I started illustrating more than a decade ago I wrote something about why spaces draw me for an interview.
Spaces, especially forgotten ones, intrigue me. Whenever I see an empty space, I find myself wondering about the lives that have touched the space, or could have. Most of my illustrations try to capture such memories, real and imagined.
The camera in 2002. Illustrations after. Watercolours now. Somehow, I developed a quiet practice of bearing witness to what time takes.
This week I had a chat with a human geographer I have known for more than 2 decades. She is writing a book documenting a district that has changed. Sitting with her I realized something I hadn’t put into words before.
I have been a visual historian for over two decades without ever thinking about it that way.
I used to feel sad about spaces disappearing. That sadness resolved itself slowly through the documentation of disappearing spaces. Moving from camera to digital pen to watercolour taught me something. What must pass must pass. What must happen must happen. We are a speck in the passage of time. The documentation isn’t about saving anything. It’s just to say - this was here.
Drift
Around this time last year I made a decision. Mid-May 2025. I would leave MAS. Before I left I developed a plan for what would follow. Almost none of it happened the way I planned.
In AI, concept drift is when the world a model was trained on changes. My world view has definitely drifted.
What arrived instead. Way too many rooms entered awkwardly by an introvert who doesn’t particularly like meeting people. Unexpected collaborations forming sideways. Most things weren’t in the plan at all.
The flat in the photograph is gone. The version of me from 2025 is also gone. The plan I made at the end of last year has drifted into something unrecognisable.
Everything drifts.
I used to feel sad about that. I don’t anymore. Two decades of documenting disappearing spaces taught me that impermanence is unavoidable. It’s just time doing what time does. What must pass must pass. What must happen must happen.