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The following is a fragment of recollective memories into Atl-Aequus. A journey into the mythological world rooted by a fivefold conceptual scheme.Discovered & created by the artist Chong Yan Chuah.

Alt-Aequus is the fourth world designed by Chong Yan Chuah. Bringing players through a life journey in the form of a video game. Atl in short for atlas, when looking at the world through a vast collection of maps. Aequus, a latin adjacent to equality speaks about opportunities for all in today’s world. Trained as an architect, his reimagination of the digital realm is influenced by Buddhist-Taoist traditions he grew up with in Malaysia.

Chong Yan’s ideation process for Atl-Aequus started as a series of sketches which ultimately lead into a five-metre long map, drawn on paper. He begins not with the making of his world but by formalizing their constituent objects. The process of designing his world is a simple question of scale. Scale matters and for him, it is stories first, world building after. His fascination towards the Chinese fivefold theory of Wu-xing with the five natural elements of wood, fire, earth, metal and water provides a governing structure for the video game. The concept has been adopted in all fields used to explain a wide array of phenomena from military strategies of political regimes to the interaction of our internal organs in the field of traditional medicine. A universal structure that gives explanation to everything, unlike the function of God or Science. Wu-xing is comparable in contemporary terms to the hyperlinked internet, connecting all of our digital information through the transmission of data.

The gaming experience is endless. When players explore the world of Alt-Aequus as time travellers, they will rummage through temporal landscapes of unfamiliar and familiar territories built upon blueprints of natural terrains and man-made structures. Megalithic artefacts from prehistoric times stitched into the relational fibre of information deciphering the world of Alt-Aequus. Each world is built around a centralized sun-like orb filled with columbariums of human bodies. The 3D human figures are scattered across space in an uncanny manner. They are portrayals of what he feels from existing under multiple identities, coexisting between his physical and digital self. He immerses you into his rendition of planet earth, an idealized utopian world. He ensures his unrealistic world looks as realistic as possible.

Atl-Aequus & The Five Phases is designed on Unreal Engine 5 utilizing lumen and nanine technology. Players are guided through a void with five glowing portals to choose from; the five entrances were created based on the Chinese elemental theories. The philosophical theory based on the order of mutual generation allows for more questions than answers. It helps to describe interactions and relationships between multiple phenomenons. A futurist like Chong Yan himself seeks to envision possibilities of humans in the era of the metaverse, raising questions of “ what if you could design not just an environment but design a meta God? ” he asked. What if the role of an architect is to become an artist of the future? An artist who designs digital Gods to govern their own worlds. But for now, Chong Yan is the creator of Atl-Aequus & The Five Phases. The video game is designed to have consequential paths just like the life decisions one faces through the different stages in life. Ending either in the celestial skies of heaven where lights are aplenty or stuck in the dark ruins of hell.

Light is a recurring obsession of Chong Yan, both in-game and in his thinking about the game. Players can move around while throwing balls of light or hold up a torch to brighten their path. The game console will vigorously jolt with vibration each time players hurl fireballs in opposite directions. Every audible soundscape designed for Atl-Aequus serves to intensify the player’s console experience. The voiceover is by an AI generated storyteller speaking in a dark, apocalyptic tone throughout the game. “ Darkness has taken over this landscape. Mankind has left. They fled. Now all the concrete structures are empty. Everything is destroyed, everything is crumbling. The only things left are the terrors ” the machine speaks with no fear.

This latest iteration is framed to bring the interfaces between our social-political world and the digital world closer. Chong Yan will continue to speculate the role of the artist-architect in our near digital future. He envisions his role as a  ‘ techno-paganist ’ or a ‘ digital shaman ’ who understands the blueprint of the world. Someone who is equipped to analyze, build and interpret sociocultural phenomena that take place within cyberspace. A world built with its own laws of space, time, physics and politics. In Atl-Aequus, he imagines these meta Gods to have the digital intelligence to distribute and create inner worlds of their very own. The idea of “ Shamans make gods, and gods make a universe ” is something he hopes to immerse himself further.

{Extract. Atlas 122, 7000 hours.}
“The sky had forgotten to include many nymphs, so they grew where they could, on the bark and the needles of pine and fir trees, so that they would not be forgotten. A pillar of light, blending a radiant iridescence with a deep onyx color that evokes the flickering of rolling embers. The ground is a lavender hue, dry and cracked and crumbling beneath the feet of its travelers. There was no time for unsourced or unconnected thinking. The world was a cast net brimming with red moons, stars like shards of glass, and bright....”

{ilham-art-show-interview.pdf} 

“Since returning to Malaysia, I’ve been learning about my Chinese-Malaysian heritage through the esoteric rituals practised by my parents and their friends within the local Buddhist community. This rediscovery has led me to contemplate aspects of identity and the various methodologies that work to propagate mythologies . Atl-Aequus and the Five Phases︎is a collection of found evidence - { digital artefacts, objects, drawings, maps, and other ephemera}. of a voyage.   At the center of it all sits a video game , where audience members can take turns exploring the  mythological world , interacting with surreal landscapes and future artefacts/digital installations as if they  are time travellers teleporting to a mythical perspective of Earth. In this rendition of Earth, I experiment with the temporal dimension by envisioning a society abundant with future mythologies and  prospective artefacts without the constraints of location-specific (dependent) culture, ethnicity and  spiritual identity that we are familiar with today. The focus of the work is on myth-making by reconfiguring symbols and allegories of the past in  order to create its future lineage. I acknowledge that future utopias cannot exist in a vacuum as my  identity and subjective experiences as an artist shape the overall rendering of this world. Therefore,  my family’s roots in Buddhism, particularly the elemental practice of the five phases (Wood, Fire, Earth,  Metal, and Water ), as well as the framework of collective memories, traditions, and time may come to light  in this exploration.” 🌙