Critical Review with Natpavee Wanichnatee

Written by Dennis Ngan

Natpavee Wanichnatee is a computational artist who comes with a graphic design background. Reflecting on her artistic journey, I find strong echoes of her design traits, which resonate with broader questions about how we situate ourselves in an era dominated by artificial intelligence.

Inside Outside

One of her early graphic design projects, Inside Outside, immediately stands out. It consists of a pair of posters based on the visual language of traffic lights. The concept seems straightforward, yet a closer look reveals subtle and witty interventions. The familiar red, amber and green circles are actually composed of countless miniature symbols: green made of tiny circles, amber of exclamation marks, and the red is filled with crosses. These embedded signs intuitively guide the viewer’s interpretation of the corresponding signals. The second poster reveals how raw light refracts through a Fresnel lens to produce the amber glow. Together, the pair maintains the communicative surface of a traffic signal, while reimagining its interior structure as a field of geometric colour and coded meaning. The project signals an early stage of information design that speculates, transforming a functional object into a site of poetic ambiguity.

The Shinning

This impulse deepens in The Shining, an editorial book art piece inspired by Stephen King’s novel and Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation. Here, Wanichnatee illustrates how the novel is translated onto the big screen. Based on her research at the Kubrick Archive at the London College of Communication, she reedits and restructures the narrative, intertwining passages from the novel and the film script with stills, timestamps and archival annotations. The result is a reflection on adaptation, authorship and the persistence of images.

While it is compelling to see how Wanichnatee reinterprets cinematic memory, the work also raises the question of whether cultural icons such as The Shining can be used to interrogate the very nature of the moving image. Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, for example, slows down Hitchcock’s classic to the duration of a full day. By slowing it down and taking away the sound, Gordon strips away the horror and alienates the audience’s ingrained memory of it. Its images develop a new logic. The work demonstrates how found images can be reconfigured to expose the mechanics of the medium itself. Its images develop a new logic.

Entering the realm of computational art, Wanichnatee’s early experiments focus on physical computing. In Rekindle, she uses a tactile installation to explore the poetics of human interaction. Viewers are invited to wear a hand-knit fabric piece around the palm, which lights up the installation when they hold hands. The light is set to dim after thirty seconds, even if the participants continue to hold on, because, as the artist notes, “nothing ever lasts.” The piece transforms simple circuitry into a metaphor for human connection.

Multitasking Harmonograph

Her Multitasking Harmonograph merges mechanical drawing with digital sensing. The work is inspired by the playful challenge of patting one’s head while rubbing one’s belly, implying the balance between the heart and the mind. Viewers operate a crank with one hand, while using the other to influence a distance sensor that alters the pen’s motion. The drawings appear to be a result of control and chance, human gesture and algorithmic precision.

More critically, the piece articulates a broader theme in Wanichnatee’s practice: the negotiation between agency and automation. As viewers attempt to collaborate with the machine to draw a perfect circle, their gestures become busy and divided. Despite these efforts, they can only determine where the pen begins, not how it moves. The machine ultimately dictates how the shapes are drawn. This inconvenient truth mirrors our daily exchanges with AI chatbots, as one ponders how much control is left to humans when we are drowned by the omnipresence of machine intelligence.

Wanichnatee’s most recent work expands her inquiry into world-building. In Metamemory, she collaborates with Heather Bell to create a simulated VR landscape, which is populated by 3D-scanned objects sourced online. Each time the viewer approaches an object, an AI-generated poem is triggered to give voice to the object’s digital existence, at once sentimental and absurd. The work juxtaposes two forms of excess: the accumulation of digital waste and humans’ urge to preserve memories. As the viewer navigates the glowing, nostalgic terrain, the sky gradually darkens with each interaction, reflecting both the emotional and the “ecological” weight of digital preservation.

I am particularly drawn to a feature that appeared only in an early iteration of the work. Initially, the artists experimented with slowing the viewer’s movement as they collected more objects (memories). A textbox then appears to remind the viewer that “in order to move on, they have to let go”. This setting speaks to the paradox of memory: its ability to nurture, and its potential to burden. While it was ultimately removed as it works against expectations of how one interacts in VR gameplay, the gesture raises the question again on whether the medium can be used to interrogate its own conventions, challenging the ways in which viewers expect to interact and perceive.

Metamemory

Even without this earlier mechanic, the current version of Metamemory illuminates its central paradox. Digital “waste” becomes a vessel for preservation: while people forget and objects are continually abandoned, these virtual artefacts exist for as long as their servers run. One participant even scanned their grandfather and effectively “uploaded” him into the simulated landscape. The work suggests that memory itself is undergoing a transformation. Instead of collecting physical mementoes, we may preserve our histories as virtual artefacts that could, in theory, outlast us all.

If her early training grounded her in the precision of design, Wanichnatee’s current trajectory embraces uncertainty and play. Shifting from printed publication to the immersive screen and world-building, her practice recognises that the grammar of design can be reimagined as the language of art. She continues to explore what it means to make, to remember, and to feel in the simulated age.