Lọc (Filter · Strain · Purify)

Lọc (Filter, Strain, Purify) is a site-specific WebAR installation made for the Tẻ Canal, Kênh Tẻ, Ho Chi Minh City. The work is a contribution to the collaborative group installation Fabric Narratives, presented at the 28th IFFTI 2026 conference at RMIT University Vietnam.

The work asks what it means to filter: to receive, to pass through, to leave residue. At the canal's edge, objects accumulate: discarded plastic, sun-bleached shells, fallen coconuts. These are not waste as failure. They are the canal's vocabulary, matter in slow transformation, filtered through water, time, and human proximity.

Three objects found at the site are reconstructed as 3D digital models, green coconuts, canal shells, a plastic trash bag caught against a fence, and placed in an invisible triangle in AR space. Visitors navigate by touch: a liquid, drifting drag through open space, no arrows, no instructions. The camera feed is rendered alien, desaturated, blue-shifted, the world seen as if through a membrane. As each model is enlarged by pinching, it becomes translucent, see-through, the boundary between object and atmosphere dissolving.

A poem overlays the space in fragments: GPS coordinates, bilingual site words, embodied sensing, written from the position of the body as primary instrument. The skin before the pixel. Contact before capture. The pore, not the lens.

Lọc treats the body as a filtering apparatus: sensing before naming, receiving before framing. The canal does not need to be beautiful. It needs to be attended to.

Exhibition history