breakpoint

The piece was built the night after leaving a full-time role as a creative technologist at one of Singapore’s largest exhibition companies. That context is the installation’s structure.

Four states run through it. Inaction: ambient noise fills the room, continuous and directionless, the visitor standing inside it without recourse. Action: the scream, a physical assertion against the overwhelm, which fades the ambient layer and leaves the space briefly quiet. Peace: those few seconds, the visitor’s own voice decaying in the room with them. Acceptance: the noise returns on a fixed timer, and what remains is the sound they made trying to get out, now the loudest thing left.

The act of seeking quiet makes you the noise. When the ambient layer comes back, two options remain: scream again, or leave. The installation cannot be resolved from inside it. The only exit is to change your environment.

We could hear the screaming all the way from the other side of the road at level one!!

I thought it was just a crazy thing going on, didnt expect there to be a meaning behind it.

Looks like it’s the noise around us, or the noise in our heads.

Scream for Silence ran for one evening on 26 July 2025. People could be heard screaming from blocks away. It became an unreasonably memorable part of the evening for the 300+ visitors who attended.

The piece was subsequently featured in Plural Art Magazine’s writing on creative technology as a field of practice.