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Spectre System is a speculative digital narrative where spectral entities move through landscapes shaped by historical erasure and economic exploitation. The work reimagines the plantations of the Malay Peninsula, once central to the British Empire’s wealth, through the eyes of The Inaivu, spectral beings who embody memory, labour, and resistance. These spirits of the forgotten are neither ghosts of terror nor echoes of the past. Instead, they exist as agents of remembrance, navigating the threshold between history and the present.

As the computer-generated protagonist wanders a hauntingly familiar plantation-scape, the sound of laboured breathing echoes throughout the digital space, amplifying the corporeal toll of racialized labour and displacement. Ethereal orbs, reminiscent of spirits, hover across the terrain acting as silent witnesses, suspended between visibility and oblivion. In Spectre System, labour is not just a historical phenomenon but an evolving condition that continues to shape contemporary existence. The work draws connections between the coercion of South Indian indentured workers in colonial Malaya and the abstraction of labour in today’s hyper-financialized economies. As tangible production gives way to speculative capital, The Inaivu experience a profound dissonance, where their once-physical efforts are rendered intangible, their existence reduced to echoes in a world untethered from material realities.

This tension between embodiment and disappearance is mirrored in Mesh: Prelude to Spectre System, a vinyl print depicting elongated, contorted hands in mid-motion. Reflecting the elasticity of rubber, these hands blur the boundaries between body and space, symbolizing the spectral traces of labor and its enduring imprint on contemporary realities.