Hands-On ALT ART

At ALT ART Philippines, interactivity takes center stage as artists invite viewers to step inside algorithmic systems, kinetic reflections, living archives, and decolonial narratives.

Words Randolf Maala-Resueño
February 13, 2026

ALT ART Philippines has steadily distinguished itself as a fair grounded in curatorial rigor and experimentation. Organized by a collective of leading galleries, it moves beyond booth-style display and leans into projects that are immersive, research-driven, and critically engaged. 

This year, interactivity is not a side feature, it is central. These are the works that ask you to step closer, listen harder, and see yourself differently.

ghost_control, KoloWn

Presented by The Drawing Room

Part of the ongoing ghost_projects series, ghost_control places viewers inside a crate-like work-from-home environment of screens, lights, and ambient sound. Games, dashboards, and video fragments flicker across monitors, and visitors can intervene through their phones.

The piece investigates the hidden algorithms shaping daily life, where productivity, intimacy, and control blur. By inviting direct participation, KoloWn collapses the distance between viewer and system. You are not just observing digital labor. You are implicated in it.

Amphibian palm, Lesley-Anne Cao

Presented by Underground

Aquarium tanks house “books” whose pages flip through automated wavemakers. They undulate, stutter, rest. Music composed for them fills the constructed space.

Cao questions what constitutes a book and what it means to read. If no human hand turns the page, does reading still happen? The installation evolves moment to moment, shaped by materials that behave with their own logic. 

Viewers encounter a living archive of textiles, photographs, flora, plastic, embroidery, and even the retired names of destructive typhoons. Interactivity here is quiet but profound. Meaning shifts depending on where you stand and how long you stay.

Birds of Prey, Kiri Dalena & Ben Brix

Presented by Galleria Duemila

This two-channel video installation demands simultaneous attention. One monitor shows lush, color footage of mountain landscapes. The other displays black-and-white archival photographs by Dean C. Worcester from the American colonial period.

The work requires viewers to negotiate sound, text, and image at once. You choose where to look, what to prioritize. In doing so, you actively construct the narrative. The piece becomes an act of decolonial reading, where personal and collective memory are reassembled through your movement between screens.

Unstable waters, Marco Ortiga

ALT Discoveries

Ortiga’s kinetic sculptures use motors to move antiqued mirrors at slightly different rhythms. The result is a restless surface that mimics unsettled water.

Stand before it and you catch glimpses of yourself, fractured and unreliable. There is no stable reflection, only continuous motion. The work transforms the viewer into part of the sculpture’s visual field. Interactivity emerges through presence. Your body completes the image.

When Breathing Becomes Work, Buen Calubayan

Presented by Blanc

Calubayan constructs a framework around maintenance, repair, and the immune system as survival mechanisms. Diagrams, scaffolding, and body imagery map how labor and care circulate across terrain, landscape, and body.

The installation asks viewers to navigate its structures physically and conceptually. As you move, you confront questions of control disguised as care and rest disguised as productivity. The work invites reflection on how systems operate within and around us, and how we participate in sustaining or resisting them.

Interact, inquire, illuminate

Give these works some time. Walk around them. Revisit them. Use your phone where invited. Listen to the sound bleed between spaces. 

ALT ART rewards slow looking and active engagement. It reshapes interpretation by placing the viewer inside the work’s logic. If you are visiting this weekend, come ready to move, question, and be reflected back in unexpected ways. 

ALT ART is open to the public from Feb. 13 to 15. For more information, explore www.altphilippines.com.