Hand-Fetish-Projects®

Category: Art Practice in the Algorithmic Age | The Logbook | HFP

The Logbook documents an ongoing art practice unfolding within a cultural landscape increasingly shaped by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and platform-driven systems of visibility. Rather than focusing solely on finished artworks, these entries record the experiments, adjustments, failures, and discoveries involved in sustaining an artistic identity under rapidly changing technological and cultural conditions.

Part field journal and part operational archive, The Logbook gathers fragments from HFP’s evolving activities across publications, exhibitions, archives, digital infrastructures, distribution channels, and other supporting systems. Together, these records trace how an art practice adapts not only its works, but also the tools, platforms, and organizational structures surrounding them in order to maintain autonomy, continuity, and cultural relevance over time.

  • [5-Sep-2026] So Much for Artistic Indifference

    [5-Sep-2026] So Much for Artistic Indifference

    So Much for Artistic Indifference

    The founding open call of Hand-Fetish-Projects produced more than expected.

    Contemporary publication from a Southeast Asian Art Open Call, issued by Hand-Fetish-Projects

    I have to admit, I am rather excited that the founding Southeast Asian Art Open Call for Hand-Fetish-Projects has finally produced something genuinely interesting. To be honest, I was not expecting much. I had already prepared myself for indifference; partly because the subject is Southeast Asian, and partly because, let’s face it, there probably are not that many artists actively making work about this region, especially from within its own rather complicated cultural mess. I was quite prepared to be ignored.

    Fortunately, it seems the call managed to pick up a particular frequency. The number of submissions was not overwhelming, but the quality was. I have spent a considerable amount of time reading, looking, and trying to understand what each piece was actually doing; especially the works that leaned heavily toward concept. Naturally, I remain interested in beauty, but perhaps less than I used to be. As someone who is fundamentally rather aesthetic-minded, I have become increasingly bored by surfaces alone. AI has, among other things, made the worship of visual appearance feel remarkably cheap. I spent a particularly significant amount of time looking closely at the work of the British artist Jason Haynes, whose practice, at first glance, seems to have little to do with S.E.A. Yet in the end, I still found a way to connect his work to the book. I genuinely learned a great deal from spending time with and observing work that is so strongly driven by concept.

    We are now working on the layout and talking with publishers, with the hope of finding a European publishing partner for the project. Vietnam, after all, remains a particularly unforgiving place for artists; people have been imprisoned for saying the wrong thing, and decades later, the basic problem has hardly disappeared. Perhaps this is precisely why independent platforms, publications, and artists need to keep making their own spaces; not because anyone asked for permission, but because waiting for permission has never been a particularly productive artistic strategy.

  • [8-July-2026] The first time Algorithmic Postmodernism was discussed in public — on Reddit.

    [8-July-2026] The first time Algorithmic Postmodernism was discussed in public — on Reddit.

    I WAS POSTMODERN BEFORE I KNEW THE WORD

    A Signal Note from the Operator — By Hoang-Dan Pham

    Hoang-Dan Pham — the originator of Algorithmic Postmodernism with Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Deleuze. AI-generated image.

    I posted a note about Algorithmic Postmodernism on r/CriticalTheory, to see what real readers of this stuff would do to it. Most of it was what I expected, a couple of comments waving it off as AI-written and moving on. But one reply actually engaged, someone who knew Lyotard and Baudrillard well and pushed back on the term directly, and that exchange made the idea better. Thread’s here if you want it →

    Backstory, for anyone wondering how an artist ends up quoting French theorists. I’m not an academic. I make things with my hands, that’s grown into running HFP and, apparently, coining theory terms too. Truth is, Southeast Asian artists tend to be pretty pure people, mostly because we haven’t been poisoned by Western elitism yet. Most of us grew up believing good art is art that looks good. But, if that were actually how it worked I should’ve been famous a long time ago. So at some point I stopped trusting any “grand narrative” about what makes work valuable, mine or anyone else’s. That distrust was already in place before I had a word for it. Years later “postmodernism” showed up on some Reddit thread I was scrolling through, I looked it up out of curiosity, and there was a whole shelf of French theorists who’d written my exact suspicion down decades earlier and given it a name.

    So I went and read into it properly. AI did most of the heavy lifting getting me through Lyotard and Baudrillard, and I don’t feel weird about that, that’s a door that used to be locked. Real reason I leaned on it: those guys are bloated writers, and I don’t have the patience to wade through three hundred pages to get one idea that could’ve been a paragraph. I respect the thinking, not the word count, and I’m not going to pretend a text is smarter for being harder to get through. But reading the theory was never the point. Algorithmic Postmodernism isn’t something I observe from a distance or feel cynical about, it’s something I operate inside of. Understanding a system isn’t submission to it. That’s the whole framework, and the actual argument for it lives in the Playbook, not here: Where Algorithmic Postmodernism Departs From Its Own Ancestors →

  • Testing Borderless Signal Infrastructure — 742 Karma — HFP Gallery

    Testing Borderless Signal Infrastructure — 742 Karma — HFP Gallery

    [12-April-2026] — TESTING BORDERLESS SIGNAL INFRASTRUCTURE / 742 KARMA

    No Visa Required !!!

    Today, while sitting inside a small Vietnamese coffee shop somewhere beneath a tangled ceiling of electric cables and slow-moving ceiling fans, we successfully crossed one of the most psychologically fortified borders of the contemporary internet: becoming a trusted New York Redditor after only three days of existence.

    742 karma. No office. No visa. No Brooklyn apartment. No institutional blessing. Only behavioral consistency, aesthetic camouflage, and a stable signal infrastructure operating quietly from Southeast Asia.

    Perhaps this is the strange condition of contemporary identity. Global presence is no longer determined primarily by geography, but by whether systems believe your pattern of existence is coherent enough to deserve reality. The passport remains physical. Legitimacy has become algorithmic.