Introduction

Sue-Li Tasker Yeo

It has been estimated that constructing Angkor Wat must have required a labour force of thousands; over a period of only 40 years, more than 5 million tonnes of sandstone would have been transported from a quarry 40km away. A grandiose religious structure, a celestial map – the temples of Angkor stand testament not only to the Khmer king Suryavarman II, but to the monumental amount of excess resources the Khmer economy was able to spend on an undertaking that did not directly feed back into the economy.

Densham’s sculpture, while referencing Angkor Wat’s architectural forms, is labour-intensive on an individual scale; in a post-industrial context, this physical labour takes on new significance.

The blog for drawing tool thisissand.com states that it is “a website for play. It changes the pixels on the screen into digital sand that can be used as building material for cosmic landscapes.” Here, the digital world turns labour into ‘play’.