Artist  /  Writer  /  Creative Technologist  /  Honolulu, Hawaiʻi

Art at the
edge of what
we inherit

Essays, installations, and multimedia work examining how the impacts of migration, labor, and surveillance transformed daily life and the internet.

Current Work

Web / Data Index of Feeling Diaspora / Faith Project Sto. Niño Game / Browser Deadweight Educational Resource & Framework Principled Space

Selected Works

[ Image ]

Web / Data — Ongoing

Index of Feeling

A living archive of human emotion drawn from thousands of real entries across the web. Breathing dots, slow reveals, and collective interiority across distance and time.

indexoffeeling.vercel.app
[ Image ]

AI & Language — Multimedia

Triptych

Uses multiple language models to reveal how ideology and worldview shape truth in the age of AI.

View Work
[ Image ]

Diaspora — Virtual Installation

Altars in Transit

A virtual shrine built with crowdsourced images from the Filipino diaspora, creating a space of remembrance and reconnection across distance.

View Work
[ Image ]

Surveillance — Theater

POINT

A theater work staged entirely in darkness, where audiences navigate story through surveillance tools, confronting how power mediates perception and experience.

View Work
[ Image ]

Game / Browser — Ongoing

Deadweight

A Tamagotchi-style browser game about emotional labor, codependency, and the impossible arithmetic of care.

deadweightgame.vercel.app

Digital Projects

Archive & Community

Educational Resources

Games & Interactive

Deadweight A Tamagotchi-style browser game about carrying — and surviving — emotional labor. deadweightgame.vercel.app
Recession Fresh Surviving and thriving during economic hardship — creative strategies for lean times. Coming Soon

Essays & Writing

01 Significantly Othered A platform for adult children of immigrants navigating identity, culture, and belonging. Ongoing
02 Recession Fresh Surviving and thriving during economic hardship — creative strategies for lean times. Coming Soon
About

Hanalei R.

Artist Statement

I am interested in the points where systems impact the most intimate parts of our lives.

My work sits at the intersection of intimacy and infrastructure. Through digital ritual, installation, essays, and participatory media, I make things that ask how abstract systems — immigration law, economic precarity, digital platforms, bureaucratic categories — reach into the most private portions of our lives.

What I'm asking is: who are we outside of our labor power and the commodification of our attention? What happens when sacred spaces become sites of extraction and control?

I've spent most of my life moving between places that each claimed some part of me (Jersey City, Manila, Honolulu) and that experience of being multiple and also illegible, of being "significantly othered," runs through everything I make. The diasporic condition is not a metaphor in my work. It is the actual architecture.

The acceleration and availability of technological life has not replaced the hunger for real intimacy, for being witnessed, remembered, held. It has made that hunger more acute and harder to satisfy. The internet once had a number of safe third spaces for the most marginalized communities. However, it is increasingly a site of surveillance, monetization, and managed attention. The systems that now govern the most ordinary moments of our lives are deeply shaping how we grieve, how we love, how we organize, how we remember. My work tries to create the conditions for witnessing inside those systems. Not to resolve the tension between intimacy and infrastructure, but to name it clearly enough for critical discernment.

I build out data sets because what gets archived is a political act. I make community frameworks to sharpen the questions one should ask. I build for the internet because it remains one of the last commons.

The work is an attempt to carve out intimacy and authentic connection in conditions that are not designed for it.