Pest to Power is a quasi-science-fictional quest into a peculiar behavior of the cockroach, which is constituted as an assemblage of nocturnal, habitable, homeopathic, and resourceful material. Being marginalied for thousands of years as a creature carrying diseases and treated as a fearsome species by the human counterpart, the judgment toward the cockroach is built by the hyper-sterilized biopolitical idea of »proper lifestyle,« in which overproduction of synthetic commodities and human dis-attachment to waste generates the cockroach as a peripheral creature outside human’s sphere. World-building is one of the essential aspects of Pest to Power. Its digital world consists of three main queered characters – a commune of cockroaches, humans-without-genitals, and human-leopards. These three characters each represent different features; the collective consciousness of the nonhuman agency in cockroaches, the compassionate and proponent of kinship in humans-without-genitals, and the hubristic trait of anthropocentrism in the human-leopard.

Tontey is an artist and graphic designer based in Yogyakarta. She is interested in exploring the concept of fiction as a method of speculative thinking. This investigation brings forward the fictional account of the history and myth surrounding »manufactured fear« and seeing how it determines expectations for the future. Her works have been shown at the Next Wave Festival (2016), Koganecho Bazaar (2015), Instrument Builder Project Kyoto (2018), Other Futures: Multispecies Experiment (2019) Polyphonic Social 2019 by Liquid Architecture, K4 Gallery of Video and Moving Image (2019), and The Wrong Biennale for Digital Arts (2019), among other events and institutions. In 2019 she received Young Artist Award by ArtJog MMXIX; in 2020 the HASH Award for Net-Based Projects in the Fields of Art, Technology, and Design by ZKM Karlsruhe and Akademie Schloss Solitude as well as the Performance Space Micro Fellowshi; and in 2021 the Martin Roth Initiative Virtual Residency for transmediale.

Yogyakarta/Indonesia – Web Resident »Planetary Glitch,« 2018