Part I — Singapore as a systems aspiration
8 June 2026. This is another journal entry: Works Like Singapore. Actually, PropertyBook and so many other fundamental technologies I have built in the last five years were built in Singapore. By now, I have lived in Singapore for nine years. It is very interesting to come to a country and see how things work. In Singapore, they say: it just works. That culture goes down to everyone.
There is an expectation of service, and of the quality of service. It is very interesting, and very nice. That is the reason Singapore has been so efficient and has grown over the years: taking careful steps, but not changing things retrospectively. These are difficult things to balance. You need to quickly adapt to change and new circumstances, because Singapore does not want to lose agility. That agility informs its next opportunities.
At the same time, there is deep learning and understanding that goes into what is being created, so structures can be created. The structures and processes are identified, and only then things are rolled out. Enforcement is as important as the law. My experience with parking tickets in Singapore is simple: if I forget to pay for parking, or over-park, I will get fined. So I always feel I should pay for parking.
The fine is not too much. It may be like three days of full-day parking. But it is still something. It is an experience: walking to the car, looking at the wiper, and finding a parking ticket. From that small thing to very high-level organisation, I feel there is very good forethought into building something. That is what I feel we will carry into PropertyBook.
Part II — Blocks, Kuri, and time
This is not something I started yesterday, or two days ago. Five years ago, I started thinking about alternative possibilities. Art was, and still is, very interesting because it gives you a sandbox for experimentation. My focus was the intersection of art and technology. I had the privilege of groundwork, sandbox experiments, thinking about data, conversing about data, and seeing how different people and artists react to what is happening with data in the world.
One day in 2022, I sat down and built Material. I was thinking of blockchain not as a public hype machine, but as timekeeping. What do I want to do with blocks? I started running my own ledger, just two nodes at first, and I experimented with block time. I first thought it was 23 minutes. Sorry, it was 24 minutes. That comes from nazhigai, a Tamil time division method. I had a block time of one nazhigai.
I created validators and switched some off so the rhythm became 24 minutes and 96 minutes. That gave me a kind of rhythm. I took my hand drum and played a small music piece myself. I had a script play the sound whenever there was a new block. I tried to live on the blockchain. I used to think: how do I relate to the world between the work I do and this time?
So I took notes, wrote down a block number, wrote what time it was, took a picture of the notes, made a hash of the picture, and put it on the blockchain. Before all of this, I had a conceptual idea of working with inscriptions. I saw the blockchain as a timeline that allows you to write. Like rock inscriptions on a rock: that is how I saw a block and the inscriptions.
I was looking for words. Is it music? Is it a message? I thought about language, how words restrict us, and went into this whole experience of learning philosophy, land, religion, how we live, and how we express. Then I heard about silence and stammering from Deleuze, through a Tamil podcast. It reminded me of words that say something and not saying anything. Only people who can talk have agency. We are living in the world of LLMs, and I still think: what about knowledge that is not in words, not captured by language, just silent?
I came up with the word Kuri. In Tamil, I always find philosophy in words. It is such an old language, with deep meanings. When Tamil translates words, it takes them seriously. For example, computer is kanini: a mathematical system. It did not translate literally; it looked at the meaning. Kuri means to take note of a note, but it also carries the deeper meaning of pointing at something. I liked that dual meaning: what if you can write a note that can also point somewhere? The closest English word I could come up with was code, but that still does not capture Kuri.
One day I sat in front of the blockchain, watching blocks move at 96-minute and 24-minute intervals, and I made a Kuri. I wrote a Kuri and left a query. I was reflecting on three words: space, meaning, and action. As a method, I kept thinking about the process of what we do and why we do it. That question has carried on for years now.
Part III — From art infrastructure to PropertyBook
That question informed the projects I worked on. Slowly, how I used blockchain changed. At the beginning it was slow. With 24-minute and 96-minute blocks, if you sent a transaction, you might wait 96 minutes until your note was recorded. I liked that. I had no urgency. I was just posting a hash of a picture. If it took one hour, I did not mind. I would go do other things, and when I heard the transition music, I knew: oh wow, it is on the block.
I slowly built Material, and then Yettagam. I wanted to think about self-sovereignty, data sovereignty, and having my independent data without losing the advancements in technology. I do not want to be isolated from the world. I want to use the right tools. But I want to make sure I have access to my data. We give other people access to our data, but what is even more tragic is that we often do not even have our own data.
So I started thinking about posting, self-hosting, and preservation of data. That led to Yettagam, a complex software system that works on top of Material, on top of this fundamental unit. Because I wanted to experiment and develop the software along the way, I took up art projects with great artists and institutions, and thought about the problems digital art faces. My theme was: the art should stay. Art is not a website. It should not be something created on third-party infrastructure and then, in two years, not be available.
Art, fundamentally, should be sovereign. So how do you create that sovereignty? How do you create independence from cloud infrastructure? Not to say: do not use cloud infrastructure. Rather: know how to use it. I started building around how to preserve data on local systems, on hard disks, and how to take data from artworks. Dynamic artworks generate data, and that living data should be archived.
With this capacity, I am now building PropertyBook. PropertyBook is backed by the same Yettagam technology that powers the sovereign infrastructure I use for art production. Here it serves a different purpose. It helps the company keep and manage user data at a very low cost, with low infrastructure needs. In the future, it can also allow people to export their data and hold it themselves. That is quite interesting.
In the future, we may reach a point where we have independent AI. For independent AI, you need independent data. PropertyBook is not simply a property-management tool. It is a concept. The word property can mean something you own, but it is also an attribute of something. It could be an attribute book. Attributes of what? That is the exploration.
Works Like Singapore is an aspiration. What I wanted to say about Singapore is that it has a systems mindset, and PropertyBook is about systems thinking. Modules. Each component, each layer, doing something and doing it well, dependable and simple. Like the blockchain: history is immutable, but so is the format, because it is simple in design. Even if software changes in the future, the Kuris remain written on the blockchain. Maybe thousands of years from now, people will look at blockchains like anthropologists, searching for clues of what was happening.