I turned 26

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on the first of May. I am always grateful to have been born on Labor Day, and grateful for a life I live contingent on so many hands who have built for me, as distant as the world tries to pull us apart.

  • I don’t want to say I feel punished for being born in the Philippines because there is no truth in that—that identity is all that I am and all that I will return to. But on turning 26 and seeing how difficult life is and will continue to be, I wonder if all of it was necessary.
  • I am distant from the world and owe everything to it, and nothing of it I owe.
  • I continue to fail, and fail, and fail; I continue to disappoint, and break, and hurt people; I am weak, shallow, and incomplete.
  • I love the dignity of work, and I want everyone to find a sense of sanctity in what they do.
  • I think the relations most people have with other people is something I will never have, and that is ok
  • I must continue giving all of my life
  • I am so unfortunately a product of my environment: when the world is very cruel to me, I feel myself getting disgusting, small, virulent, snappy
  • I was once reaching a lot towards vague gestures of the internet and poetic web because it is the place I spend all my time in and continue to spend time in, and I have always been making about the Philippines in the very uninteresting to other people way, but it is all I think about because the history of the internet is so entangled with the history of my people—the Filipino people, so obscured; and that any work about the internet will find its way and hand back to this, that the infrastructural and material is so embroiled in ours, and the Philippines and America in conquests have been so embroiled over the past century and the next century will be a continuation of that
  • I saw my family members AI generating photos of my grandfather who died a few decades ago, and it has given me this sorrowful sense of urgency
  • I am appalled at how the work of software is not seen as sacred, material, creative, etc. and I will live to change that
  • I also celebrate 10 years of Developh this year, it has largely been a failure and I feel I am incapable of bringing people together always
  • I’m considering hiring someone to make reels for me (jokingly)
  • I have been a bit sad talking to some Filipinos here who have very immature, naive feelings about their Catholic faith, which has affirmed mine more
  • It is kind of impossible for me to travel or whatever if not entangled in work or the logistics of sufficiency or existing
  • I am the most unfundable person in the world
  • I am in a crisis of legibility, I am in a crisis of isolation, I am in a crisis of meaning
  • Is what I’m doing at this very moment part of my vocation?

May 6, 2026

Beginning of March

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I feel like I am really behind in work, and am racing with ideas. I live in New York now, and work has been gratifying and intense in the product design/software sense, but my creative practice is also feeling a lot. I’m saying no to many things I was overly generous about before. I am a bit frustrated: I’d love to feel prouder of the work I make, but don’t think I’m quite there, nor do I think am I close to getting any form of mentorship, residency, or funding that will allow me that – so I am doing the best I can. I’m still quite secluded in terms of ‘meeting people’ and am quite solitary in my practice and sharing.

Here’s some things I’m working on:

Transmediale - Berlin, Germany

Every Love Song in the World

My performance at Transmediale is about infrastructural intimacies and Filipinos as interfaces. It’s a ‘modular’ performance lecture in many chapters and variations of form, intended to change upon every performance. It is an ambitious weaving, in many threads, of how technologies condition the Filipino, and how we inhabit it.

‘Every Love Song in the World’ is a new lecture performance about the intimacies of infrastructures in the Philippines, tracing how love, cruelty, and desire circulate through networks. I talk about everything from the history of cableships & Filipino marine workers on the USAT Burnside post Spanish-American war, the ILOVEYOU virus released by Onel De Guzman in 2000, to the invisible labor of content moderators, virtual assistants, and data labelers.

One interesting companion to ‘Every Love Song’ is Burning, a truly self-executable desktop performance that you can run on your own computer. It creates, downloads, moves, structures, and plays with your desktop to pop up windows, images, and text in a kind of fantasy account, the experience of the Filipino seamen on the USAT Burnside.

Burning

I’m currently working on expanding the tech and thinking behind the work, hoping to output the ff:

  1. A modular performance (there are a few more chapters I cropped out from the Transmediale edition) – to be shown again and again, no planned dates at the moment
  2. A series of publications — gathering research, text, image from source material to generations of the work
  3. A series of videos – several recordings of the ‘modular’ program, with audio and voice-over, for purposes of showing when running software is not available.

Arkipelago

Currently showing at Nguyen Wahed, Arkipelago is a ‘world engine’ I’ve been building of barangayscapes of Filipino life.

Arkipelago is a series by Chia Amisola depicting the “second creation” mythologies of the Philippines, where a world comes to life from primordial material—here, the computer interface. Ark 1 of the trio draws from the domestic amidst disaster, depicting everyday agricultural life, influenced by Filipino social realist painters such as Fernando Amorsolo, and the dynamics of city builder & simulation games.

The work exists as net art executables, three-channel video, and a series of performances; it exists as a landscape, and also as a slowly evolving story, narrativized each time it is performed and run.

Each work is composed of hundreds of websites made from a mix of handcoded software, generative processes, and desktop performance. Assets appropriated and modified from satellite imagery, Google StreetView, forums, and marketplace sites are renewed into small vignettes of life and movement. Recorded and re-composited directly from the artist’s desktop, the act of ‘creation’ shifts from mere execution to the programmer’s active, constant performance, continuously renewing the world on the desktop.

I’m currently working on the ‘simulation’ aspect, and am enjoying how to take my hand away to let these windows behave and run around, returning my hand to interact with them more authentically rather than puppeteer their every movement.

Paracosms

I’m working on a series of tools and sandboxes for designing fictional worlds in very Dwarf Fortress-like, lo-fidelity ASCII rendering. The goal is to have something I can pull on the side of my computer, my iPad, or my phone, jot down fantasy scenarios, and decide which ones I want to make ‘canon’ in my paracosm. It is mostly a play with designing beautiful software for strange structures (perhaps somewhere in between tools for writing, hypertext, DND, simulation, science, mapping, datavis). I think a kind of ‘tool-game’ where you just end up designing increasingly complex systems is quite fun.

Other Works

  • Hypertext Diary #2
  • An Engine.lol update, for version 2.5
  • A prediction market-like Papers Please game
  • Working on cleaning up my code from many past workshops into a personal series of scripts and libraries for myself
  • Trying to put some works into frames and videos
  • Some writing again

I’m excited to go into a state where I am producing often, consuming inspiring things, reading a lot, and playing a lot of video games.

Our second-bedroom-as-home-studio is shaping up nicely, and I am amassing a collection of small monitors, synthesizers, cables, and computers.

March 7, 2026

ambiences, agencies, apparitions

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i’ve been interested in describing my practice as relations between ambience (condition/enclosure) — agency (action) – apparition (traces/aftermaths)

Ambiences

as in the environmental conditions of the world; feeling before understanding / feeling as understanding; ambience as material & process; the invisible logic and condition that we move through / perceive (or fail to); pre-narrative fragments, transparencies, the world coming unto us unannounced

Agencies

as in a capacity to act, misbehave, be redirected; the distributed/networked/infrastructural forms of agency and belief that exist across system / decentering agency, exploring autonomous components and the emergence that might arise form agency; a polyphonic form of meaning-making; as in misdirection, surprise, subversion, deception, scamming; lagging/glitching/leaking/clicking/reading; as in my density

Apparitions

traces, afterimages, ghosts, echoes, and discards of our systems; the phenomena that comes from the system exploring itself; how the system becomes legible to itself; as in consequence after consequence; glitches, illegibility, cached memory; ritual, residue, the spiritual; uncanny, transcendent, holy, angelic things

December 15, 2025