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:
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.
I’m currently working on expanding the tech and thinking behind the work, hoping to output the ff:
- 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
- A series of publications — gathering research, text, image from source material to generations of the work
- 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.