Chia Amisola (b. 2000) is an internet & ambient artist from the Philippines.
Their (web)site-specific art posits worlds & tools where creation is synonymous with liberation—investigating technology's love, labor, and liberation.
Through 'internet ambient', their work is situated in the internet's ecologies, its politics of visibility, defaults, and infrastructures—to make an internet where we can be heard.
Chia is the Founder & Organizer of Developh, a critical technology institute based in the Philippines, and stewards the Philippine Internet Archive.
They graduated with a BA in Computing & the Arts with distinction from Yale University in 2022, receiving the Sudler Prize for the creative arts. They currently are a resident at Gray Area (US), were a Fellow of the Processing Foundation, Yale Center for Collaborative Arts & Media, and the Internet Archive's DWeb Camp. They have spoken internationally at The Lab (US), the Grace Hopper Celebration (US), Causal Islands, UX+ (Philippines), Naive Yearly (Denmark) have been internationally exhibited at /rosa (Germany) and Now Play This (UK), performed at CultureHub (NYC), panke.gallery (Germany), and 98B (Philippines), recently published in Rappler and The HTML Review, and have been featured in El País, Frieze, and The New Yorker.
Their work is situated within a post-colonial internet of extremes, from their upbringing in the Philippines: where the infrastructural becomes architectural, where power is exposed literally and figurally, where both god and machine are worshiped—where technology is so enveloping that we do not know where it ends and where we begin.
Their (possibly prolific) practice dates back to 2006, including writing & software (such as gamemaking tools as games), digital intimacy ( whenwe.love), placemaking & territories (their manifesto, thesoundof.love, on domain naming), religion & ritual (Visita), folk archival (Philippine Internet Archive), teaching & organizing (including pro-bono organizing 100+ events across 7+ years of programming with Developh), artifacts & performances (the performance of the browser, the browser as performance), amongst others. Their work, talk, and performances have been shown in Berlin, London, San Francisco, New York, Brisbane, Toronto, New Haven, and Manila.
By day, they work as a Product Designer at Figma. They've been in tech work since they were sixteen, and in organizing movements around Manila and the Bay Area.
( Simply, I dream of gathering all the people I love in one place, and build an internet that might be that place. )
Chia Amisola
b. 2000 Tondo, ManilaEducation
2022 BA Computing & the Arts, Yale UniversityExhibitions
SOON Kakakompyuter Mo Yan, TBD2023 Soft Narratives, /rosa (DE)
2023 Now Play This, Somerset House (UK)
2023 Swords & Kisses, Staffordshire St (UK)
2022 Endnotes, Yale School of Art (US)
Selected Talks & Performances
2023Internet ambient, 98B (PH)
If you knew me..., panke.gallery (DE)
On domain naming, Naive Yearly (DK)
On mythology & computing, Casual Islands (CA)
On sites & sights, Processing (US)
On cyberfeminism, The Lab (CA, US)
On prototyping, Figma (CA, US)
Concrete Form, CultureHub (NY)
Artists' talk, WordHack (NY, US)
On (web)sites, Software for People at Yale (CT)
EARLIER
On design as fantasy, UX+ (PH)
On worlding, Batangas State University (PH)
Speaker, Hopper Down Under (AU)
Speaker, Grace Hopper Celebration (TX, US)
Professional
NOW Prototyping, Figma2021 Design Systems, Spotify
2020 Design, Kumu
2019 Tech, Rappler
Selected Residencies & Honors
Microgrant, RhizomeCultural Incubator, Gray Area
Residency, Welcome to my Homepage
Fellow, Internet Archive/DWeb Camp
Sudler Prize for Creative Arts, Yale University