Chia Amisola is an artist of agencies and ambiences. Their work is devoted to the internet's loss, love, labor, and liberation, particularly of the third world experience.
Amisola's practice traces technology's relationship with ambience, agency, and the apparitional in spaces domestic to divine. They are interested in duration and density: the intimacies of our infrastructures, what emerges from systems & scales beyond our interpretability, and the narratives that might come of them.
An artist, designer, and programmer, they work through websites, sound, and hypertexts in form of performances, games, lectures, and video.
Presently, their body of work centers around hypertext, totality, and density: performing 'internet ambient' works, writing interactive non/autofictions that contest reading, authorship, and legibility amongst the fictions/realities of online place. They draw from MMOs, call centers, early web militarism, POGOS, forums, & other internet margins to look at the extremes of digital spaces, the exploitations that enable them, and the fantasies of agency/autonomy they present.
Chia founded & directs Developh (since 2016), a research & arts institution dedicated to critical and creative technology practice in the Philippines & broader Southeast Asia. Projects include KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN! (That's what you get for using the computer!), an exhibition of Filipino net art presented with NEWINC, Tai Kwun, & Art Fair Philippines.
Their work has been presented internationally at Art Fair (Philippines); the V&A and Tate Britain (UK); Gray Area (San Francisco, USA); Nguyen Wahed (New York, USA); Transmediale & panke.gallery (Germany); Tai Kwun (Hong Kong); InterAccess (Canada); and the Experimental Games Showcase at the Game Developers Conference. Features include The New Yorker, BOMB Magazine, Frieze, It’s Nice That, Nylon, et. al. They are recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia honoree and a Lumen Prize Winner, and have held residencies with NEW INC, Gray Area, and the Internet Archive.
They received a BA in Computing & the Arts from Yale University in 2022, and grew up in Manila, Philippines.
They're a Senior Product Designer at Figma, designing creative tooling.
Education
2022, BA Computing & the Arts, YaleSelected Exhibitions
Kakakompyuter Mo Yan!, Art Fair, ManilaScreening, Tate Britain, UK
Screening, V&A Museum, UK
DEMO Festival, NEWINC (New Museum x Rhizome), New York
Code.Xcess, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong
Website as Subject (Duo with yehwan song), panke.gallery, Berlin
Now Play This, Somerset House, London
Selected Talks & Performances
On Himala, Internet Archive, San FranciscoHimala, CultureHub, New York
Artists talk, Gray Area, San Francisco
On apocalypses & archipelagos, UX+, Manil
Performance, Gray Area, San Francisco
KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN, NEW INC, New York
Screen Walk, Fotomuseum Winterthur & Photographers' Gallery London
Internet ambient, 98B Collab, Manila
If you knew me..., panke.gallery, Berlin
Domain naming, Naive Yearly, Copenhagen
Selected Press
BOMB Magazine (Interview)The New Yorker
WeTransfer
It’s Nice That
Escape the Algorithm (Interview)
Usurpator (Interview)
Frieze
El País
Nylon
Esquire
Awards & Residencies
Moving Image Award, Lumen PrizeResident, CultureHub NY
30 Under 30 Asia, Forbes
Y10 Art & Code, NEW INC, Rhizome & New Museum
Media Arts Residency, Kala Art Institute
Microgrant for net.art, Rhizome
Cultural Incubator, Gray Area
Fellow, DWeb Camp, Internet Archive
Sudler Prize for Creative Arts, Yale University