Arts
Developh produces and creates artistic projects, interventions, and exhibitions that engage in technology through critical, plural, experimental, and socially-engaged lenses.
We nurture practices and perspectives that center the tropics, archipelagic, and third world: their ways of working, urgencies, and means for articulating past, present, and future.
Projects
We commission, produce, and synthesize technological narratives into artistic artifacts and interventions. We present these works in online & offline exhibitions, slowly and intentionally.
Kakakompyuter Mo Yan!
An anthology of websites and internet art from the Philippines — a curated exhibition of digital artworks exploring third world internet cultures, online identity, and networked life in the archipelago.
Kakakompyuter Mo Yan (Filipino for "that's what you get for using a computer!") is a never-ending karaoke party and exhibition platform for Philippine new media and net art, presented as a playable anthology of digital works consisting of games, essays, browser-based pieces, sound art, playlists, and fanshrines selectable like songs on a karaoke machine. Centering third-world internet cultures, the project foregrounds the labor, intimacy, improvisation, and resilience that shape how Filipinos live and make meaning online, insisting that the Global South does not merely consume the internet, but actively produces, transforms, and inhabits it.
Against dominant narratives of net art as rooted in institutional access and technological novelty, KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN proposes an alternate genealogy — one built from pirated software, sultry dial-up romances, Catholic fan fiction borne from the living room. Colonial technologies are repurposed and made intimate as people carve out a home and identity in infrastructures not built for them. The karaoke interface is itself this argument made form: a gathering place to linger and return to, where works exist not as objects to be viewed but as songs to be chosen, shared, and sung together.
Agustin Crisostomo, Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler, Anton Romero, Bao, Beatris Cabana, Carmine and Fabi, Chia Amisola, Czyka Tumaliuan, Elise Ofilada, Emmanuel Fabella, Gab Brioso, Isola Tong, Jared Jonathan Luna, Jord Earving Gadingan, Kiana Fernandez, Kwago, Kuya Marlon (deepweb dumaguete), Leon Leube, Mac Andre Arboleda, Nikita Sacha, No Core (Silke Talastas & Daniella Jabines), Tàtam & Ijah, Waki Badz
Developed with support from the New Museum's NEWINC incubator and Rhizome.
Exhibited at Art Fair Philippines, Manila; Tai Kwun, Hong Kong; WSA, New York; with presentations at Gray Area, San Francisco.
Links
Explore Kakakompyuter Mo Yan →
Press
- Chia Amisola is bringing karaoke and pisonets to Art Fair 2025, Spot.ph
- Doomscrolling through the Woods, the Philippine Star
- Inside the Exhibit That Celebrates Filipino Internet Culture, Esquire, September 2024
- KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN talk at Gray Area Festival, September 2024, San Francisco
- KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN talk at DEMO2024, June 2024, New York
Game Chat Shop
On the last day of a childhood MMORPG before the servers shut down forever.
In a decrepit computer cafe, you log on to the last day of a childhood MMORPG before the servers shut down forever. Manage three windows: the game, its all chat, and yourself in the shop.
The work is a melancholic meditation on the lost social words of compshops and MMOs.
Chia Amisola, 2023
Commissioned by Runway Journal
Data Labeler Dream Transcendence
An internet art and desktop performance in which a group of girl data labelers in Makati City log on to discover that their classification interface has become divine — rewriting reality. As users label objects, those objects are redefined within the world, exploring technological reification, women's contributions to computing, and questions of authorship within technological systems.
Teaser premiered at BetaCamp: SuperTele (LEV Festival, Spain & iMAL, Belgium). Full performance in development.
Ang Bantayog
A martial law im(memorial) — a digital monument for the 11,229 victims of the 1972–1986 Martial Law period in the Philippines.
A martial law im(memorial) — a digital monument for the 11,229 victims of the 1972–1986 Martial Law period in the Philippines. Visitors light virtual candles stored in browser localStorage, a fragile medium vulnerable to decay and deletion, mirroring how both human and machine memory deteriorate in times of revisionism and erasure.
The work positions everyday participation — the act of clicking, of remembering — as resistance against historical erasure.
Propose an art & technology project with us, or contribute as a creative technologist.
Contact us (core@developh.org)