65369
Jared Jonathan Luna
Jared vs TikTok
In the performance, Jared challenges TikTok to a dance battle in the classic trope of man vs machine. Jared will use and confront TikTok on the production of dancing: the process of the dancing body, and the creation of dance through TikToks. In this challenge, the corporeality of Jared's dance comes face to face with two dimensional realizations of their dance as captured by TikTok and its filters. Each round uses the app's duet feature' where videos are nested, as Jared performs the same choreography again and again. It is a battle of repetition, duration and endurance.
10524
Anton Romero
Peer to Peer
Anton Romero's Peer to Peer invites you to dive through an old filesharing client, each torrent revealing hidden TXT files that recount the author's experience with piracy, nostalgia, and community. Each download blurs the line between the player's own computer and the game's, piling on music videos, videogame screenshots, and movie clippings as seeders & leechers bounce up and down, connections throttle, and reflections on seeding and self come to life. Fantasy and digital are blurred; distribution becomes more than a manifesto – it becomes a way of living, a way of understanding, a necessity to connection.
13317
Leon Leube
Every State Is A Hole
From the Karma of graphics cards and PC case mods, to the Spratly Island disputes in the South China Sea, to strategies of space colonization, the elements of air and water, extra-judicial killings, bikers, bootleg fashion, MMORPG's, truckers, case-mods, and absurd amounts of liquid nitrogen. What connects them all is our collective skin, and the overclocked bubbles that we live in. Filipino-German artist Leon Leube's Every State Is A Hole is an infinite, generative text-to-speech play that recites non-linear ramblings, conversations, and feedback loops onto itself. At times anthropological research paper, and many times wild speculation with many voices, the algorithm bends, overclocks, circulates.
50141
Elise Ofilada
Just Off the Key of Reason (The Ballads of St. Peter Wentz)
(What would you trade the pain for?) Poet Elise Ofilada voices over an intimate collection of original poetry in the form of a playlist with the image of St. Peter the Apostle and Fall Out Boy's bassist Pete Wentz clashing and caressing each other. The author's grief pours into the smoothness of a looping EP, you saved my life, the lyrics and the form call. (I'm not sure.) Catholic doubt & reconciliation over centuries, a pop punk band's lyrics over decades, and all too early loss take stage, casting a pang that only young grief can bear.
84712
Carmine & Fabi
PH-19XX_OS
Power on the fantasy OS that Carmine & Fabi have constructed and enter a desktop powered upon the systems the Philippine operates on. Alerts warn of fraud & whistleblowers, a transportation map has weeks stricken due to jeepney phaseouts, and tsinelas icons flail around a hopscotch window… a window into a window of exploitation, they call out, a canvas is but a lens of reality…
53610
Classroom 5C
Tàtam & Ijah
This month, you're the CLAYGO manager. 5C is a multiplayer experience set in an endless classroom with a single objective: to rearrange an endless amount of chairs. Opening with a multiple choice quiz, the simulator grounds you back to the early 2000s, where the only solace and comfort we can find are the stories left behind by those before us. Tàtam's sound design layers old pop hits, traffic remnants, the Angelus prayer, and basketball games behind the post-morii simulation. A timer ticks, a memory is only fleeting. In these liminal spaces, we confront our own histories and the limitations of the marks we make in digital & real space. What memories do we choose to take, and what of ourselves do we leave behind?
27463
Agustin Crisostomo
Alt-Tab
Alt-Tab is an off-beat minigame about burgeoning queerness and the shame that follows. In Agustin Crisostomo's game, you take control of a lanky young boy in a computer shop, sneaking around and visiting questionable gay smut sites who must ALT-TAB to hide their screen from prying eyes. Unexpectedly difficult, replayable, and challenging, Crisostomo's experience is both addicting and absurd.
92575
Kuya Marlon
1277-22219
It's 1997. Kuya Marlon (deepweb dumaguete)'s story is one of unrequited love with a beeper operator — a testament to the frailty of love & the limits of proximity in the age of telecommunications. Originally published as a Facebook post in 2017, supposedly twenty years after the encounter, the post finds new form in an endless scroll. The writer behind the account, Marlon Tobias, has been constructing these fictions from fragments of past and pop (the story features Rizal Underground's Bilanggo), inventing the most intimate stories that find their way in the deepest corners of the internet.
10625
No Core Collective
Last Words
A more solemn repose from the noise of the television, Last Words is a letter bearing the parting words of a loved one. "Our stories of bygone eras persist the same way jewels do," the patchwork letter recalls struggles with colonial mentality and the lifelong quest of unlearning. On top of painterly backgrounds, highlighting the letter with one's cursor alters its text and tone: defeat is now defiance, desperation is now dreaming.
89770
Emmanuel Fabella
Dahil Sa'yo
Dahil Sa'yo is Emmanuel Fabella's cinematic montage about love, loss, and memory of my lolo through the lens of his lola. Combining intimate home videos on YouTube and 1950s Filipino cinema with scenes of harana; moving between his lola's reality, recent past, and dreams – Fabella's piece mirrors the selectivity of memory itself. Four renditions of the piece's namesake song, Dahil Sa'yo, play out as the work in itself transforms the present into the past, an act of self-archival. As Fabella's grandparents were the last generation that had practiced harana widespread, it is also a tribute to a dying cultural practice, mirroring the aging and eventual loss himself.
69878
Gab Brioso
Fragments of a Private Vacuum
Gab Brioso's Fragments of a Private Vacuum is presented as a digital triptych of three different interactive 'murals' on disinformation. The artist's practice challenges digital disinformation by breaking apart the screen & the interface, mapping out disinformation's internal properties as a phenomenon as well as its external effects to the public sphere. Brioso's call for hyperfocuses in a time of hyperobjects, Timothy Morton's term for objects and events whose enormous scale defies explanation, leading to their elusiveness.
80398
Angeline Meitzler
Into the Jaws of the Horizon
The crocodile whispers and acknowledges, "Here is where I have built a home, and here is where I will also sink my teeth." Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler's Into the Jaws of the Horizon connects internet infrastructures to Bisayan mythology in a piece that speaks to immigration, natural/digital phenomena, and the labor that powers empire. Within each website, awaiting like a promise, the crocodile diwata crawls and lurks. It swims around data centers in cities with the highest Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) populations spread across a world map, feeling the loops of devaluation and the tides of colonization.
69158
Isola Tong
Vessels of Disappearing Craft
The browser is imagined as a vessel of disappearing Filipino crafts. Vessels of Disappearing Craft gathers tutorial videos on how to manipulate locally foraged materials into objects and building materials—often of dying and little-known weaving practices. These videos uploaded by Filipinos living in the peripheries on YouTube present social media as a potential counter-archive. While the tutorials often only have a handful of views, perhaps platforms still serve as a partial tool to distribute knowledge in a sea of endless information. Knowledge work is thankless, but Isola Tong's excavation can be its own exercise.
00040
Waki Badz
Hyperarchipelagos
Artist-researcher Waki Badz presents a massive internetworking primer that traces Filipino internet history. An academic epic that contextualizes everything from the physical make of the internet, the first Filipino BBS systems, the hardware & software of the typical Filipino Household PC, to the economics of computer shops. The artist's practice around 'challenging prevailing narratives' is given life in the immense
39412
Mac Andre Arboleda
I-LOVE-YOU.PH
In 2000, Filipino hacker Onel de Guzman drew global attention to the Philippines for programming the notorious ILOVEYOU virus. While Onel initially made the virus to steal wifi passwords, its spread as an attachment through emails with the irresistible subject line 'ILOVEYOU' ended up causing $10 billion in damages, renaming and deleting the files of their victims. Mac Andre Arboleda presents a shrine to the now-reserved hacker, inviting people to leave links, videos, letters, and files to him. In many ways, I-LOVE-YOU.PH (also accessible at that domain name) speaks to the heart of the Filipino internet: where our exploitation is silent until the world can't help but see to us.
73243
Kwago
Bad Connection
"Bad connection or subtitles to silence" is a series of 20-minute gatherings at Zoom featuring various artists and poets confronting and exploring how digital technology is affecting the ways we express, connect and live during this period of crisis and great change. Presented as a CCTV surveillance-like grid, Kwago's documentation is activated once more, harking back to ways we've gathered in times of crisis.
54159
Cyzka Tumaliuan
Bagong Makata
Laying down the foundations of a language between mother and machine for a daughter, Czyka Tumaliuan attempts to teach natural language processing chatbot A.L.I.C.E. the Filipino tongue. The results are scrambled and indecipherable, despite a mother's insistence. A colorful pixel grid takes the resulting three poems made from a game-like protocol, endlessly spitting out repetitive conversations. With this earlier chatbot, Tumaliuan points upon the surprising maternity needed to nourish machines as nascent language models simply did not have sufficient Filipino data. These tendencies towards repetition strike a chord as today, many similar systems are headed towards model collapse — polluting their datasets with their own outputs, leading to the very illegibility that Tumaliuan encounters.
27865
Beatris Cabaña
To Induce A Period
Beatris Cabaña's To Induce A Period simulates the experience of buying an abortion online. Clicks, scrolls, and skims unravel an infinitely-generated forum. Made out of thousands of scraped & warbled messages, the labyrinthine forum's threads always open into a creative work written by Cabaña; though here, they are detailed as if presented by the posters. In the loneliest depths of the internet, Filipino women find comfort, relief, regret, and their pain. There are corners online where shame might turn into solace, and in a nation of deep religiosity and repression, these unspoken conclaves are rife.
81430
Jord Gadingan
Tarsier Touch
In the 90s, Sibika educational posters lacked people, animals, or issues — they were just landscapes. Tarsier Touch recalls middle school cartolina paper landscapes in an attempt to trace one's own ecology in a digital age. Today's sensitivities to climate and cultural collapse come with more urgency, where a reaction to the world is one's reaction to self. Tapos, hihingian ka na agad ng reaksyon/opinyon/simpatya dahil kailangan nang ipagtanggol ng mga ekosistem/kultura/species na kakakilala mo pa lamang. May mga kapangyarihan nang kailangang tindigan; may api.
13454
Chia Amisola
Bahay na Rosas
The erasure of comfort women, Japan's soft power, and cute violence are traced in this iFrame film. Composed of found images of aestheticized cute, anime, and pastel aesthetics, the small world around the Bahay na Pula of San Ildefonso, Bulacan forms in fragments and frames, veiled in pastel-pink sweetness, sugar, and softness. The language of atrocities, the bodies of casualties are disemboweled, tactically used to displace and dispel a truth. These suggestions of the cruelty during World War II, when hundreds of Filipino women were forced into sexual slavery. To shape an immaterial, temporal film as comfort women statues are taken down and as reparations are denied begs questions about our relationships with digital cultures and objects that turn a blind eye—or at worst aestheticize—terror.
30140
Nikita Sacha
Reflection
Exploring the tension between authenticity and performance in digital spaces, where the mask serves not only as a disguise but also as a window into deeper layers of the self. Nikita Sacha's multidisciplinary practice constantly questions cyberspace and conceptions of distance: from her livestream performance art, algorithmic presence, and digital presentations—all are enigmatic pieces that question our conception of identity and fluidity. In this digital piece, a Captcha asks us of our humanity while a mirror-like fragmentation of her breathes and stutters before us. What makes a digital body any less real?
