Kakakompyuter Mo Yan!
Kakakompyuter Mo Yan! is an exhibition, project, and neverending karaoke party celebrating third world internet & networking cultures.
It is curated & produced by Chia Amisola, as a project of Developh and the Philippine Internet Archive.
Artists
KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN means something like "that's what you get for using the computer!" in Filipino. It's something our moms would shout at us when we're on the computer late at night... and now it's an exhibition.
Probably the most significant collection of internet art in recent years from outside the western world, these pieces were translated and concepted for the internet—commenting directly on our lives entwined with the internet. Think of it as internet/electronic literature, a webzine, new media, computational art, or whatever...
About the exhibition
KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN (“that's what you get for using the computer!”) is an exhibition of internet art featuring 22 Filipino artists. Its 'songs' are represented as various artworks: an elegy for Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz and St. Peter, a shrine to Onel de Guzman, a simulated torrent client, to data center mythologies.
These counter-narratives articulate an online third-world. From exploitation, to queerness, to appropriation, to bootlegging, many of these stories would not have been possible without the internet. Contained within the karaoke machine, the internet becomes an urgent medium for works that speak to its potential for resistance.
Curator statement
What does the third world get for being on the internet? Exploitation, labor, repression, disinformation… but also liberation, community, self-preservation. This collection speaks to our counternarratives: the identities, selves, and bodies that carry, inhabit, and dwell within the internet but are often obfuscated in its tellings.
The third world makes the internet what it is. From call center agents, migrant workers staffing data centers, paid trolls, your third wife found in FOREIGNER SEEKING FILIPINA groups, livestreamers, the laborers behind artificial intelligence, the disinformed, the kidnap-for-ransom recruitment, new evangelists, hubs for radicalization, your family Viber chat, cottage printers... our history, made and unmade, our life, lived and unlived.
The Filipino internet is dead. The Filipino internet is alive, it sings.
What is internet art?
All of KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN's pieces are internet art works — specifically born-browser digital works.
Internet art (also known as net art) is a medium that refers to art not only distributed on the internet, but using the internet as a medium in itself. It's a form of new media art. Each piece here uniquely reflects the Filipino internet experience, and cannot be told without the internet itself.
Thank you
A project of Developh and the Philippine Internet Archive
Curated by Chia Amisola
Production in the physical installation by et alt
KMY is an independently funded exhibition. We did not receive any institutional support or grant for its development, and have not paid ourselves for our programming work. (WE LOSE MONEY DOING THIS - THE MONEY TO HOST THE FUCKING WEBSITE COMES OUT OF MY OWN POCKET. THIS IS NOT A PROFESSIONAL OR INSTITUTIONAL ENDEAVOR)
Funds are directed towards our artists and the material needs for our exhibitions (including funding our friends doing production); we ourselves sourcing technical materials, putting in the labor, etc. have never been compensated.
Showings
Limited preview
Press
We're traveling!
(KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN is a traveling exhibition! We currently have four pisonet units and a karaoke set in the Philippines, and a karaoke set in San Francisco.
Please reach out to me if you'd like to host a machine – either for an exhibition, or in your community space. Let me know anytime.)