Kakakompyuter Mo Yan!
A never-ending karaoke party and exhibition platform for Philippine new media and net art. "That's what you get for using the computer!"
Kakakompyuter Mo Yan (Filipino for "that's what you get for using a computer!") is 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.
Its 23 works span a shrine to ILOVEYOU virus creator Onel de Guzman, a generative poem drawn from Filipino abortion forums, a simulated torrent client downloading the Philippine archipelago, an elegy intertwining Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz with St. Peter the Apostle, a playable pisonet classroom, and a 24-hour vlog documenting life in the margins of Manila. The exhibition has been shown at transmediale (Berlin), Art Fair Philippines, Tai Kwun (Hong Kong), DEMO2024 with Rhizome & the New Museum (New York), Space63 at Comuna (Makati), and Gray Area Festival (San Francisco).
Credits
Curated & produced by Chia Amisola
A project of Developh, an organization for critical & creative technologies founded by Amisola in 2016
The Philippine Internet Archive, an archival and knowledge project built on the premise that the history of the internet holds the history of the Filipino people
Artists
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?
Internet art (also known as net art) refers to art that uses the internet not merely as a distribution channel but as its primary medium. Unlike a painting photographed and uploaded online, internet art is born in the browser — it cannot exist outside of it. The webpage is the canvas; the hyperlink, the scroll, the click, the lag are its materials.
All of KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN's pieces are born-browser digital works. They span interactive games, generative poetry, simulated operating systems, scrollable essays, video performances, sound art, and fanshrines — each one inseparable from the web technologies that make it possible. A torrent client that you actually download from. A chatbot you teach Filipino. A karaoke machine you sing along to.
Net art has a long history — from early experiments by Olia Lialina and JODI in the 1990s, to activist works by Electronic Disturbance Theater, to the preservation efforts of Rhizome's ArtBase. But its canon has been overwhelmingly Western and institutional. KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN insists on a different genealogy: one rooted in compshops, piracy, chain messages, and the improvised digital lives of the Global South.
Press Kit
Download the KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN press kit — includes exhibition photos, artwork previews, curatorial statement, and artist bios.
Showings
Curated by Neema Githere and Juan Pablo García Sossa
Produced by et alt. Invited by Chris Fussner for the Digital Section
Curated by Ingrid Pui Yee Chu & Nick Thurston
Produced by et alt, with Agu Crisostomo & Arts Serrano at Dan Matutina's space
Curated by Eileen Isagon-Skyers, produced by Tony Tirador. For NEW INC 'Art & Code'
Limited preview
Interested in presenting KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN?
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.
Contact chia@developh.org for domestic or international showing inquiries.
Press
Artist profiles & interviews
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Credits & Thank you
A project of Developh and the Philippine Internet Archive
Curated by Chia Amisola
Production in the physical installation by et alt
With support from NEW INC, Rhizome, and We Are Family Foundation
Intro tunes: Pikunin, DJ Love
KMY originated as an independently funded exhibition, and currently barely makes returns to sustain years of digital and physical hostings. We did not receive any institutional support or grant for its initial 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.)
Funds are directed towards our artists and the material needs for our exhibitions (including funding our producers, gallery sitters, and installation handlers — never the coding or design costs). We ourselves sourcing technical materials, putting in the labor, etc. have never been compensated.