Patronage

If you admire my work or see my potential, you might consider being a patron or an angel investor in myself.
If you're interested, please let me know by email or DM me where you know me.

I think of myself as an artist founder. Pouring capital, even small-sized, into the artifacts, thought leadership, and communities artists steward is an underrated act — it's one of the most meaningful ways to forward culture, watch new subgenres and scenes emerge, and seed belief in practices that transcend the container of a startup. Just as capital goes into investing into the founder rather than ideas, you may find that artists are even more critical in their beliefs and projects. Tiny grants of $1k–$25k can be life-changing and project-changing (see the amounts that large institutions grant to artists), and while not providing the same returns, return impact and thinking on a much shorter timeframe

I'm an artist, designer, and researcher at a prolific (I'd like to believe) point in my career — treading tech, art, games, and social practice; shipping, speaking, teaching intensely, working around emerging environments, visioning towards a future world. My work is situated in San Francisco and Manila, Philippines, at present – but has been presented internationally. I program, design, write, perform, and install work that has been exhibited at international institutions; I practice as a designer, focused on design tooling. I've created work bridging critical technology, poetic computing, and third world internet aesthetics through web art, performances, and installations. Beyond my practice, I've founded Developh, guest lecture & present internationally regularly, and shape design tools at Figma. My position across these worlds continues to feel urgent — stewarding this work is my life's work.

At the heart of what I do, I'd like to gather everything and everyone I love in one place, and I build an internet that might be that place.

Operationally, I see myself with the same technical rigor and obsessiveness that founders orient themselves with — as any artist holds. Funding artists is just as, if not more meaningful as funding 'builders' — their artifacts and interventions are wide-reaching, socially-engaged practices build and shape networks more than companies do. At the same time, I admire how the infrastructure of tech allows for tooling, capital exchange, and collaboration & distribution at scales I find exciting.

My work has influenced the ways we act, think, and imagine sites and the web. Popularizing the poetic web through curation, writing, and my projects (drawing after Laurel Schwulst's description of the "poetic potential of the web"), and many other digital practices.

More words and context to come...

Thank you

Thanks to those who have supported me in the past:

Thanks to those who have supported Developh, my life's work nurturing the internet's ambiences, environments, and ecologies in the Philippines andlarger Southeast Asia: