Chia Amisola is an artist & technologist of agencies and ambiences from Manila, Philippines. Their work is devoted to the internet’s loss, love, labor, and liberation, particularly of the third world experience.
A tech worker and artist, their practice across text, software, games, and performance spans encyclopedic, archival, and personal works that unravel the systems and narratives that condition and emerge from technology, and the intimacies and infrastructures underneath them. They are invested in the myths and beliefs fabricated around technologies, Philippine history, the dense & uninterpretable, and themes of opacity, faith, and labor amid spaces domestic to divine.
Chia founded & directs Developh (since 2016), a research & arts institution dedicated to critical and creative technology practice in the Philippines & broader Southeast Asia. Projects include KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN! (That’s what you get for using the computer!), an exhibition of Filipino net art presented with NEWINC, Tai Kwun, & Art Fair Philippines; and the Philippine Internet Archive, preserving histories of Filipino involvement in digital & network histories.
Their work has been presented internationally at Art Fair (Philippines); the V&A and Tate Britain (UK); Gray Area & the Internet Archive (San Francisco, USA); Nguyen Wahed & CultureHub (New York, USA); Transmediale & panke.gallery (Germany); Tai Kwun (Hong Kong); InterAccess (Canada); and the Experimental Games Showcase at the Game Developers Conference. Features include The New Yorker, BOMB Magazine, Frieze, It’s Nice That, Nylon, et. al. They are recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia honoree and a Lumen Prize Winner, and have held residencies with NEW INC, Gray Area, and the Internet Archive.
They received a BA in Computing & the Arts from Yale University in 2022. They're a Senior Product Designer at Figma, designing tools for creativity used by millions.
In 2026, they are building games, writing hypertexts, performing, and designing software in rigor as a technologist and artist.
They are working on Every Love Song in the World—a series of multi-chapter explorations on Filipino entanglement with digital infrastructures and its impacts on colonialism, warfare, and love, drawn from a mix of research, simulation, archives, and personal vignettes. See early telegraph cables & warfare, to data annotation facilities, the BPO industry, and clickfarms. It takes form in a modular performance lecture, a publication, and a series of interactive works: a mix of literature, audio pieces, and games.
Of concern to them is the future of labor and legibility in systems whose density has become a form of totality.
( Mostly, they want to gather all the people they love in one place, and build an internet that could be that place. )
Selected Exhibitions
Kakakompyuter Mo Yan!, Art Fair, ManilaScreening, Tate Britain, UK
Screening, V&A Museum, UK
DEMO Festival, NEWINC (New Museum x Rhizome), New York
Code.Xcess, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong
Website as Subject (Duo with yehwan song), panke.gallery, Berlin
Now Play This, Somerset House, London
Selected Talks & Performances
On Himala, Internet Archive, San FranciscoHimala, CultureHub, New York
Artists talk, Gray Area, San Francisco
On apocalypses & archipelagos, UX+, Manil
Performance, Gray Area, San Francisco
KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN, NEW INC, New York
Screen Walk, Fotomuseum Winterthur & Photographers' Gallery London
Internet ambient, 98B Collab, Manila
If you knew me..., panke.gallery, Berlin
Domain naming, Naive Yearly, Copenhagen
Selected Press
BOMB Magazine (Interview)The New Yorker
WeTransfer
It’s Nice That
Escape the Algorithm (Interview)
Usurpator (Interview)
Frieze
El País
Nylon
Esquire
Awards & Residencies
Moving Image Award, Lumen PrizeResident, CultureHub NY
30 Under 30 Asia, Forbes
Y10 Art & Code, NEW INC, Rhizome & New Museum
Media Arts Residency, Kala Art Institute
Microgrant for net.art, Rhizome
Cultural Incubator, Gray Area
Fellow, DWeb Camp, Internet Archive
Sudler Prize for Creative Arts, Yale University