PAGASA
( Hope )

Growing up with 'hope' as the Philippine national weather bureau, PAGASA is an unpacking of the names & lives we breathe into the tools that instrumentalize the weather, and continuous human efforts at patternizing and systemizing the weather to avoid disaster. Part alternate mythology, ambient performance, weather report — PAGASA is a sampling of the many conflicting narratives, datas, senses, and histories we use to construct our understanding of the atmospheres and divines.

In three acts — PAGASA, Diwata-1 (the first Filipino-made microsatellite), Visayan creation stories, the anthropomorphized storms I grew up with, animist belief, and new technological myths — are relived, simulated, soothed, and narrativized in a new oral history. Diwata-1 is named after environmental spirits that once formed, serenaded, and guarded the natural world — now, she has become an all-sensing figure blessed for her all-seeing objectivity — but she sees only through compression, reduction, flattening.

( A recollection of the storms, all I know by name )

Those who toil the land closest know the smell of the air before the typhoon. The divine Diwata-1 has lost her ability to see all the immeasurable intuition of humanity; she oft fails to pre-empt disaster, she lags in her work at recovery. Our methods of sensing & systematizing that are now valued are rewritten by bodies whose notions of progress are often adjacent to colonial, conquering ideals.

Sonically, PAGASA constructs an ambience around the sensibilities of the manmade divine. Scraped visuals & data from the internet are reconstructed to create a "fourth world" vision of the third world's attempts at heavenliness. It mixes many imaginaries on the sounds of space, heavens, and the tropics.

PAGASA is in lineage of my body of work around tropical technologies, where I unravel our understandings of colonial technologies and how tropical + third world bodies temper and reclaim their usage. In the case of the satellite, who herself returns to the atmosphere, I'd like to imagine that Diwata-1 takes form once again.

I would like to see myself in the image of the whole earth — I would like to know the politics and spirit of its capture.

PAGASA is open to be presented in more venues and forms. Feel free to reach out...

Event description
In the archipelago, technology swells at every extreme. All matters are now in service of machines: land, sea, body, mind. The Filipino is a weather(ed) machine. Chia Amisola performs an experimental ambient atmosphere in PAGASA (Tagalog for hope, after the Philippines’ national weather bureau). Historical & real-time climate data provide the basis of sound, image, & samples in a simulation of the tropics, going from its mythological formations to future geographies. Anthropomorphized storms narrativize a history of migrant movement across waters, sonic weaponry breaking waters, and a reliance on colonial imaging technologies. What happens when islands become both the subject and object of computational prophecy?