To Fail the World with an Open Heart

Chia Amisola's practice is grounded in extensive research, producing websites that function simultaneously as medium and subject of exploration. In the series Arkipelago, the artist turns to Philippine “second creation” mythologies — stories centering earth, domesticity, and survival amid catastrophe — drawing formal inspiration from Filipino socialist realist painters from the 1970s and 1980s such as Anita Magsaysay-Ho. The work interrogates a foundational assumption of computational culture: that rural life stands as the opposite of the digital, rather than its condition and origin. Composed of hundreds of browser windows arranged through web-based simulation and manual gestures, the series appropriates imagery sourced from extractive online platforms and advertising, reassembling them into intimate vignettes of rural livelihood. By reimagining the browser as a living ecosystem, Amisola situates herself within the legacy of 1990s net art while pressing further — exposing how these infrastructures are no longer external to social life, but constitutive of it.

Arkipelago, Ark 1 (2026) is part of the May 2026 program, To Fail the World with an Open Heart, curated by Robert Seidel.