SQUATTING

SQUATTING is an ongoing networked net art piece and experiment that explores the dichotomy between informal settlements and the fragile, ephemeral nature of digital occupation. In the Philippines, an estimated 4.5 million Filipinos live in makeshift dwellings across dumpsites, roads, highways, and graveyards.

The project invited hundreds of people with personal websites to host an iFrame (a web element that embeds another webpage onto one's site) that contained a house. Each house is generatively constructed, and houses several interior rooms and occupants that move across the webpage with clicks, time, and refreshes. These digital homes are gradually removed, deleted, or taken down as their hosts delete the dwellings from their pages, displacing the individuals within, and thus making the individuals in the piece move outwards and fill in other spaces.

Each house was formed out of textures, objects, and layouts taken from extensive Google StreetView walks through Las Piñas. Digital mapping often reinforces inequity, discounting the many unmapped streets and territories in the country through its cartographic invisibilities and erasures.

The contradiction at the heart of this work lies in how we conceptualize 'occupation', and which occupants are protected. While "cybersquatters" receive legal protection and the internet is often portrayed as a safe haven for those lacking offline security, both digital and physical spaces operate under similar imperialist and expansionist impulses. As these digital homes spread across websites almost virus-like, they make visible the dense, rotting infrastructure of the internet itself.

When we claim territory online, are we settling or colonizing? Are we displacing others or creating something new? What constitutes legitimate ownership in a realm where permanence is never guaranteed?

As an artist working with websites, I've seen the atmosphere of the internet shift from early optimism and distributed creativity to more centralized, monolithic algorithmic platforms that value capital. Still, the internet began with militant origins and still exists in pursuit of such goals; all digital space is mapped to physical space; and domain names only alter pointers and names — all borrowed space. Many times owning a webpage does not equate to owning space. No domain on the internet is truly ours. Whether physical or digital, settlement, displacement, and our human need to create homes, gather, and commute persist – even against all that would deny us of it.