KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN!

( That's what you get for using the computer! )

Kakakompyuter Mo Yan (Filipino for "that's what you get for using a computer!") is a collection of new media art: digital works consisting of games, essays, browser-based pieces, sound art, playlists, and fanshrines selectable like songs on a karaoke machine. Centering third-world internet cultures, the project foregrounds the labor, intimacy, improvisation, and resilience that shape how Filipinos live and make meaning online, insisting that the Global South does not merely consume the internet, but actively produces, transforms, and inhabits it.

Against dominant narratives of net art as rooted in institutional access and technological novelty, KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN proposes an alternate genealogy—one built from pirated software, sultry dial-up romances, Catholic fan fiction borne from the living room. Colonial technologies are repurposed and made intimate as people carve out a home and identity in infrastructures not built for them. The karaoke interface is itself this argument made form: a gathering place to linger and return to, where works exist not as objects to be viewed but as songs to be chosen, shared, and sung together.

Its 24 works span a shrine to ILOVEYOU virus creator Onel de Guzman, a generative poem drawn from Filipino abortion forums, a simulated torrent client downloading the Philippine archipelago, an elegy intertwining Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz with St. Peter the Apostle, a playable pisonet classroom, and a 24-hour vlog documenting life in the margins of Manila. The exhibition has been shown at transmediale (Berlin), Art Fair Philippines, Tai Kwun (Hong Kong), DEMO2024 with Rhizome & the New Museum (New York), Space63 at Comuna (Makati), and Gray Area Festival (San Francisco).

Presented as a karaoke party, the exhibition is available online forever, but also travels offline. Every piece is translated in two forms: pisonet (mouse & keyboard) and karaoke (microphone & remote).

KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN is a traveling exhibition! We currently have four pisonet units and a karaoke set in the Philippines, and a karaoke set in San Francisco. Please reach out if you'd like to host a machine — either for an exhibition, or in your community space: [email protected]

We situate KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN in domestic contexts and use the karaoke machine as a perfect example of technology as a site for community & gathering, and as it invokes the blurriness between public and private, colonialism and reclamation, imitation and resistant, performer and audience, high and low technology, and beyond... it's intimately familiar, and received very differently in the Philippines vs. the western contexts it has been presented in.

View the playlist of art pieces online ↗