Now
( What I'm up to... )Currently tending... More ambitious, grand, installation-based & sculptural setups for work; expanding performances with sound, networked experiments & tools-for-tooling; aspiring to construct computers as cathedrals...
Also adjacently... various workshops, engagements, writing, performance-lectures/talks, etc. that branch off these projects rhizomatically, are making-as-thinking, a constant mending of sound/listening/ecologies in the work.
( See past talks and my past performances. )
( See my CV for upcoming talks/workshops. Open to more! )
I work very prolifically, quickly... feel free to chat with me in case you want to learn more about any of these :)
KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN!
The Philippine Internet Archive's inaugural project, KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN (that's what you get for using the computer!) is a net art exhibition of 20+ browser-based pieces from Filipino artists, articulating the condition of the third-world online *online*. Abortion, piracy, vessels, maternity, language, colonialism, territory, fandom, pop, & politics unfold in the form of a neverending karaoke party.
On view offline (Manila, HK) and online this August 2024.
Artist book coming in Fall 2024.
Looking for funding so we can do this again — continuing to commission work on the third-world internet.
Performance
A poetic web, its reading, communality, sound, and environment becomes inhabited in my performance practice: each piece is given new life, evolving.
No Soliciting contains site-specific performances, tools, scripts, and gatherings that I host for myself and others — dedicated to the spirit of the screen.
I'm open to performing / performance lectures. Reach out!
When We Love
A dating simulator where you date everything.
An umbrella project holding in intimacy, desperation, and longing: spread across dozens of offline & online projects: multiplayer wishing, hypertextual poems, comment collections, etc. I make large and small projects under this, and also have a big forever-in-progress game at its core.
All I want is to gather people in one place, and build an internet that could be that place...
IN THE WORKS
Larger projects (not including experiments/sketches/one-offs), in loose order of how fleshed out it is
Himala (Miracle)
Through Marian apparitions, technologies of containment, maternity, passivity, delusion, and ritual-building are hallucinated. Supernatural, she is only a saint; our virginal software submits to us. Within these infrastructural intimacies, the reward for devotion is delusion. Any sufficiently advanced girl is indistinguishable from a god. This is why they do not let us ascend.
A durational performance interpreting the Catholic rosary into a net art narrative epic, also performed communally over 6–12 hours to shape a new sacred.
It was love in the call center
Amongst the world's largest BPO industries, nightshift Filipino workers betray tongues. A spectrum of intimacy emerges: innocence, service, alters, sexual liberation, STDs, stigma, and queerness emerge in the backrooms; wires and bedspacers are wet; comfort, care, and salvation emerge as infrastructural intimacies: how do those who carry the internet love one another?
How do those who enable these intimacies love? What security do we find in service? What scarcity emerged from the scaling of sex and softness? How do the dichotomies of Filipino imaginaries work against each other?
Evolution of a Filipino Family
Slowly, rotting, conquering: a synchronized, real-time piece on the rise-fall-loop of a generational clan. Machismo, submission, dynasty, and violence unraveled in a domestic narrative from World War II to the speculative centuries forward.
Multi-channel installation, real-time, networked, etc. after the slow cinema film.
#RP612FIC (A MADOKA MAGICA x RIZAL FANFIC)
Homura Akemi timeloops for hundreds of years to save national hero Jose Rizal from execution by firing squad. An alternate timeline emerges where Noli Me Tangere is dedicated to preteen magical girls who save a nation from climate & colonialism.
Ongoing series on cultural soft power, the erasure of (comfort) women, hope/faith & saviorism/worship, violences of cuteness & consumption & fandom imaginaries — after the alt history tweet hashtag. (Fan) installation, writing