At Sónar+D we don't believe that the past was necessarily better, but as everyone does, we sometimes feel nostalgia. We especially miss the time moment when a personal website was a free and self-owned space. When UX design wasn't yet a dogma and there were only tools to play with: HTML, Flash, Java…

Chia Amisola embodies the spirit of the web as a tool for artistic and personal expression. This Filipino artist works on loss, love, labour, and liberation on the internet through narrative and systems-based pieces that explore the totality, duration, and density of the network. They founded Developh in 2016, an arts and research institution dedicated to critical and creative technological practice in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, and have exhibited at the V&A, Tate Britain, Transmediale, and the Internet Archive, among many others. Their work has appeared in The New Yorker, Frieze, and BOMB Magazine, and they are a Lumen Prize winner and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia honoree. 

Amisola presents a piece from their internet ambient performance series, where the computer desktop becomes a stage, a landscape, and infinite fiction. Their browser-based work, spanning poetry, games, and speculative interfaces, is re-presented as an improvisational performance and a live hypertext: non-linear, citational, unresolved. Equally dense in its programming and in its embodied enactment, the piece appropriates and pushes at the bounds of our technologies, demystifying the "ambience" of our computers. The once-intimate, private space of the desktop opens into a shared world. 

No slide presentations: just a browser. 

Chia Amisola also hosts a workshop at Sónar+D this year, exploring how to personalise and poeticise your  browsing experience with ‘Bookmarklets’.