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As a young innovator, Amisola was recently cited in the Forbes 30 under 30 list for creating and organizing Developh
As an internet and ambient artist, Chia Amisola is distinctly Filipino as she carved her niche online. As a young innovator, Amisola was recently cited in the Forbes “30 under 30” list for creating and organizing Developh, a nonprofit community that seeks to promote the use of technology as a tool for liberation rather than oppression.
Amisola was born in Tondo, Manila in 2000 and started making websites at a young age of seven, after being inspired by fansites and online forums. In 2016, Amisola founded Developh, a student-run club in De La Salle Santiago Zobel. From its inception, Amisola and fellow students worked on education programs while building tech-enabled initiatives, and growing a community of students from high schools and colleges.
They supported movements and organizations looking for social justice such as Save Our Schools Network of Lumad Schools, networks of local bail funds in the US, and human rights organizations in the Philippines. They also raised funds for human rights defenders. Their initiatives upheld the interest of Filipino tech workers that “enable technologies to serve the Filipino people.”
Currently, Developh is focused on publishing, activations, and education related to digital preservation, internet art, and tech labor.
The Developh.org website hosts and oversees Sasha’s Archipelago, a presentation and conversations with designer Sasha Magallona; Liturgy of the Archipelago, conversations with Shamini Aphrodite on archipelagic thinking, memory, and devotion; Kakakompyuter Mo Yan!, an experimental exhibition on Philippine Internet culture featuring internet art, new media, and online works; Martial Law Index, an online community archive of Martial Law documents, Technology.ph, publishes content on critical computing and transformative technologies to deepen tech discourse in the Philippines; and the Philippine Internet Archive that aims to preserve ‘digital work, movements, cultures, and art’ on the premise that “history of the Filipino internet is the history of people.”
One of the most recognizable website art projects is Ang Bantayog, a Martial Law memorial developed for the Bantayog ng mga Bayani Foundation. This digital memorial “commemorates victims of human rights abuses in the 1970s when the Philippines were under Martial Law.”
Ang Bantayog is described as “an expansive digital monument stretches before you, laying out 11,103 candles.” Visitors of the website are invited to light a candle. Once lit, a name is revealed with the burning candle representing a life remembered. Ang Bantayog is “an internet art piece that speaks to memorials, mourning, and memory as experienced by machines and man.”
Amisola received her BA in Computing and the Arts from Yale University in 2022.
She received the Student of Vision award from AnitaB.org, has spoken at Asia’s largest UX conference, and is also a Processing Foundation fellow.
Amisola was a former product design intern at Spotify and was a studio fellow at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media. She works full-time as a product designer at Figma and is an Art & Code member of New Inc., the New Museum’s incubator.
Amisola’s work has been featured in the New Yorker and Frieze, and has been exhibited in Berlin, San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Manila. — Carla Mortel Baricaua
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Credit belongs to: www.mb.com.ph
