Paru-paro (Butterfly)
Iframe, 2026
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About the artwork
Paru-paro (Butterfly) is a browser-based landscape/game that drifts across maps and memories, where superstitions of the departed manifest as butterflies and you roam an open world of recollection. Amisola makes websites and games that move between diaries and archives: assembled from platforms, satellites, and stock images, the work re-sorts once-extractive, impersonal material into a precious encounter with myth, streets, and cycles.
A tech worker and artist, their practice across text, software, games, and performance spans encyclopedic, archival, and personal works that unravel the systems and narratives that condition and emerge from technology, and the intimacies and infrastructures underneath them. They are invested in the myths and beliefs fabricated around technologies, Philippine history, the dense & uninterpretable, and themes of opacity, faith, and labor amid spaces domestic to divine.
Chia founded & directs Developh (since 2016), a research & arts institution dedicated to critical and creative technology practice in the Philippines & broader Southeast Asia. Projects include KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN! (That’s what you get for using the computer!), an exhibition of Filipino net art presented with NEWINC, Tai Kwun, & Art Fair Philippines; and the Philippine Internet Archive, preserving histories of Filipino involvement in digital & network histories.
Their work has been presented internationally at Art Fair (Philippines); the V&A and Tate Britain (UK); Gray Area & the Internet Archive (San Francisco, USA); Nguyen Wahed & CultureHub (New York, USA); Transmediale & panke.gallery (Germany); Tai Kwun (Hong Kong); InterAccess (Canada); and the Experimental Games Showcase at the Game Developers Conference. Features include The New Yorker, BOMB Magazine, Frieze, It’s Nice That, Nylon, et. al. They are recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia honoree and a Lumen Prize Winner, and have held residencies with NEW INC, Gray Area, and the Internet Archive.
They received a BA in Computing & the Arts from Yale University in 2022. They're a Senior Product Designer at Figma, designing tools for creativity used by millions.
In 2026, they are building games, writing hypertexts, performing, and designing software in rigor as a technologist and artist.
Current long-term projects include 1.) Every Love Song in the World—a series of works, performance-lecture, and book on Philippine history, infrastructure, affect, and empire. Works include Burning, an executable desktop documentary about Filipino seafarers; and their 2.) Internet Ambient series, including various hypertext performances and a durational internet novel.
Of concern to them is the future of labor and legibility in systems whose density has become a form of totality.
( Mostly, they want to gather all the people they love in one place, and build an internet that could be that place. )