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CHIA'S BLOG


ON DOMAIN NAMING

Reading Time: 12 minutes

This is a republication of my essay written for the Naive Yearly x Are.na
publication; the original essay-site is live at
https://ambient.institute/domain-naming/ and contains interactive elements that
are essential to the piece’s themes on (re)defining, language, and borders. I
encourage you to explore the publication site with a foreword by Kristoffer
Tjalve and the Are.na editorial post with thoughts from Meg Miller.

The essay itself is an expansion of my talk given at Naive Yearly in Copenhagen
last August 2023, which was then a fragmented performance-lecture responding to
Kristoffer’s prompt of ‘naming’; the essay weaves these into one (of many)
reading-writings on naming. Thank you dearly to Meg Miller for editing this
piece closely and Kaloyan for our conversations on domain names, names, and
life.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



The internet is where I have always made myself.

As a precocious child, I made websites.1 Without much of an environment around
me, I wanted to shape places for myself, and found that the internet gave me
this potential.2 Here, I taught myself the language & code, pointing at screens
and not understanding why my parents were confused when a collection of boxes
was, to me, indistinguishable from me. Slowly nestled under any free website
hosting service I could find was an accumulating corner of stories, posts,
resources, and games — all things I loved and couldn’t lose, now safeguarded in
a home.3

One of the first steps you take when creating a website is choosing a domain
name. The domain name becomes your presence, a point of access; you are a site
that people may recognize, are welcome to visit, one that is real. I took as
many names as I did selves: destinyzbond.webs.com, cirrumilus.sky-song.org,
belovedhearts.webs.com, each a name to my stories, a place to fill, a becoming.

chia.neocities.org, a collection of my domains

As I grew older, my domains began to take on a realness
(chiaski.com4, chia.design, chias.website, chia.audio).5 I was interested in how
my name alone could be as vast a container as my earlier website names that
leaned towards my interests and ambiguous provocations. 6 The self is
fragmented, and the internet affords it this complexity. We split and weave
these names across spaces,marking the boundaries and lines that make the self.



“People determine who they are by drawing a line.”
Luc Devoldere, translated by Astrid Vandendaele



I buy domain names when the right word or phrase resonates, incubating the space
far before a tangible idea has come to mind. Technologists commonly joke about
how many domain names they have in their pocket, a collection of unrealized
dreams just waiting for activation. When I start thinking about these names as
invitations rather than tombstones, I find that what I work on naturally settles
itself into one of them, inhabiting language and perhaps even redefining it.

A website is a site of potential.7 A domain isn’t only a name, it is an
invitation to start something new.8 Websites have always functioned to me as
translations and fragmentations of myself, ways to give form to myself through
constantly re-situating and re-contextualizing across the internet. The act of
construction is a practice of making the self (rather than just a
re-presentation): filling a domain is assembling a new body for the self, with
the site as an extension of the body, or a distillation and compression of it…
Conscious of how being online is intertwined with distribution, presentation,
marketing, but never going without making. If names are nothing and naming is
everything, the website is the perfect medium in which I carve space, take
space, and make space… A website in its infinitely republishable, malleable,
transient, and perpetually unfinished nature; its accumulation of histories, a
body that attempts to obscure so much of history. I think of myself like I think
of a website.9 At any moment, I am remaking my name and what it means. Names are
functionally territories. I become a landscape.

Decades later, these digital records are one of my only remains. I trace these
sites, dissolving to time, assembling a fragmented collection of selves that
tell a story of a becoming. I watch the way I carry an ever-changing girl
through new containers, always outgrowing myself. At each step, I’d bare an old
self, searching for a new name I could inhabit.10

Language shapes worlds and selves, drawing the territories that we then inhabit.
Naming then, is placemaking: as naming identifies a domain of control, it
becomes the act of domaining itself. 

> All digital space is anchored in physical infrastructure. The internet cannot
> point to itself.

As names point to both the online and offline, the URL/IRL divide is less blurry
than one might think. Internet geographies are reroutings atop of the human
world, more than they are distinct, fantastical spaces11 unconstrained by the
world. Domain names collapse and reorder territories to form ones of their own
through assemblages of cables, data centers, and clouds; the physical conditions
that let us make ourselves malleable.

Domain names12 function as unique identifiers that point to locations.
Functionally, domain names map onto less human-readable numerical IP addresses
(like 192.168.1.1), corresponding to a host server that stores a website’s
content and assets. When typing in a domain name, the machine translates it into
the respective numbers and addresses, then takes you to the correct server’s
location. Call the website by its name, and the machine helps you get there.
Here, hardware and software tuck their mechanisms underneath human language.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Domain naming is the social, situated, and environmental practice of “naming as
placemaking” on the internet, recognizing the power in words to shape worlds
materially, ideologically, and socially. ‘Domaining’ draws out places and
borders by naming. ‘Naming’ makes place legitimate, legible, and accessible.
Enter a name to access a site. Name it and it becomes a site.13

The process of domain naming acknowledges our self-made authority to define the
environments we inhabit, and thus ourselves. As we settle with language, words
determine the visibility of a place’s logic. Logic in turn, is just an
evaluation of language. Within these dichotomies, naming treads the line between
liberation and oppression, illegibility and clarity, obfuscation and
identification. 

The secret to construction (of identity14, object, or place) has always been in
naming. Language and space are interlinked, each mutating our understanding of a
world and the possibilities within. Truth is revealed when it is recognized.
Names are tools for recognition / memory-making / cognition / meaning-making.
Like a collective contract to recognize one color as red, or to dispute for
centuries over the name of a land and its authority, names as relations are
always embroiled with questions of power.

When I wanted to find myself, I made websites.

I registered ifyouknewmewouldyoulove.me in a time of reinvention, it carryied me
through an era of erasure, seeing. I lean towards websites (more than
newsletters or physical artifacts) precisely because they are immaterial and
impermanent, but instantaneous and immanent. For many bodies, to be unseen means
repression, erasure, and exploitation. Love was and is to me, about fully
embracing a whole self: I thought it impossible to know all of someone without
loving them. Otherwise, how would you get to that point? I wanted to be an
environment, not a monument. A place where people could go, fill, address, see,
and then eventually know.15

One of our primal desires is to be seen. Or more precisely, to say how we want
to be seen. Naming is knowing.16

Chias.website would hold a field of lifelong flowers, lifel.ong would be the
place where I could find all my friends, chia.design would be an illegible index
of all I have done and could become, ifyouknewmewouldyoulove.me would be an
invitation to this labyrinthine self, chia.audio would be a fishbowl collecting
fragments of fields and sounds, engine.lol a tool that would make
itself, chia.pics a series of clippings, chias.computer a repository of all that
make me. 

A Google Search

Each name serves as a boundary. Names serve as recognition of a place, body, or
identity: drawn out from relationships and context: what we call each other,
where we go towards, who we respond to. For the person I become—only once you
recognize me. The name situates, letting us access sites on the internet when
names point to space (as DNS protocols17 name to point & recognize; turning
numeric IP addresses into human-readable names), and when names prevent
collisions in space (as programming languages & filesystems utilize ‘namespaces’
that assign, group, and prevent collisions; preventing naming conflicts by
providing unique identifiers within their scopes of control)—using names to
determine relations (in what sphere is a name recognized?), control (what does
the name enable?), and power (who assigns the name?). Domains are controlled
territories and names draw out nations.

> Domains are controlled territories and names draw out nations.

When I choose to make space on the internet, I place my faith in vast systems of
infrastructure, care, and ecologies. I put my faith in people. All within a
network of relations, an ecology of machines and places all tended by human
hands, interdependent to all. Identity is infrastructure because naming unites
the self and its signifiers with a site; these relations are the foundations of
the worlds we can visit.

For the computer to know where I am, and for you to reach me. From any point in
the world, point at the name you remember and find me, if I’m still there, I am
found again. Domain naming is self-preservation against a world that demands
singular cohesion.

> “Domain naming is self-preservation against a world that demands singular
> cohesion.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Perhaps who decides what is named and what the process of naming
entails is authority. These concerns are all the more pertinent online, where
although material conditions are necessary for us to move around the internet,
the concept of ‘place’ is effectively nonexistent without names reinforced by
relations & protocols. To cross from one site to another, one accepts its
borders and conditions. Recognizing the name realizes both the thing referenced,
and the authority that grants who may be identified at all.

Take the most central institutional authority to the domain name system, ICANN
(The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) taking over the
general administration of IP addresses and top-level domains from a lone
researcher named Jon Postel. Today, many top-level domains are administered by
countries (such as .us or Tuvalu’s primary export, .tv), sponsors (.gov or
.xxx), or other genericized domains (.design or .wiki). 

Will Oremus, Why You Won’t Find Tuvalu on a Map of the World’s Internet Domains

The delegation of these names sweeps physical infrastructure under a rug, acting
as if internet cartographies are exempt from politics, borders, and protocol
biases. While the DNS system was designed to resist territorialization, it’s
even more strongly coupled to physical geography today. Entire digital cultures
and histories have dissolved from domain deletions, from the self to nations. 18
Scaling the self contends with the hypercapitalist system of delegation,
exploitative and predatory, manufacturing ‘scarcity’ for mere
identifiers. 19 Imperialism manifests through power struggles over in-demand
TLDs. If domain names are considered as ‘natural resources,’ do we know where we
inhabit? 20 In the very fabric of the internet is the violence in naming, the
delusion of self-extension at odds with expansionism. 21



In knowing, we must also know the underlying expansionist goals of the internet
project that underscore the promise of connection.22 As I use websites and names
to expand myself, I borrow addresses atop an internet that posits itself as
ever-expanding, near-infinite. With no real-real space to own and conquer, we
look towards the internet. With nothing in real life, I made life for myself
online: was it as limitless as me?

The internet can be traced to its imperialist U.S. roots, a military venture
connecting scientists, the academe, and defense contractors.These origins
underpin its infrastructures and continue to weaponize its shape: from DNS
governance (the authorities that administer the provision and control of
domains), ongoing platform23 centralization (where more and more internet users
rely on social networking and profit-oriented platforms to maintain presences
online, nestled as slashes on Facebook instead of naming their own space), to
surveillance and repression (domain names provide information on the physical
location of host servers to point, so can be used to loosely detect an area).
All sites on the internet are tinged with a sharpness and an ever-pervasive
question of who serves who. When I speak of the liberatory potential of the
internet, I speak with cautious optimism: these very structures have been used
to destabilize democracies, radicalize nations, and erase people. The dream of
the internet did not begin with intimacy and interdependency, it began with
power and subjugation. 

How the internet was invented

Borders are drawn by names, tangible or intangible, routes for wayfinding and
routes for coloniality. 24Names, with all their power, are weapons themselves.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A true reinvention of the name might involve a remaking of our protocols for
knowing. A redistribution of addressing, of power, and of place. Today, names
exacerbate inequities, further territorializing the internet by perpetuating the
limitations of place in the real world. The internet is not the utopia it
appears to be: it masks our bordered, imperfect world, not as a mirror, but a
recreation absolved from the physical world’s limits – a far more dangerous
presentation. 

When language is re-translation and re-situation, and when language is equated
to space and place, we need to question both ends of this re-assembly… the
institutions that determine the name, the objects that the names point to, and
the sovereignty that all in-between may truly hold. Domain naming might be
liberatory on the level of the individual who holds autonomy over a world, but
on the level of larger societies, it falls to the roots and authorities that
only push imperialist agendas.

Even the language we use to describe ourselves online needs prodding: those who
tend websites as worlds, gardens, and rivers, might be invited to evaluate what
they are looking to carry from these real-world spaces. If language is
world-shaping, why limit ourselves to the borders and failures of the offline,
where existing words and languages might exacerbate inequities? Why limit the
mythology25 of the internet rather than write new ones?

> “Why limit the mythology of the internet rather than write new ones?”

Critical and poetic reimaginings of the internet require the authoring of
entirely new logics. We find language to carve out landscapes, defining their
curves with words, terraforming the world and its histories in tenses. Much of
this practice of writing comes from inhabitation: After all, while the border is
drawn with articulation, we live in looseness. We live within the self before
knowing our name. We live to draw the border between ourselves and all around
us. We live in states whose borders are drawn and redrawn. We live in sites that
we have yet to find the language and write the poetry for. 

Domain naming invites us to inhabit worlds so emergent and unnamed, that to
refer to things, we might only be able to point.26 Language is laggy, boundless,
bounded, overlapping, constrained, situated, uttered anywhere, everywhere,
embedded, becoming. Extending ourselves onto a website might not only be an
interior, individual practice of preservation, but part of a broader non-linear
history 27 that welcomes many visibilities, each with countless lines and
opacities.

I know that whatever place I end up in, I will find a way to make it a home. I
know that for a name to be truly known, it must be inhabited. A name is not just
sounded, it must be lived. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What’s in your name?

When you ask the name of someone next to you, attempt to truly know it.
(Don’t just remember it politely, know them.)

How are you using your name to border yourself?

What names have you taken that you’ve truly felt you’ve filled?

Does the potential of anonymity on the internet inspire you?

How do we recognize the place and geography of the internet, whilst
simultaneously recognizing that what we build does not have to map cleanly
towards real-world geographies?

Call the world you live in something new.

What words do we use? What words do we ignore?

What words do we need to use in new ways?

What name do you want to become?

What name do you want to kill?

Do you have the language to reinvent a world?

How do we engage in a way of seeing and naming that stands as cognizant,
optimistic, and agentic?

How might we become cognizant of the imperialist, expansionist desires
underneath names?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

March 25, 2024 Add Comment


THE PRACTICE AND LOGIC BEHIND MOVEMENT

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Suffering is no longer interesting, so I’ve begun the process of dying.

I started abstracting my feelings into art, which is why it’s ever the only
thing I am interested in doing these days. It feels urgent–a survival
mechanism–saving myself in order to save others, understanding all human beings
as consequence. I stopped writing when my anger became violent, and its
visibility is difficult to display.

Nothing new is happening but self-acceptance. I listen to myself talk about love
like a child, I think about my mother who bore me as a barely-child, I live
again in every abandoned world and truth. Look at how far this dependence on
delusion has carried me: now I can walk to the Pacific any day and give myself
to it. All grandeur is still as immense. I’m not detached enough to think that
excess has become mundane, and still find myself rational enough where I create
most problems in my life by delay, doing the wrong intentionally. The same logic
is used to crucify myself for anyone who will bear witness.

I looked at myself so much that I made this body of nothing into something.
Before this, others had to believe that there was something in that gesture:
that when I looked, there was weight, a mass, a calculation. The intention was
to suppose significance, to put one thing in relation to the other thing in the
world. All dead, dormant things with taste and color and hue and their own
voracity. All this life might be a history of longing. I’ve become the
environment, and no one can help but see me.

Kristin Ross writes “For the only way you can belong to your era is without
knowing it—which is to say, through belief.”…

February is short but my life is even shorter. The more I read the more I
understand invention covers emptiness; my impetus to record is mostly a sign of
regression. My only faith is in the tangibility of attending, everything else so
compensatory.

I’m making things that are ambitious, and I am growing unkinder. Here is a site
where the whole world can be willed, where you play god; here is another where
the houses flood the screen, where people suffer and you watch them in the nook
of space; here is one where my whole humanity is excised, with no one to run
through. The most interesting of the past years is of field recording (and
proximity) and performance (and intimacy), getting comfortable with wasting
people’s lives and my own, attention to seeing, seeing becomes all surfaces. Of
course in the work I put in, I want to make myself divine, or make an experience
close to the divine, or represent the sublimation of the divine. Of course,
there are already too many stories about 23-year-olds busy making to make
themselves.

When people ask what’s on my mind, I talk about simple things: not knowing where
I can legally be in a bit over a year, a persistent detachment from America and
its all, the desire to author something so heavy that everyone else has to write
in it.

There is nothing new in the morning. It is just as beautiful.



February 21, 2024 1 Comment


(SELECTED) WORKS, 2023

Reading Time: 13 minutes


last year, began exploring an art practice (on the side of work) after the
realization that my stay in the country is only temporary (or more precisely,
having that fully settle in). i thought art would be one of the only things that
could never be taken away from me. grateful to everyone who has given me a
chance to show, publish, perform; for everyone ive met, and learned with. ive
been making on the web for as long as i can remember, it is my default, urgent
mode of expressing. and for the first time: it felt seen and important: that
there is a space for the way i see, thus for me and the world i have come from &
believe in..

every time i evaluate why i make, i think about urgency and finding myself: i
think about how i just want to be prolific, to live my life in abundance /
expression, trusting that meaning follows; that the work writes the stories, the
work is not writing the story, etc

this year i got to make a lot of work on the philippines, love, labor, memory,
preservation that im happy to have invested in. here’s a selection of them with
some additional commentary:


( WEBSITES/GAMES )

engine.lol, a tiny gamemaker that is a game in itself..

released the biggest update since the first release of engine.lol.. my undergrad
thesis (released april 2022) is now out on itch.io! my slow labor of love and
constant movement towards tooling, constraint, and creativity..



i even started on a wip mobile-friendly txt-only version of engine.lol with an
infinite canvas. lots of bugfixes to come, as well as more asset packs, and
another big update to come! (see future release notes: engine will develop
feelings.) excited to start nurturing this on itch.io..

play through the library of engine.lol games here, and check out the itch.io
collection
decenber 2023



♡





a bedroom in las piñas, escapist room + vignettes from 18 yrs in manila (wip)

as with my classic alone on the holidays routine of ‘break down and write a
traumatic, verbose interactive fiction piece*’, i ended the year with ‘a bedroom
in las piñas’ – an ‘escapist room’ game made over a weekend (perhaps an escape
room if you could escape from memories and ideologies with actions & verbs)



around this time of year i often think “what life choices led me here?” “would i
have been happier with a simpler life in the philippines?” “would my self not
have collapsed if i wasn’t torn from the only nation that has ever loved me,
molded me, made me?” “what does it mean when every day, i die away from the land
that raised me?” “why am i not home?” etcetcetc. this recollection (very much in
vein to visita) is a cathartic reconciliation with some early memories in the
guise of an escape room, after jake elliott’s wonderful generational piece a
house in california (i played it once in middle school in the early 2010s and it
has never left my mind) and olia lialina’s early work

*so many of my pieces this year were incredibly text-heavy and dense.. the blog
drought went to writing within the code editor (not just code, but paragraphs
and paragraphs of text enjambed into arrays). i probably hide behind the form of
the site to mask my poor writing skills, but i hope it still means something to
read/see

play the demo on itch.io
december 2023 (version 2)


♡





we are only moving towards each other, a love poem

speaking of manic writing in the browser.. in january 2023, this piece came out
to me from a violently gentle dream: i woke up every day crying after dreams
about grocery stores, so desperately wanting to be touched, to regain
sensitivity for the enormity of life around me. lifted halftone pictures,
darting sequences, texts with infinite variants, windows and moments closing and
opening endlessly.. i’ve read this piece live more than a handful of times now
(which can take as long as up to 2 hours), and i still always find new ways to
say it, arrange it, mold a landscape around me.

a bedroom in las pinas and we are only moving towards each other are both about
~15k words in length, except this piece is more manipulable, astray, in need of
mending. i have repurposed and loved many lines in it, so hope you give it a
read sometime. (make sure you’re ready to close everything.)

if there’s anything of me you experience, please try reading this or the last
piece! in play or in a performance setting!
play on whenwe.love/moving
play on itch.io
january 2023

♡

when we love, a dating simulator..? (wip)

i’ve been releasing under ‘when we love’, my future mega dating sim.. you will
see how all are weaved together :#)

2023—??

♡

manifesto for (web)site-specific art

i rewrote and retitled this manifesto on my practice at a coffee shop in new
haven earlier this year and first shared it at rosa mcelheny’s software for
people class at yale; and later got to present it at panke.gallery in berlin. i
want to keep it as a living and active ecosystem of ideas around a living,
ecologied web that grows with me..

> It is in a website’s being of a world that it turns into the grandest
> procession for all those present in it: a ritual gathering, encounter, and
> event that can occur for even a parade of one or none.

read the manifesto
march 2023 (remake)

♡





GAME CHAT SHOP, a multiwindow compshop symphony

In a decrepit computer cafe, the last day of a MMORPG plays out before its
server shuts down forever. Across three windows & scales of space, you’re left
to ask: where does the game end? where does the self begin?
As a server death comes, players navigate a game, chat, and a shop across
browser windows—different dimensions of embodiment, scale, and time in dialogue
with each other. Time runs out in your computer shop session, ads disrupt, calls
leak, the spam of the real-world against the chaos of the room. The
discontinuities of the game and real worlds bring us to search for boundaries
that might not exist, where both the avatar and the self are constantly
fragmented, where we do not know where our technology ends and where we begin.

as part of runway journal’s MMORPG issue, I made GAME CHAT SHOP: loops, lag,
glitches, unveiled over three browser windows. i was thinking a lot about server
deaths (of course), the loss of community and space that i felt in early
internet cafes, and the people along the way.

there’s still a handful to do for the game, but i like it as both an active and
atmospheric piece, and it was quite a technical exercise figuring out how to
make these windows talk to each other ..

play on GAMECHATSHOP.com
play on itch.io
read runway journal
november 2023

♡

concrete form, a form poem

Have you ever violated, or engaged in a conspiracy to violate, any law relating
to controlled substances?Have you ever committed or conspired to commit a human
trafficking offense in the United States or outside the United States?  Do you
seek to engage in espionage, sabotage, export control violations, or any other
illegal activity while in the United States? Have you ever ordered, incited,
committed, assisted, or otherwise participated in genocide?

for the html review’s spring 2023 issue.. i anticipated and experienced a year
crying over the bureaucracy, repetition, and dehumanization experienced through
immigration and visa forms. the questions above aren’t part of the piece, but
are part of the DS-160 nonimmigrant visa questionnaire!

the piece is also a contemplation on identity, its loss and abstraction through
labeling checking filling writing categorizing defining etc. i like to think of
it as a bit of a puzzle, and have often been adapting it for performances.
working with barebones ascii and default form inputs (and bending them) has also
been very exciting to me, continuing with a theme of exposing defaults and
structures.

play on whenwe.love/forms
read the html review
march/april 2023

♡

bisita, a recollection of the seven churches visitation

a remaster of a 2021 piece made around holy week, of course. in the only
intensely Catholic nation in Asia — the devotion and routine that surrounded the
Holy Week practice of the Seven Churches Visitation leaves lasting imprints on
one’s experience of repetition, tradition, ritual, religion. here’s a post on
the original work.

i abandoned the ardent atheist act in high school and started recognizing how
i’d probably name what i have inside of me as devotion, one passionate, fiery,
seeking martyrdom—i just don’t know what the institution for it is, anymore.

play on alli.love/bisita
april 2023

♡

ang bantayog, a martial law (im)memorial

this is definitely one of my more conceptual pieces this year: something i
tended at the very beginning of 2023, wrote to the bantayog ng mga bayani about,
and executed in time for the martial law anniversary.

the loss of national memory and collective consciousness has been plaguing the
country, leading to reelection of the bloody dictator’s son. i don’t pose this
site as a true monument, but more of an artifact that speaks to the process of
memory itself, its loss, decay—that consciousness and collectivity is of course,
not a linear accumulation, but an involved, connective thread.

here’s a piece about it on rapple, its space on the bantayog ng mga bayani
website, and my writeup on it.

visit at ang-bantayog.com
sep 2023

♡



all i love, the naming of a world (wip)

another ambitious, durational piece that takes those alchemical combination
games (or like, doodle god/devil) into the much overlooked space of the browser
address bar. a few hundred handcoded objects, dark stories/descriptions, a tale
underneath of apocalypse and invention..

i don’t think this is *quite* cohesive yet – it might take at least a thousand
pages to get there. but the fun in words/definitions/surprises/finding has been
charming

play demo
june 2023—

♡

crucifixio, a history of christ (wip)

veryy wip poem, fragmented jesus, playing with browser history, titles,
syncing.. have more religious pieces to come in early 2024 where this will be
more fleshed out!


play demo (click to launch)
nov 2023



♡

⋆????⋆｡˚???????? ???? ⋆⭒????⋆｡˚????????✩⋆????????⋆????, landscapes

one of the last i made for the year: a series of youtube collages for syntax,
which i also had the pleasure of doing design + dev for! my favorite is this
fish one. from 42 embeds to 100, they all made my computer crash and required
the most powerful imacs in the gallery to display!!

i like thinking of lag, glitch, and delays as constant variables in any
web-based work: it’s why most of my work is textual and minimalist in design,
with a fraction testing the limits of the computer. i love the idea of work that
is designed to be malleable: that if i were to repurpose this for viewing in
different spaces, i’d have to rearrange the strokes of these ‘landscapes’ (which
were already inherently very tediously/meticulously arranged, playing with
filters, scale, rotation). i presented it with galleryspeak, talking about how
the dimensions are variable (duh!), just barely retrofitting barebones youtube
embeds to collapse the videos from their former containers (and depending on
speed/machine, it’s not so obvious that they’re youtube embeds), using the count
of embeds to emphasize the heft of the work. i love the fact that the landscape
is lifelike: dying as the videos get taken down, erroring out..

see series at syntax
see videos
dec 2023



♡



can two things ever really touch or can we only fall apart? (wip), a browser
reading

> > > A language of embrace is unraveled in touch, distance, and movement.
> > > Exploring the poetics of metadata, alt text, and ambient ways of reading,
> > > ‘Can two things ever really touch or can we only fall apart?’ is a net art
> > > piece designed for the screen, reader, and screen reader.
> > 
> > Continuous, at times erratic, and polite languages reveal vignettes
> > contained over objects. Interaction mediated only through hovers and clicks,
> > verbs & interactions bring users across objects, people, places — unfolding
> > into an expanding world made possible only by witnessing. Here, we spit,
> > love, chew, tick, consider, feel, express, regret, fear, maim, inhale,
> > scrape, concentrate, cherish, sprawl, rest, surrender, ease, fondle, look,
> > honor, liberate, split, connect, twinkle, trace, cry, cherish, long, want,
> > hope, dream, bloom, wait, pause, hold, feel, feel, feel, feel, feel, hover,
> > click, spit, emerge… as we become everything.

a piece i made for website as subject with yehwan song at panke.gallery, another
word / verb overload to tell of dark stories and grim memories on objects,
forcing alternate modes of reading. also deceptive word count. still figuring
out presentation, but happy w it – its nonstop, continuous, endlessly explaining
self

play at whenwe.love/touching
nov 2023

♡

cloudwatching / stargazing, a naming at day / a gathering at night

two alternative time-based, single-purpose social networks i started the year
with, as an experiment in working with server-side stuff that ended up being
surprisingly lovely community spaces

over 1700 clouds have been made on cloudwatching! over 530 wishes left on
stargazing! want to do a recap of these soon.. thanks for gathering with me :#)

cloudwatch at whenwe.love/cloudwatching
stargaze at whenwe.love/stargazing
jan 2023

two-date tour poster of the year


( PERFORMANCE/SOUND )

i fell in love with performance, mending my interest in field recording +
ambience & atmospherics + 23-year-old synth bullshit with websites, desktops,
and networks thanks to the reading i did of concrete form at the html review
last spring.. it has been so amazing to do site-specific, unique ambient
performances with work, adapt pieces, and play in berlin, san francisco, manila
(!! <3), and online. i can’t wait to actually get good at this, and do it
forever more.

most of my experiments have been in-person and improvisational, but here’s a
handful that have been recorded that i’d love to share with you

♡

‘the artist is dreaming…’ for screen walks

what a dream to do this: i love screen walks, and was so surprised when jon and
marco invited me. it was their last event for 2023.. a perfect time to share my
work for screen, properly

pretty happy with this performance and short q&a after. will be doing a handful
of sessions this january, see you soon!

watch recording
dec 2023

♡

‘pacification’ mix for nts supporter radio (53:00)

traffic tunes for nts supporter radio!

listen to the mix
aug 2023

♡

&amp;bient for manila community radio (1:54:57)

two-hour ambient mix for mcr!

listen to the mix
june 2023

♡

runtime as ritual as religion (as repetition) for panke.gallery

networked performance closing panke.gallery, weaving through the shared work

watch/listen
nov 2023

♡



ambient at koffee

i have no documentation for this but this snippet i managed to get on my norns
and i did not dj, i played live, but i thought the graphic was cute and i miss
hailey

feb 2023


( TALKS/TUTORIALS/INTERVIEWS )

on websites and spreadsheets

i warred with myself and microphone so painfully to make this guide on folk
archival etcetc out of google spreadsheets on a website and i still don’t think
it’s clear enough so i will revisit it.

tutorial website, tutorial video
may/june 2023

♡

on domain naming

one of my greatest gifts of this year was when kristoffer gave me the perfect,
purposed prompt of ‘naming’ and managed miracles so i could travel to copenhagen
for naive yearly, where i gave a painfully awkward yet sincere talk about the
internet, territory, selfhood, conquest, placemaking. let it be known that if
your phone makes the microphone crackle for the first ten minutes of the talk
and you’re sleep-deprived and out of your mind and have handcoded a website over
and over a last minute flight with barely no wifi because you realized you can’t
fly through london because you are filipino——danish media WILL open their
article with it, and you will never charm the media again

this january, ill be publishing a more holistic essay/site version of this realm
of thinking.. pls stay tuned!

are.na channel, instagram post
aug 2023

♡

on the creation myths of computing

i gave a remote* talk on mythology, the role of technologists, and the power in
narrative for causal islands in toronto

it is impossible to get a canadian visa in a month’s notice, life hurts

watch the recording
april 2023

♡

why aren’t there more websites about love? / the web is a place where people
gathered, conversations with elan kiderman ullendorff

spoke on my practice around love, websites, and folk archival (and all of
webmaking as a love language challenging the hostile web today) with elan
kiderman ullendorff for their wonderful ‘escape the algorithm’ newsletter (fka
deep sea diving) — and later got to visit their class at penn!

???? “Why aren’t there more websites about love?”
???? “The web is a place where people gathered”
june 2023

♡



a website can be a poem (a poem can be a website) with ana for usurpator

lovely, intense, long long conversation with the prolific ana for your listening
pleasure!

♡ read on usurpator mag
♡ listen on spotify
july 2023


♡



in conversation, with now play this

> Sebastian Quack talks with Chia Amisola, creator of We Are Only Moving Towards
> Each Other, about reshaping the internet and creating caring spaces.

being remote for now play this in london, i was so generously given the space to
talk a bit about my game as it was played in front of me for the first time..
very loopy (so nervous!!) thoughts on love, care, embodiment, and the internet
as a space that can be shaped/reshaped

watch
april 2023








( OTHER.. )

this post didn’t exclude a breadth of collaborations, trips, performances,
lectures etc etc that i was so grateful to go on. i live next to the ocean in
san francisco and moved in with the person i love. i cannot believe i am here..

January 3, 2024 Add Comment

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The place we make for ourselves. A world in itself.
Aren’t stories built into our societal infrastructure? (Is the internet not an
infrastructure for stories?)
“All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of a home.,” says
Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space
.com, The standard for TLDs, initially designated in 1985.
I own too many domain names to count, spread across registrars. Most of them are
my name, but I’m not sure what my name really is.
Norman O’Hagan’s Are.na channel personal websites named after an idea rather
than the human is a perfect example
To site is to use a name to draw a boundary, and to begin inhabiting.
The wonderful thing about a domain is that it’s not only a gift—it’s an
invitation to start something new. A prompt. A naming of something. When a
domain name is given as a gift, it’s even more powerful—an act of saying “I
trust in you to bring this to the world.” — Chia’s 2022 Domain Name Gift Guide
I know that wherever place I end up in, I will make it home.<br>I know to
inhabit, I must give my whole self.
Take the material of the internet: that which purports itself to be invisible or
ambient, like data, cloaks vast swathes of information and machinery that hold
us.
The history of space has always been that of hunger: where to locate, connected,
move, survive; how to map these out, classify, spatially process; how to border,
demarcate, and surrender to space to draw new worlds from others. When I wanted
to make space for myself, I thought to make a website.
A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative authority,
control, or autonomy; stemming from widely-accepted protocols, particularly DNS.
Pointing to a numerical address, the text-based name functions as a more legible
identifier. Abstractly, names very much demarcate domains of control and space
amongst vast, machinic systems of ordinality.
Place, A real location, a pointer. A sense of a place, the relations. The
wayfinding
An ever-shifting body on a set label. I am remaking my name every moment.
Protocol, Hardware/software reinforce human exchanges of information.
All of naming, of language — stems from the desire of (re)affirmation. My name
is not really a name until you call me by it. My name became what was always my
name—the moment you spoke it. It is a social language, an exchange, a contract,
a shared exercise.
Knowing, “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of
something and knowing something”
The Internet Domain Name system is a protocol that helps us translate internet
domain names into IP addresses, allowing us to map and locate websites. <
 such as in the expiry of Yugoslavia’s .yu domain in 2010 after severe
geopolitical conflicts. Read more on Kaloyan Kolev’s Yugoslavia’s Digital Twin
with the amount of options today and an expanded IP standard, the concern is
more in the ‘viability’ of certain domain names, such as .com still being much
more recognizable than .vodka
We must examine cases like the island-nation Niue that seeks control over their
designated .nu that has been controlled by the Internet Foundation in Sweden
since 2016, costing the smaller state over $150,000,000 in potential revenue
Expansionism, We begin constructing space for ourselves to conquer, a need for
domination and control… Am I only taking up space to become something? Am I
expropriating myself for the internet?
Connection, For the computer to know where I am. For you to remember me a bit
better. For us to make our way to one another. For me to find a way to better
fit into myself.
Platform, Online social platforms are both languages and spaces.” Charles
Broskoski, Rules Are Rules
Borders, “Borders are the interior routes of modernity/coloniality and the
consequences of international law and global linear thinking.” Walter D. Mignolo
Mythologizing, Much of the making of a world is simply giving a name to it…
Point, Domain pointing or, “The world was so recent that many things lacked
names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” – Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
History, Names that stand the test of time carry something beyond them.