A never-ending karaoke party
Net art, karaoke, and digital gardening workshops to tend creative technology in the Philippines
Welcome to Developh’s newsletter. Developh is a research & arts institution for critical and creative technologies in the Philippines. We’re a community of practice shaping tools, exhibitions, and artifacts that works towards a more intentional and humane internet.
You’ll see us working on a mix of educational programming, art exhibitions, and publications in the coming months… including this newsletter, a return to regular writing from us with roundups on art, technology, and culture.
From Developh
Kakakompyuter Mo Yan, an internet art exhibition, is online
Kakakompyuter Mo Yan! is now online and redesigned in hazy CRT form. It is an online internet art exhibition that presents sites, games, and software as various ‘songs’: an elegy for Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz and St. Peter, a shrine to Onel de Guzman, a simulated torrent client, to data center mythologies… it questions Filipino identity, labor, faith, memory, and history in the digital age.
Kakakompyuter Mo Yan means something like “that’s what you get for using the computer!” in Filipino. It’s something our moms would shout at us when we’re found on the computer late at night… now turned into an exhibition. Wind down, choose a song, and flip through channels—you could spend an hour going through it all.
Try it at KakakompyuterMoYan.com, online forever.
Learn a bit more about Kakakompyuter Mo Yan in this talk we gave in New York last year. :-)
(If you’d like to support or be involved in future editions of KMY, reach out to us. If you’d like to host a pisonet and computer set-up with Kakakompyuter Mo Yan, reach out to us and we can customize something for you.)
Kakakompyuter Mo Yan at Art Fair
Early this year, we put up a physical exhibition of Kakakompyuter Mo Yan at Art Fair Philippines, the largest art fair in the country. In a corner of Makati, we put up half a living room and half a pisonet cafe, turning it into a neverending karaoke party—while selling nothing.
Art Fair reminded us of how wonderful the internet can be when it feels like a place again. Not a dark, looming thing that fills us with dread, but instead a more intentional place where we can gather, sing, and play around. We’re thankful to our artists, Art Fair (who trusted rowdy kids with no resources and a volume warning), Et Alt, Tropical Futures Institute, our parents, and all our volunteers & friends who helped make this possible.
You can read more about the event at this Spot.ph interview.
Art writer Pie Tiausas recently won the Purita Kalaw-Ledesma prize at the Ateneo Art Awards 2025 for their review of Kakakompyuter Mo Yan, “The internet is a space for the lonely”. Congrats Pie!
Events
All events are online and listed in GMT+8, Philippine time.
Building Relationships with Information: A Digital Gardening Workshop, Fran Carlos
Fran Carlos teaches our first workshop of the season this Saturday on the practice of ‘digital gardening’. Digital gardens are containers for connecting information, often shared publicly as living documents that focus more on the thinking, rather than the writing.
Come out of the workshop with your own digital garden set up in Obsidian.
10AM–12NN this October 18, Saturday | http://luma.com/qklgbgab
Bookmarklet Instruments: A Workshop by Chia Amisola
Turn the browser into an active instrument of play & performance in this workshop that explores ‘bookmarklets’. Bookmarklets are lightweight Javascript functions that live in the browser’s bookmarks bar and let you manipulate websites.
Leave the workshop with a toolkit of bookmarklets to play with, manipulate, and inject websites and treat them as a canvas.
8PM–9:30PM on November 5, Wednesday | https://luma.com/ggm625pl
In the works: let’s talk about the Blockchain Bill
Have you heard about Senate Bill No 1330, the Philippine National Budget Blockchain Act?
We’re spinning up a casual discussion group around the bill and adjacent technologies – unpacking both dreamy and realistic scenarios around a blockchained budget, and whether it is a path to transparency or just a technosolutionist fantasy. We’re at the planning stages of a group discussion and invite all regardless of familiarity with policy or blockchain technologies to join in.
Join us on Discord and express interest in the discussion group here.
Roundup
📺 Media
Kinetic artist David Medalla in conversation with artist-critic Cid Reyes touching on man, nature, machine and the Filipino art scene, as resurfaced by by ArticulatePH.
The Tyranny of Compliance in Higher Education highlights the pitfalls of compliance regimes that rankings, accreditation agencies, and government metrics push.
Rappler’s ‘Politicontractors’ map tracks and identifies public officials who have owned, currently own, or whose family member owns, a company that wins government contracts bankrolled by taxpayers.
☎️ Calls
Benilde HiFi, a technology business incubator, opened a call for innovation residents.
The Makati-based culture hub WHYNoT opened a call for entries to a transdisciplinary exhibit.
🎤 Events
Somewhere Else is launching a primer and discussion on designing creative communities through placemaking. Saturday October 18, Comuna, Makati
For designers: UXPH is hosting the Manila leg of their UXPH Mini 2025 series. Saturday October 18, Pasig City
The Design Center of the Philippines is hosting Design Week, ongoing now until this Saturday, October 18. Standout events include:
Design, Kapwa, at Ginhawa, a discussion-workshop series on interconnectedness in design.
Mapping Makati, a workshop on sensory exploration and mapping that brings together designers and cyclists.
Futuress hosts Ari Melenciano for a free online lecture on AI, sound, and ancestral memory. Thursday October 23, 2025, Online
The Film Development Council of the Philippines presents a curation of Asian Cinema screening in Mandaluyong, Negros, and Iloilo. October 22–29
Get Involved
If you’re an artist, technologist, or researcher interested in engaging in more critical + creative ways of engaging with technology, join our Discord as we announce more programming and collaboration opportunities
If you’re a group interested in taking us on for our services such as exhibitions, digital projects, R&D, or presentations, reach out.
Follow us on Instagram @develo.ph, and get acquainted with what we’ve been doing at developh.org.
This is the first issue of Developh’s newsletter. All replies land on our inbox—so feel free to say hi, or tell us more of what you’d like to see.