Paru-paro (Butterfly) is a browser-based narrative landscape and computer game that drifts across maps and memories. Reincarnated as a butterfly, the viewer navigates a forgotten world where superstitions of the departed are surfaced. Floating across an ethereal land, the butterfly encounters landmarks, objects and people that store memories and release them upon the butterfly’s passage, leaving the viewer to piece together the story. Part diary and part archive, the artwork collects references from platforms, satellites and stock images and re-sorts once-extractive, impersonal material into a precious encounter with myths, streets, and cycles. Paru-paro is an example of how the humble website can become a site of artistic self-expression, foregrounding emotional affect and vulnerability, reappropriating algorithmic and surveillance culture into moments of solemn reflection, nostalgia and grief.
Chia Amisola is an artist devoted to the internet’s loss, love, labor, and liberation, particularly of the third world experience. They make work about intimacy, infrastructure, and infinity across text, websites, and performances.