Chia Amisola《If you knew me, would you love me?》

‘If you knew me, would you love me?’ presents Chia Amisola’s computer desktops from the past three years as sites of landscapes, intimacy, and poetry. The desktop–an accumulation of our identity and work, often a private space–instead becomes a space to consider how we might know and be known online. While technology today encourages algorithmic smoothness and seamlessness, Amisola returns to ‘hypertext’: non-linear, friction, and difficult forms of knowing that demand our attention and constant care. The artwork’s titular question reveals a hidden truth: only through the effort of attention does true connection become possible. The video compositions are collaged from Amisola’s custom browser-based software, recorded and performed by the artist as much as they are programs executed by the computer. Windows flood the desktop, containing small stories, anecdotes, and facts drawn from the artist’s upbringing in both the Philippines and internet. The text is heavily referential, fantastical, but also mundane; images are sourced from massive, impersonal repositories like Google StreetView, forums, and auction sites, reclaimed into handwritten fictions and memories. The desktop gestures towards technologies that might hold vulnerability and intimacy not for surveillance or extraction, but for connection – perhaps presenting ourselves online is just an asking to be loved.