Ang Bantayog, by internet and ambient artist Chia Amisola, is an expansive digital monument stretches before you, laying out 11,103 candles. Once a day, you are invited to light a candle, each one representing a name. When lit, a name is revealed, the candle burning on to represent a life remembered.
‘The Monument’ is an internet art piece that speaks to memorials, mourning, and memory as experienced by machines and man. Dithered candles flood the screen under a fog as you scroll nearly infinitely, accompanied by a log of remembered names, sound tracked by an ethereal composition with loose whispers and the sounds of matches struck in the background. Utilizing the inherent nature of the browser and internet to create a networked experience for gathering, memorializing, and also forgetting—it exists to mirror the struggle of collective memory as experienced in the past 51 years since the imposition of martial law, more than to be a lasting marker or true spatial memory. Here, the website poses a monument as a question of infrastructure & collective memory: how do we gather, maintain, and remember together?
One and whole
There are two ways to experience the monument, ‘one’ and ‘whole’ – that alter how ‘memories’ are shared: locally or collectively.
In the ‘whole’ version of the monument, memories are communally shared. A networked experience: when other users visiting the collective bantayog light a candle, every other user hears the match struck – receiving the name of the ones remembered, memory becoming a collective gesture that reaches farther.
As ‘one’ alone, it would take approximately 30 years for each candle to be lit: the magnitude of loss paced with the decay of human & machine memory. In the experience as ‘one’, memories are retained in the browser’s localStorage, which are also erased when one’s (browser) history is cleared.
Of memory and memorialization
Intentionally programmed & designed to keep ‘defaults’ in mind, the monument operates within the environmental constraints of its technologies. For instance, ‘localStorage’ is used to store the ‘names remembered’, a form of data storage without expiration that is usually only erased when the user’s (browser) history itself is cleared. The website itself is accessible by a temporary domain (e.g. an equivalent to acquiring ‘property’ on the web, in exchange for a human-readable address in the URL). The enormity of victims and loss also make it nearly impossible for most machines to scroll past a few hundred candles, with most browser windows often shutting down. These mechanics are intentionally used as metaphors (often intimately analogous to their real-world equivalents), the limitations of machines not too different from those of man. While the common assumption is that technologies to be faultless and everlasting, in truth, they are often manufactured to be just as scarce, our hardware maybe just as fragile as our bodies.
Of digital space and revisionism
Beyond the organic decay of memory, we live in an era of intensified revisionism and political repression: a digital environment that contributed to the election of the ousted dictator’s son, Bongbong Marcos, who now sits as the 17th president of the Philippines. The internet coexists as a place of liberation & of learning, and simultaneously one of immense loss & repression. As technologies are reflections of human will & of power, they have the potential to exacerbate real life inequities just as they do the power to redistribute agency and knowledge.
The technologies used to program the monument represent the decay of memory, the burden of externalized knowledge wrought by the new digital era, and the active potential of technologies to rewrite history situated within a post-colonial internet with militant origins. Most often, these manifest as questions of environments: of visibility, optics, and both tangible and social infrastructures that dictate how we commune, and remember. In the website as an exercise of visibility, we are moved to consider who and what we pay attention to (the monument asks every visitor to wait for at least a minute before participating in a lighting), how often we return (such as the candle lighting being limited to once a day), and whose lives are afforded the privilege of remembering.
The monument is an imperfect site. By nature, it can never be a true ‘memorial’. It is transient, temporary, and tethered to the technologies it’s built upon—which falter more than man. What does it mean, to mourn and become in digital space? In between waking, remembering, and action, can we ‘never forget’ online? Perhaps the only way to combat the rate of decay is to collectively gather, and remember—as when the infrastructure that holds our memories fail, human hands might rebuild then.
About the Artist
Chia Amisola is an internet / ambient artist from born in Tondo, Manila. Their (web)site-specific art posits worlds & tools where creation is synonymous with liberation—investigating technology’s love, labor, and liberation. Through ‘internet ambient’, their practice is situated in the internet’s ecologies, its politics of visibility, defaults, and infrastructures—to make an internet where we can be heard.
Chia is the Founder & Organizer of Developh, a critical technology institute based in the Philippines, and stewards the Philippine Internet Archive. They graduated with a BA in Computing & the Arts from Yale in 2022, work as a producer design at Figma, and are an Art & Code member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator.