Chia Amisola Releases Browser Open World Paru-paro
The piece showed in WEBSITES WEBSITES WEBSITES!, the exhibition ARTXCODE and Rhizome mounted in New York.
Chia Amisola has released Paru-paro (Butterfly), a browser-based open world playable for free at paruparo.cloud. Amisola shared it in an announcement on Instagram. The work showed through September 27 at WEBSITES WEBSITES WEBSITES!, the Armory Week exhibition that ARTXCODE and Rhizome mounted on Great Jones Street in New York for Rhizome's 30th anniversary.
The player is reincarnated as a butterfly, the paru-paro that folk belief says carries the departed home, and drifts over lakes, streets and graveyards. Landmarks, objects and people release memories as the butterfly passes. Amisola built the world in a homemade level editor modeled on the Warcraft III world editor, assembling it from stock images, Street View captures and photographs of Philippine marketplaces. The announcement ties the work to a stream of death notices on Facebook.
The exhibition text describes the piece as part diary and part archive. The online edition of the show remains up at websiteswebsiteswebsites.net, where Paru-paro is filed under Poetic Computing alongside work by Maya Man and Petra Cortright.
For more reading, see Andrew Thomas Huang's art game at Rhizome's 7x7 and the online exhibition.
Two more stops in Paru-paro (Butterfly): a field below a pair of volcanoes, and a memory held in a pair of hands. Images: Chia Amisola
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