Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? Crafting Cyber Transfeminist and Filipinx Futurisms through Creative Technologies

Abstract

Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser’s Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? (2022) animates speculative aesthetics through creative technologies that give rise to decolonial futures. The installation centers on the fictive artificial intelligent figure, Piña, who carries Philippine and Ecuadorian ancestral and matriarchal data into the present and to diasporic communities who have been separated from this knowledge and culture by colonial suppression and global migration. Recapitulating the connection of these two former Spanish colonies, the artist duo generates Piña as a gender-fluid embodiment of digital systems designed to archive and convey Philippine and Ecuadorian Indigenous worldviews for the future. Echoing the aesthetic and political impulses of Indigenous futurisms and Afrofuturism, the authors argue that this work crafts Filipinx futurisms, global Indigenous resurgence, and what the authors coin as “cyber transfeminist aesthetics” by eluding binary categorizations—both gendered and computational, collapsing geographies and temporalities through virtual reality and enlivening ancestral epistemologies.