Manila Lights
by Low Bandwidth Dreams
Manila is a city defined by contradictions—a capital that dazzles with relentless neon and commercial glow, yet frequently hides its deepest struggles in the shadows. This project invited artists to engage with Lino Brocka’s seminal film, Manila: In the Claws of Light (Manila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag), using its stark portrayal of urban life as a lens to explore the city's complex layers of past, present, and future. By examining Manila through the perspectives of four artists, the project reveals how the city’s artificial brilliance often serves as a backdrop to its most profound human experiences:
After Hours Atlas
by Rhaz Oriente
translates the recurring rhythms of a Friday night in Poblacion into a celestial map. Drawing from patterns of nighttime activity, the work transforms sites of gathering, movement, and exchange into a constellation of mapped sites whose connections shift over time.
Using the visual language of constellations, the installation proposes an alternate atlas of the city. Rather than mapping streets and buildings, it traces connections between places, revealing how a different geography emerges after business hours.
Projected onto suspended frosted acrylic, the constellation moves between map and night sky. As patterns emerge and dissolve throughout the evening, the work invites viewers to consider how cities are shaped not only by geography, but also by the rhythms, connections, and shared routines that unfold after dark.
panaginip sa 19th ave. (dreams in 19th ave.)
by Shara Francisco
is a generative video piece that constructs a speculative memoryscape of the shared history and effect of urban migration, interlacing the artist’s provincial recollections with those of her relatives. The work inquires on the layered narratives tethered to the family’s places of origin, oscillating between the tenuous and enduring ties to an ancestral hometown that is often the collective experience of Filipinos in pursuit of a better life. Through the episodic recreation of a shared familial memory, the piece draws the fragmented, nonlinear structure of recollection where converging pasts recontextualizes how the artist relates to and perceives her own ties to these places.
Untitled
by Christina Lopez
is the moving-image component of the multimedia installation untitled (interfacing under the same sun), originally presented at ALT PH 2026. Lopez began experimenting with image generation well before "generative AI" and "slop" entered the mainstream lexicon. In this piece, she deliberately obstructs these images, obscuring them into a haze-like film.
This aesthetic mirrors the oppressive presence of giant billboards along EDSA and the city's pervasive pollution. Simultaneously, it captures the sensory fatigue of modern life, where an endless deluge of physical and screen-based media numbs our daily perception.
Sign of the Times
by Roan Alvarez
is a free-form circuit sculpture that draws on the resourceful DIY ethos of Recto Street. Its visual language references the cinematic atmosphere of Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, borrowing directly from the hand-painted lettering of the Chua Tek Trading Company sign and the ambient glow of the film’s neon landscape.
Moving beyond static illuminated signage, Alvarez utilizes microcontroller technology to transform LEDs into a dynamic medium. The sculpture functions as an interactive display matrix where fluid text, hidden messages, and coded scripts can be continually projected, decoded, and reimagined.
Artists
Shara Francisco is a media artist, designer, and cultural worker whose practice explores the reciprocal patterns between human cognition and digital technology. She observes how the latter functions as both an extension of and a repository for the lived experience, responding to a human inclination to preserve personal memory. Through digitally recreating episodic simulations across installations, moving images, and live visuals, she examines recollection as an active, reconstructive performance, one that unveils the fragmentary and associative nature of memory retrieval and, by extension, the construction of self.
Rhaz Oriente (b. 1992, Manila) is a visual artist based in the Philippines working across installation, photography, moving image, sculpture, and text. Her practice investigates how places are shaped through the interplay of environmental phenomena, material conditions, and cultural imagination. She examines how landscapes and built environments are perceived and experienced across time, as histories, narratives, and collective memory become embedded in place.
Roan Alvarez (b. 1995) primarily makes intermedia and transmedia artworks. Her interactive works often involve the use of light-emitting technologies, microcontrollers, sensors, and other electronic components, which allow the audience to participate in diverse narratives concerning human- technology relations through which she explores the sociopolitical effects of technology on identities, self-presentation, and culture. She has exhibited in various art spaces in Malaysia, and the Philippines. Her recent collaborative work was shown in Phuket for the 2025 Thailand Biennale.
Christina Lopez is a visual artist based in Manila. Her contemporary art practice ranges from the traditional sense of image production to methods more involved with new media. She is interested in the capacity of art to present alternative possibilities; to theorize, to test certain boundaries that are currently in place. There is specific intent to explore power, including its relations, structure, and implications.
Recently, she has been producing work that utilizes paranoia as a tool for divination, one that navigates through the obfuscation omnipresent in the production and dissemination of new technologies. The forms she chooses to represent these concepts often involve digital-physical fusion, reflecting that the virtual is inseparable from material realities. By grasping at what is seen and unseen, progress is viewed as something that is neither good nor evil, and arguments are presented with commitment to what the future could be. Her work can be found inside and outside of privatized spaces and institutions. She continues to exhibit work in the Philippines and abroad.