Latin American Cultural Production Online, from 1990 to the Present

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This project explores one of the most innovative and exciting developments in cultural production of the Americas in recent years: the new cultural forms being developed at the interface between literary-artistic expression and new media technologies. These include networked installations, online video art, digital story-telling and tactical media, amongst others, and typically involve features such as multimedia components, hyperlinking, interactivity and computer-generated images, as well as drawing on existing, pre-digital genres such as experimental poetry, visual art, installation art, and performance art. Focussing on the emergent community of Latin(o) American online cultural producers whose work falls under the broad category of net.art, the project investigates how their work, from the 1990s onwards, has been engaged in interrogating some of the central concerns of Latin(o) American identity through their on- and offline cultural practice. In order to acheive this, the project has selected as case studies seven works by net.artists from different countries within Latin(o) America which depict particular iconic locales in the Latin(o) American imaginary, and explores how these locales are re-defined or imagined differently by these net.artists through their use of new media technologies. These locales include the cartography of Latin America, and the specifics of the Malvinas conflict; Mercosur, as both a geographical mapping and as a neoliberal practice; the Plaza de Mayo and the image of the port city as defining Argentine identity; the Colombian terrain as a contested territory between opposing forces; the US-Mexico border as both physical and conceptual space; the streets and the barrio as the configuration of Latino identity in the US; and finally the configuration of globalization and the global South as representative of a Latino American identity in the era of late capitalism. The project analyzes these works in order to explore, firstly, how new cultural forms, such as hypermedia fiction or game art, build upon, or, conversely, challenge existing literary, cultural or artistic forms, exploring to what extent these new cultural forms foster greater interaction and 'wreaderly' (Landow 1997) participation. Secondly, the project analyses the role that these online cultural forms play within the Latin(o) American imaginary more specifically, investigating how Latin(o) American cultural producers make tactical use of the interplay between virtual and real space to construct new formulations of territorial identity. That is, since networked digital media offers the possibilities of rethinking place and territory, the project looks at how Latin(o) American net.artists make creative use of this possibility to engage in the interrogation of and the re-shaping of some of the central place-based metaphors of what it means to be Latin(o) American in the contemporary world. Thirdly, the project explores how Latin(o) American net.arts re-use globalizing technologies and post-digital fragments to their own ends, in order to question the socio-political effects of new media technologies, and provide space for the expression of cultural memory.