Art and Technology: A Latin American Perspective

As July’s editor-in-residence for A*DESK, I propose to focus on the intersection between two opposing gestures, that is, the enthusiastic celebration of innovation and the denunciation of technological extractivism, without relating one to the other. The questions guiding this issue are something along the lines of: What are the ways of working (with) machines that exist in Latin America, and from what memories and with what sounds?

The title embraces multiplicity and is beyond any declaration of identity or regional stereotypes. The texts gathered here explore different approaches, media, time periods, and geographical areas, although they are united by a common conviction that, in Latin America, technology can be more than an imported phenomenon and a promise for the future. Technology is a material and symbolic battleground, and other countries have nothing over us.

Oscar Santillán, ANTHEM, courtesy of the artist

The path unfolds organically, emerging from an archaeological perspective on Latin America’s digital prehistory, then continues with speculative curating as a geological and spectral temporality, moving toward the stubborn materiality of malfunctioning machines, and concluding by articulating conceptual tools for further reflection on technologies of listening and world-building.

We begin with Doreen Ríos, who traces an archaeology of net art in Mexico from the 1990s to the 2010s, rescuing foundational experiences and digital activism from an era when a truly distributed connection gave rise to a dream of creating a genealogy of artistic communities which understood the internet as a territory for political and poetic experimentation. Juliana Gontijo follows with a text that invites us to consider curating as a technology of temporal interference. Between oxidation, faults, and telluric communication, she proposes a radical gesture, that is, to reopen buried temporalities rather than offering redemptive futures, a lesson from the Global South to remind us what an exhibition can achieve. In turn, Jazmín Adler explores a body of work depicting failed and inefficient machines that crash, get tired, and fight. Her writing inhabits errors as operations with a profoundly personal meaning, and through her reference to counter-hegemonic machines, she links failure with disobedience. I conclude with my own text, in which I propose the notion of a “scale interface” to consider how sensors connect the local with the planetary, without resolving any of this tension. By revisiting contemporary methods of sensor design, this text attempts to show that, in our countries, sensitivity opens pathways to activate frictions and transform noise into shared space.

This issue, as a whole, aspires to be a constellation of situated questions, hoping to provoke, through texts, a certain interference or noise in which one only needs the presence of a signal.

[Featured Image: Marcela Armas, Sideral. Courtesy of the artist]