Latin American Cultural Production Online, from 1990 to the Present

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.

The impact strategies for this particular project build upon the success of smaller pilot projects undertaken during 2011: a public performance of Latino American combinatory fiction, and a project workshop on net.art, both held in conjunction with FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), a venue housing art galleries and an arts cinema, in May 2011. The impact strategies for this project will therefore not only strengthen existing links, but also create new ones. The potential impact of this project is targeted at the following audiences and potential beneficiaries: filmgoers; visitors to art galleries; curators of new media arts; third sector organizations supporting local residents of the city of Liverpool; other members of the general public.

Filmgoers will be targeted during the Abandon Normal Devices Festival (Sept 2012) by means of the programme notes I will write on Latin(o) American net.art, and also more broadly through my collaboration with FACT. Benefits to filmgoers will be an enhanced understanding of multimedia formats and how they dialogue with other visual art forms such as cinema.

Visitors to art galleries will be targeted during the Abandon Normal Devices Festival, the net.art 2.0 workshop (Jan 2013) and more broadly through publicity with FACT. Benefits to this user group will be an enhanced understanding of new media arts, an increased knowledge of works from countries beyond their own, and the opportunity to try out interactive art works, potentially for the first time.

Third sector community organizations supporting local residents of the city of Liverpool will be targeted during the workshop for tenantspin (Nov 2012), a community media collaboration project aimed at high rise tenants in Liverpool. Potential benefits for the members of tenantspin will be the opportunity to share experiences of life in a port city with those in other national contexts, to gain knowledge of other port cities, to test out existing net.art projects representing Buenos Aires as a port city, and to have their own expressions of cultural memory showcased in Argentinean contexts.

Curators, in particular although not exclusively curators of new media arts, will be targeted throughout the duration of the project. Lines of communication with this user group will capitalize on FACT's role as the leading organization in the support and exhibition of new media arts in the UK, making use of FACT's mailing lists and networking, as well as building on my own contacts in the field as established during the pilot projects in May 2011. Events targeted to this user group will be the net.art 2.0 workshop, the Abandon Normal Devices Festival, the latamnetart bookmarking database and the monograph. Benefits envisaged for this particular user group include the opportunity to discuss the challenges that net.art has for conventional curatorial practice; to use the results of the project to think through ways of engaging with net.art in gallery spaces and to think through curatorial policy accordingly; to access the primary data of the project via the bookmarking database and so have an easily accessible form of information about new and upcoming net.artists in Latin(o) America as an aid to planning and developing future exhibitions.

Although these are the main user groups identified at this stage, other members of the general public will be encouraged to participate in and benefit from the various impact events, since these will be free and open to the public; similarly, the podcasts arising from the tenantspin workshop and the UGA talk will be freely available to download online, and the bookmarking database will be open-access.