Taylor - Place and politics in Latin American digital culture: location and Latin American net art

One of the most hotly debated issues in discussions about the internet in recent years has been the extent to which online content can be understood as rooted in a particular place. Given that much of the initial hype about the internet in the 1990s presented the internet as a globalized medium inhabited by placeless netizens, the question of localityof the rootedness of online content in a particular geographic settinghas come under question in recent years. As user-generated content has grown exponentially, and as a wealth of applications now allow users to refer to their geographical location, add geo-coordinates to their photographs on online platforms, or link content to online maps, amongst many others, the internet is increasingly becoming linked to offline place. The internet nowadays, rather than being a (solely) globalized, placeless medium, in fact offers ways of allowing people to make important connections to, and re-affirm their affiliations to, their physical, offline location.

I engage with this dynamic throughout this book, in which I focus on a vibrant community of Latin(o) American artists to investigate how, in their online works, they engage in re-imaginings of and representations of offline place. Broadly speaking, each of the artists oeuvres falls within the category known as net art, an amorphous category that takes its origins in a specific group of artists in Europe in the 1990s whose work was collectively known as net.art and whose works were characterized by playing with internet protocols, by putting errors within the system to artistic use and by the revival of avant-gardist aims of breaking down the barriers between art and life.to offline praxis both in its subject matter and in its enactment, and as this volume explores, it is often in the intricate negotiations between online features and offline participation that the resistant potential of the works is actualized. The Latin(o) American artists analyzed in this volume develop cultural formats that give rise to new forms of local and regional place-based affiliations, and they interrogate some of the central place-based concerns of Latin(o) American identity through their on- and offline cultural practice.

Six particular works by artists of different countries in Latin America and the US are studied in detail in this book, with one each from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, the USMexico border and the US. The works selected for study depict particular iconic locales in the Latin(o) American imaginary, and each chapter explores how traditional place-based affiliations, or notions of territorial identity, end up reproduced, reaffirmed, or even transformed online. These locales range from the Alameda in Santiago de Chile as the contested space of historic memory in Chile; the Plaza de Mayo and other key locations in Buenos Aires as embodying Argentine identity in both the dictatorial and the neoliberal era; the Rambla Sur and iconic monuments in Montevideo as a defining image of the Uruguayan project of modernity; the cartography of the Colombian terrain as a contested territory; the US Mexico border as physical and conceptual space in which the workings of late capitalism make themselves manifest; and the streets and the border as the socio-economic space in which US foreign policy is played out. Here, the volume engages with recent research over the past decade that has found that place is not lacking on the internet; rather, it is transformed, given different meanings, or re-affirmed in a variety of contexts.

As I discuss in the following, if networked digital media offers the possibilities of rethinking place and territory, then Latin(o) American net artists make creative use of this possibility to engage in the interrogation of and the reshaping of some of the central place-based metaphors of what it means to be Latin(o) American in the contemporary world. The works by the artists analyzed in this volume involve rethinkings of conventional conceptualizations of territoriality, citizenship and local and global affiliationsmany of which notions are central to conceptualizations of Latin(o) America itself as a region. These rethinkings, as I argue in the following, are enacted through a resistant reworking of technology, whereby technologies conventionally put to use by corporate powers, state institutions and transnational capital, amongst others, are used against the grain.

This book thus poses two overarching questions. First, it explores the role that the internet plays in allowing for the formulation of place-based affiliations, asking how Latin(o) American net artists make tactical use of the interplay between virtual and real space to construct new formulations of territorial identity and new cartographies of (urban) space. Second, the volume explores how Latin(o) American net artists appropriate alternative modes of expression and dissemination enabled by new media technologies in order to give voice to oppositional or resistant discourses. Building on and dialoguing with recent debates on tactical media, as well as on the rich Latin(o) Americanspecific heritage of the resistant appropriation of hegemonic tools in a broader sense, the volume investigates how the artists re-appropriations of globalizing technologies and post-digital fragments provide space for the expression of oppositional discourses and for the recuperation of cultural memory.