1st Edition
Place and Politics in Latin American Digital Culture Location and Latin American Net Art
This volume explores one of the central issues that has been debated in internet studies in recent years: locality, and the extent to which cultural production online can be embedded in a specific place. The particular focus of the book is on the practices of net artists in Latin America, and how their work interrogates 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 within Latina/o communities in the US are studied in detail, with one each from Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, the US-Mexico border, and the US. Each chapter explores how each artist represents place in their works, and, in particular how traditional place-based affiliations, or notions of territorial identity, end up reproduced, re-affirmed, or even transformed online. At the same time, the book explores how these net.artists make use of new media technologies to express alternative viewpoints about the locations they represent, and use the internet as a space for the recuperation of cultural memory.
Preface: Negotiating Net Art Communities in Latin America 1. Introduction: Re-articulating Place: The Resistant Use of Technologies and the Tactics of Re-territorialization in Latin(o) American Net Art 2. Memoria Histórica de la Alameda: The Mapping Out of Resistant Memory Battles in Chile 3. Sites of Memory in Women: Memory of Repression in Argentina 4. Re-Mapping Montevideo: Affective Cartographies and Post-Digital Remixes in Brian Mackern's 34s56w.org 5. Questioning Democracy and Re-encoding the Map of Colombia: Martha Patricia Niño’s Demo Scape V 0.5 6. Monopolies and Maquiladoras: The Resistant Re-encoding of Gaming in Coco Fusco and Ricardo Domínguez’s Turista Fronterizo 7. Resignifying the Border and the Streets in Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga’s Vagamundo, A Migrant’s Tale 8. Conclusion: Struggles over Place: Latin(o) American Net Art as Resistant Praxis
Biography
Claire Taylor is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool, UK. Her recent publications include Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production, co-authored with Thea Pitman (Routledge, 2013), Identity, Nation, Discourse, ed. (2009) and Latin American Cyberliterature and Cyberculture, co-edited with Thea Pitman (2007).
"Place and Politics in Latin American Digital Culture is bound to become a permanent reference not only in Latin American Studies but also among various disciplines in new media and the digital humanities. A much needed interdisciplinary contribution to the study of globalization in all its forms." -- Eduardo Navas, Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, USA
