When I was asked to curate this exhibit, I did not imagine the dimensions
and consequences of such a task. I was just coming back from Alchemy,
a lab for new media artists organised by the Australian Network of Art
and Technology that took place in Brisbane, Australia. The idea of reuniting
the works of my colleagues and some of my closer friends in this endeavor
prompted my response.
For the past thirteen years, I have been producing part of my work in
Mérida, a provincial city in the south-east of Mexico, and I always
want to showcase Mérida as part of my artistic landscape. Although
the diverse communities that once made up Mérida's downtown have
largely been displaced, decay and overpopulation affect the city, and
racism towards migrant communities and the indigenous population, who
make up the bulk of the workforce, is still a major issue. Recently, residents
of nearby rural communities have migrated to the city en masse, creating
a syncretic dialogue where tradition and pop culture interweave with pre-Columbian
and colonial pasts and the socio-economic and political disparities of
the new century and the Information Age. The challenges of producing new
media art in settings where such conflicting histories meet the demands
of the present is one of the major subjects of this essay.
At the end of July of 1998, in collaboration with a group of artists
from Yucatn, I designed and programmed 'PDÀ?Digital', the
first web gallery in Yucatn. Agustin Chong Amaya was part of this
endeavor. The site was hosted for two years by the San Francisco-based
Bay Area Video Coalition. In 1999, Reyna Echeverria, Jorge Lara, Roger
Metri and I collaborated in the designing and programming of 'Presente
Continuo' an interactive web art project for trAce, an online writing
community based in England. Since then, I have been trying to bridge the
worlds of new media with Mérida.
Practicalities
The exhibit had been scheduled to open the second week of December at
one of the galleries run by the Institute of Culture of Yucatn.
Three weeks before the scheduled date, the person in charge of the exhibition
at the institute decided to cancel, claiming that the political condition
of the state had forced him to reduce his operating budget. The Yucatecan
artists and I decided to walk over to the MACAY (Museum of Contemporary
Art) to present the project to the directors there. Silvia Madrid, the
coordinator of activities at the museum, was very receptive and decided
to support the exhibition. She allocated the Expoforum, their biggest
gallery, for the end of March.
Knowing the technological limitations of the museum, we developed a campaign
to obtain support from the private sector. In less than two weeks we had
found the computer equipment, projectors, video monitors and sound devices
needed to mount the exhibition. ETRYC, a local communications company,
offered technical support for the installation of the computers and access
to the Internet. The rapid organisation by the artists demonstrated that
with a collaborative effort their project could come to life.
Issues around the museum technical facilities and access to the Internet
also came up. The museum's website, managed by a company that sells packages
of pages rather than creating specific interactive architectures to satisfy
their clients' needs, wanted money to create a link to the exhibition.
The museum refused to allocate the web portal in the server and the curator
had to pay, from his own packet, for space in a US server. Somehow InteractivA
'01 had become a semi-official, semi-independent hybrid. The Yucatecan
artists took advantage of this situation and created Cartodigital.org,
the organisation that was going to represent them as a collective.
Like most new media shows, InteractivA '01 ran into technical problems
just before the opening. The museum staff were very supportive, but because
it was the first time the museum had presented this type of exhibition,
they didn't know how to handle the press release and the publicity for
the show. Still today, InteractivA '01 doesn't have a link to the museum's
official web site.
Nevertheless, when the public started accessing the Expoforum, the biggest
room at the MACAY, the artists were able to give a real performance. Because
of the technical difficulties, they were fixing computers, bringing down
software from the Internet and figuring out the digital projection as
the audience arrived, giving the public the chance to see the artists
at work. Contrary to the expectation that work be 'finished', ready to
be displayed and shown, the public interaction with the artists at work
created a unique perspective, forcing spectators to re-evaluate the nature
of the museum in relation to new media arts.
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