Background

InteractivA '01 was born as a reaction to the big biennials of electronic art, to the marginalisation experienced by new media artists with limited access to technology, and to the need for creating a space for future generations.

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 Yucat‡n, I designed and programmed 'PDÀ?Digital', the first web gallery in Yucat‡n. 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 Yucat‡n. 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.

Issues

Lack of access to the Internet is a big issue in Mérida and much of Latin America. Artists here have limited or no access to technology and to the kinds of knowledge needed to produce interactive art. On top of that, none of the schools or universities in the city have wanted to engage in the dialogue that is taking place between writers, engineers, artists, programmers, sociologists, architects and business people around the world on new media art at the beginning of the 21st century.

Presently, the big corporations and governments are fighting to control and capitalise on the new information economies and the reorganisations of the work force it creates. For very low wages, people in the so-called 'third world' increasingly process the information that comes from the 'first world' in big data containers. According to some residents of Mérida, data processing 'sweatshops' have been opened in the city, despite the fact that only 1.2% of the people here have personal access to computers and the Internet. Shilpa Gulpta, with her InteractivA piece 'Diamonds and You.com', explores this new colonial paradigm, which uses the net to transport data into the 'developing countries' where it's classified, archived and stored. We see the Internet being used to reproduce the geographical and economic divisions created by 20th century imperialism.

On the other hand, information technology has created new kinds of movement and transformation within physical spaces. The flows of information organise 'new territories/networks' involving telecommunications and computers, nodes and hubs. Economic, social, political and cultural activities become increasingly decentralised due to the possibility of reaching a global audience. Cities and urban centres face a cultural transformation based on a new spatial logic that is specific to the Information Age. As Manuel Castells points out in 'Grassrooting the Space of Flows',

This logic is characterised by the combination of territorial sprawl and location concentration. Thus intrametropolitan, interregional, and international networks connect with global networks in a structure of variable geometry that is enacted and modified by flows of information and electronic circuits and fast, information-based transportation systems.

Hubs are points that offer both entry into these new networks and the technology to travel from one hub to another. They can be bus stations, ports, and in the case of new media exhibitions featuring net art, museums. The MACAY became the site where people in Mérida could access the diversity of work presented at the exhibition. In the same way, the web portal of InteractivA '01, designed by Art Miller, became the cyber-hub where diverse international communities converged to access some of the works present at the exhibit. The artists of Cartodigital became the social actors constructing a new understanding of the condition of high tech art in the Latin American context.

In the case of InteractivA '01, the formation of a flow of information that originated in a provincial city in the south east of Mexico emphasised a critique of the centralisation of new media art around major metropolitan centres. The new generation of Latin-American and 'third world' new media artists are constantly excluded from museums, galleries and festivals because they don't live in the right metropolis, or because their limited access to technology forces them to produce 'rudimentary' work. The diversity of works and artists grouped in this exhibition, however, demonstrate that one doesn't have to be a 'guru programmer' with a 40 GB workstation in order to make interactive art.

www.cartodigital.org/interactiva