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Oswald de Andrade. Anthropophagite Manifesto. 1928

As you might imagine, it is almost impossible to draw a comprehensive view of South American media art. If we consider that the region’s area is almost twice Europe’s and that it includes two of the largest countries in the world, it is easy to understand how complicated designing panoramic overviews would be.
Nevertheless, in recent years a number of institutions, scholars and curators have tried to create bridges among the region’s countries, integrating their diversity in an open-ended dialogue. Drawing on their common cultural heritage and language, in similar historical processes and economic disadvantages, significant efforts were made to foster communicative channels and to consolidate local artistic production in order to develop a South American perspective and future for the media arts. This article examines the results of these efforts.

Low -tech

Access to technology is quite difficult in countries with weak economies, political breakdowns and large areas of poverty. These circumstances have led to strategic and critical uses of media, both in the way of low-tech productions that both reflect on the particular situation in South America and question the First World’s technology hype - and in the development of a strong commitment to social and political issues. In fact, this last trend has deep roots in local film history as well as within the visual arts, and constitutes one of the most recognisable Latin American arts features.

Low-tech productions usually deal with irony, parody and other critical perspectives. Ricardo Lanzarini’s installation 28 Round, Place, Strategy (1998-99) refers ironically to both kinetic sculpture and the utopia of technological progress. He connected a stationary bike to the lights of a Broadway-like billboard displaying Lenin’s sentence, “Communism is Socialism plus the electrification of the URSS”, the only definition of Communism he found at his homeland Uruguay during military dictatorship in the seventies. His compatriot Martin Sastre created the Martin Sastre Foundation for the Super Poor Art (2002), a web-based fake foundation that has been recruiting wealthy patrons to adopt Latin American artists as their contribution to contemporary art.

Low-tech is also the approach to video art that many artists prefer. Relying on basic and sometimes outdated technologies and resources, they focus on discourse efficacy rather than on polished language and refined images. For Alvaro Zavala’s video Atipanakuy (1999), for example, chroma-key effects are enough to develop a poetic and meditative look at contemporary Peruvian youth and their relationship to the Inca heritage. Confronting both realities, the artist provokes a deep reflection on the difficult persistence of local traditions in a globalised world.

 

Alvaro Zavala, Atipanakuy, video (1999). Courtesy the artist.

Jose Alejandro Restrepo, Iconomy, video (2000). Courtesy the artist.

Video art

Video art has a consolidated place in South America, though there has been a displacement from single-channel productions to video installations in the last years. Many activist groups still rely on video to unveil critical distortions in the social fabric, rendering political explorations as a main current of local media art. But politics must be intended in a broad sense. In a way, it could be said that Latin American video art has long been a laboratory of experiments to test the different ways some artistic discourses can address political referents or can be considered political discourses in themselves.

Certain Chilean video pieces are good examples of this. In Chile, many military directors, like Augusto Pinochet who was responsible for the death, torture and disappearance of ordinary civilians during the 1970s, are still part of the government. While people in the ruling classes are trying to erase the memory of that time because they support these politicians, many artists are recovering that memory. The insistence of artists such as Edgar Endress, Guillermo Cifuentes, Claudia Aravena and Lotty Rosenfeld in remembering those acts can be understood not only as an aesthetic inquiry but also as a political statement: an affirmative stance on memory in a country that wants to forget.

Historical controversies continue to be a driving force behind South American media arts. But present urban life and people provide stimuli and sources. One of the main concerns of Mexican artist Fernando Llanos is to get video art out from within institutions, and to the streets where everyday life is.

Fernando Llanos, Mobile video interventions, media performance (2005). Courtesy the artist.

In the late nineties, he delivered small videos by mail with the motto; “Be happy, consume video”. For the last Mercosur Biennial (2005) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, he created a wearable device with wireless technology to project images on walls and buildings. During the night time the artist photographed the city life and with his images created interesting and confrontational images, such as when he projected video footage of people kissing in the sexual workers’ area of the town.

Fernando Llanos, Mobile video interventions, media performance (2005). Courtesy the artist.

High-tech

Curiously, there is a long tradition of technological arts in this region. From 1960s on, Brazilian and Argentine artists have experimented with video, computers and a number of mechanical, electronic and digital devices.

Op (Optical) and kinetic art [2] had a strong influence on South America. By the late 1950s and early 1960s many artists were experimenting with light, optics and movement. Venezuelan Jesus Soto and Carlos Cruz Diez, Brazilian Abraham Palatnik and Argentine Julio Le Parc —a founder of the Group of Visual Arts Research (GRAV) in Paris— are probably the most internationally recognized but the number of artists investigating in that field is far larger. Argentine Marta Minujin began incorporating media technology into her environments as early as 1965, creating outstanding media events where electronic images, telephones, computers, radios and other communication technologies were employed. And Brazilian Waldemar Cordeiro began creating computer graphics in the late sixties, becoming a pioneer of digital arts.

Marta Minujin, Simultaneity in Simultaneity, media environment (1966). Courtesy the artist.

More recently, Brazilian Lucas Bambozzi works with mobile devices to develop his microcinema pieces. Using low-definition technologies like video cameras incorporated in mobile phones and digital photo cameras, he builds up a fresh and spontaneous portrait of urban life, which he usually complements with a widespread delivery system like the Internet.

As the cost of audiovisual and digital technologies is decreasing, and access to them is becoming easier, some interactive, augmented reality, virtual reality and robotic installations have arisen from the main cities, where a number of research centres have begun to emerge. In the past, Latin American artists, eager to work with up-to-date technologies usually had to emigrate to find suitable working conditions. Brazilian Eduardo Kac and Mexican Rafael Lozano-Hemmer are probably the most recognized Latin American artists working on complex technological pieces outside their birth countries.

Today that situation has changed. Even countries with very little tradition in the media arts such as Bolivia, Paraguay and Ecuador have begun to show clear activity in the field. But sophisticated works have only seen the light in the main cities, supported by specialized art centres and research institutions, with the exception of perhaps the work by Diana Domingues at the University of Caxias do Sul, a small city in the south of Brazil.  Domingues has developed a series of interactive installations that draw on popular rituals and myths. Comparing the sensorial experience of interactive installations with the decentred and disturbing state of some rites, the artist aims at taking the users out of everyday situations.

Many Brazilian universities have laboratories equipped with sophisticated technology where artists and researchers alike are able to investigate the complex world of digital media. Rejane Cantoni and Daniela Kutschat have developed the immersive and interactive environment Op_era (2003) at the CAVE of the Laboratory of Integrated Systems, University of Sao Paulo. The piece is a virtual reality environment conceived for a multisensorial experimentation of space through the relationship of the user’s body and different abstract forms of visualized data. For its complexity, it surpasses mere aesthetic considerations, becoming a reference piece in the area of Virtual Reality (VR) investigation.

No other South American country has the infrastructure of Brazilian research centres. But that has not discouraged artists from other places to try their way in the realm of high-tech arts. Despite having very often neither technical nor economical support, the artists have had to rely on their own resources and their efforts have been fruitful.

Peruvian Jose Carlos Martinat has made some inroads into media installations and robotic objects. In House (1997), he created a media environment for an abandoned place that had been his family’s house for eighty years. Through photographs, videos and sounds, he recovered the memory of both the place and his family, driving the viewers into his personal stories and remembrances. For Stereo Reality Environment I (2004), his approach to technology was quite different. He designed a microphone that spoke to a loudspeaker and when he spoke, a series of television sets repeated its commands. The microphone also followed people inviting them to speak, but it avoided them when they tried to do it.

Jose Calos Matinat, Stereo Reality Environment I, interactive installation (2004). Courtesy the artist.

Mariela Yeregui, Proxemia, robotic installation (2005). Courtesy the artist.