Latin America

We will discuss the issue of the platformization of culture from a Latin-American perspective and decolonial thinking. Platforms strive on the automated algorithmic administration of access and reproduction of creative works (text, sound, video, o code-based). The common trait of current platform culture is the maximization of profit by means of garnering data and attention in order to capture more attention (and more data). In this context, is there any space for pursuing artistic digital activism and decolonial e-lit? The presentations in this panel will try to answer this question. The panel will be Spanish-English based in a sort of tentative of linguistic decolonization of e-lit field:

Agustín Berti: The Country and the Platform, or The Issue of NanofundiaThe issue of latifundia and the consolidation of vast productive land owned by a very reduced minority of wealthy elites has been one of the distinctive traits of lasting inequalities in Latin-American countries. This has seemingly nothing to do with digital culture, and yet this push forward the concept of nanofundia as a continuation of the reprimarization of production in the developing world and the digital extractivism of platform economy described by Pasquinelli and Joler. If there is any chance of reverting this situation in terms of decolonial geopolitics of electronic literature, the struggles will be about national and regional digital infraestructures and the local regulations over the globalized attention economies.

Anahí Re: It Will Be Difficult or Won’t Be. Challenges of Latin-American E-Lit.Platforms that nowadays enable large scale production and distribution of third generation e-lit (Flores), and even this kind of e-lit itself, promote a specific temporality. Doing so they guarantee the permanence of users in social media. What is at stake is clearly our “available attention” (Stiegler). Following Stiegler’s organological perspective, this presentation will focus on why “the difficult” (Tisselli/Torres) is, and should always be, an emancipatory alternative within Latin American poetic industries.

Claudia Kozak: Occupy the Platforms. Scope and Limitations of Decolonial Contemporary E-Lit.This presentation will analyze cases of Latin American e-lit that particularly engage to deconstruct and/or occupy contemporary platform culture. Being these cases either strictly experimental e-lit based on “the difficult” (Tisselli/ Torres), or digital activism in indigenous languages or even attempts of decolonial mixtures between experimentalism and third-generation platform e-lit, there is an opening for discussing how e-lit might temporarily occupy contemporary platforms without being (completely) absorbed by their agenda.

Leonardo Solaas: The Pull of The Banal: Digital Systems and Programmed FreedomInternet platforms are based on a perfect formula: they provide us with the endless satisfaction of choosing, while they get to know all about us and better anticipate our tastes and desires. They create for us dazzling worlds of perfect visibility, while their own logic recedes into the unreachable depths of an ever-blacker box. We will analyze how the space of possibilities generated by digital systems deploys a field of power under the guise of freedom, and how users can adopt three positions with regards to it: integration, rebellion, or critique. 

Digital literature and art are currently being produced right across the globe. However, some digital works are more visible than others, depending on where in the world they are being produced, who is producing them, and how they are being circulated. The works that this panel will address are from Latin America, a region that has usually occupied a peripheral place in terms of global geopolitics, and whose digital cultural production, and its theorization, has typically been less visible than that produced and analyzed in the Global North. Furthermore, some of the works featured in the panel are produced by marginalised communities even within a Latin American setting (eg. indigenous communities).

Thus, in this panel we intend to present different approximations to make Latin American digital cultural production more visible, through the presentation of research projects that advocate the archiving, preservation and curation of Latin American digital cultural production, as well as the development of models of digital visualization of works, authors, genres, techniques, and other elements that allow us to characterize the particularities of digital cultural production from the region. In this sense, we would like to position Latin American digital cultural production not only as a field of creation, but also as a field of theoretical analysis that is making a strong contribution to the debate on how digital cultural production per se is being produced, circulated and preserved around the globe.

To read e-literature is to use multiple literacies. New media theory stresses the role of user interactivity or engagement, but it is critical to also engage with the hermeneutic readings leading us to question, what does it all mean? How is e-literature proposing phenomenological questions regarding selfhood/identity, communication, spirituality, consciousness? Poets and artists are instinctively reflecting an awareness of the paradigm shift that surged with quantum mechanics. Curiously, those same theories have been part of the long tradition of ancient Eastern mysticism. This dialogue between the two that began in the 1950s and resurged in the mid 1970s is very vibrant and present in today’s electronic literatures, particularly those with poetic inclinations. This presentation will briefly give an overview of my current manuscript Poética Quántica that examines how e-literature in Latin America reveal universal questions that have long been meditated in Eastern mysticism and have been paralleled in quantum physics discoveries. It is not an inquiry into the dialogue between the scientific and humanistic discourses, nor are these works simply “digitalizing literature” or just techy creations. Rather the study shows how these pieces have deep philosophical tendencies that draw connections with the socio-human cosmos-vision, as well as foresight about the meaning of being human, and the social philosophy behind alterity, otherness and the observer-I-Other quantum relation. The selected digital works speak of the diverse, regionalized and multi-ethnic reality of the Latin American experience in the realm of contrasts, contradictions and socio-cultural diversity where the Other harmonizes with radical multi-culturalism. These poet-artists, with or without intent, are literally closing the literary gap in Latin American literature by drawing subconsciously and/or accidentally on the shift in consciousness of our understanding of the world, and a new cosmos-vision due to quantum discoveries: that there is indeed a systemic or networked view of life (chapter 1), that effects of synchronicity may be tangible (chapter 1), that parallel universes are possible (chapter 2), that consciousness is a temporal and collective all-at-once (chapter 3), and that time is not a separate entity (chapter 4). The pieces themselves are creative, fun and engaging but become intellectually stimulating and emotionally charged as we dive into a deeper understanding of “how it is what it is,” to borrow Susan Sontag’s phrase. I would like to propose a discussion of how e-literature does indeed reflect the way we think about culture, society and what it means to be human—very different than how traditional literature approaches these epistemological questions. The technologies used affords these artists/poets ways of experimenting, manipulating, creating and simulating ideas that are best placed in interfaces or formats that require participation (auditory, kinetic, visual, tactile). This is, a cultural study of how electronic literature is salient to our understanding of the world as we dive into their quest for an adequate explanation of contemporary reality.

This poster and lightning talk will introduce PoéticaSonora (http://poeticasonora.mx), an international research group developed by professors and students from Concordia University (Montreal) and UNAM (Mexico City) seeking to question the primacy of textual dimension in art and literature by addressing the legibility of sound, the nexus between sound and inscription, and the evasiveness of voice in print and other writing systems. It seeks to archive, preserve, and disseminate works by Latin American sound artists and poets in digital audio format (mainly in Spanish, but not limited to this language), as well as to facilitate the study of these authors and trends. Founded in 2016, it operates under two complementary axes, preservation and activation. While many academic and artistic events are hosted throughout the year, mainly in Mexico City, fieldwork and archival research is regularly conducted to gather audio files for our main project, the Digital Audio Repository for Sound Art and Sound Poetry (DARLA, work-in-progress name https://poeticasonora.me/searchhome). Its prototype was created by the Montreal research team, hosted by Hexagram, using an initial sample of 317 audio tracks, performed or composed by around 180 artists. During the project’s first phases, the Mexico City research team, hosted by Laboratorio de Literaturas Extendidas y Otras Materialidades, has coordinated undergraduate students to editorialize tracks donated by private collectors and public institutions. This focus on Mexico City’s archives and collections is mainly due to logistical reasons, as most professors and students affiliated to the project study or work at UNAM's campus in that city.

(Source: ELO 2018 Conference: Lightning Talks: PoéticaSonora: Prototyping in Montreal a Digital Audio Repository for Latin American Sound Art and Poetry)

This article examines an aesthetic experience associated with the digital, which is characterized by the ability of the reader to interact, participate, and manipulate literary works created in this format. First, a map of Chilean digital literature will be presented and then two aspects will be analyzed which allow a description of an aesthetic of the digital: hypertextuality and cultural hacking. As a result of this analysis, and considering that digital literature is that which is created to be read on the screen of an electronic device, two poems will be investigated: A veces cubierto por las aguas by Carlos Cociña and Clickable poem@s by Luis Correa-Díaz.These texts allow us to think about the status of literature and poetry in the digital era, linked with an aesthetic experience which emphasizes intervention and the wish to participate.

Framed by the theme of the 2015 ELO conference, the paper will examine several interwoven kinds of ends concerning Latin American electronic literature. In this case, the theme is particularly appealing when we consider specific aesthetic/political ends frequently pursued in Latin American contexts and when we situate this thought from “the end of the world”. In fact, being at one of the edges of the world, metaphorically and/or literally, drives one to specific aesthetic/political responses that take position in relation to hegemonic global imaginaries of technological modernisation. We could even establish as a hypothesis that in this respect, and because its location in terms of economic underdevelopment, interculturalism and glocalisation, Latin American electronic literature tautens an imaginary string called “technological modernization” whose ends are, on the one side, experimentation as a form of non critic technological fascination and, on the other side, experimentation as a form of posing new meanings of utopian intercultural community, which works within digital culture in order not to fascinate or to be fascinated, but to open imagination to a change – though mediated – of sensitivity and materiality, the latter meaning the material conditions of life of millions of people to whom global technological developments don’t necessarily imply an improvement.

To illustrate this metaphoric and even literal position of the “end of the world”, we can recall that, for instance, the Argentinean city of Ushuaia is the most southern city of the world, and the place chosen for the first three editions of the “Biennial of The End of the World” to take place. This is a nomadic biennial of contemporary arts in the South Cone of America, whose motto says: “To think in the end of the world, that another world is possible”. In the context of the 1st Biennial in 2007, the installation of electronic literature IP Poetry, by Gustavo Romano with programming by Milton Läufer, was exhibited. As IP Poetry has been exhibited in different places around the world –namely Buenos Aires, Beijing, New York, Badajoz or Ushuaia, among others – we will analyse to what extent the work changes due to these different contexts and what aesthectic/political ends it could convey.

This will be the point of departure for a more expanded interrogation on Latin American electronic literature and its own ends, of course not a “secret agenda” but a particular way of grasping the mere idea of producing/reading electronic literature in contexts of third world glocalisation. In that sense, the ultimate aim of the paper will be to present a summarised map of contemporary Latin American electronic literature, based on its aesthetic/political search.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)