Tilman Baumgaertel on Thu, 28 May 1998 17:11:04 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> Interview w/ Roberto Sifuentes and Guillermo Gomez-Pena |
The following interview with Mexican-american perfomance artists Roberto Sifuentes and Guillermo Gomez-Pena has been sitting on my hard digsk for quite some time now. It was conducted at last year's ars electronica,gand for many moons I have been trying to get in touch with Roberto or Guillermo to have my transcript approved as I usually do with my interviews. So if anybody knows how to reach one of them, or if you, Roberto or Guillermo, are on this list, please get in touch, I need more info. The others remember that this interview is not yet "approved". Yours, Tilman baum@snafu.de %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% >>Tilman Baumgaertel, Hornstr. 3, 10963 Berlin, Germany Tel./Fax. 030-2170962, email: baum@snafu.de<<< http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Tilman_Baumgaertel/ %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% ---------------------SCHNAPP!----------------------- The Border Patrol in Cyberspace Tilman Baumgaertel: Tell me about your Net project "CyberVato"... Roberto Sifuentes: We've created a kind of techno- confessional on the WorldWideWeb where people can come and confess their intercultural cyber sins to us. It's a form survey that asks questions about people's tolerance for other cultures, tolerance to other languages, it asks people about the hegemony of the internet... Guillermo Gomez-Pena: ...and why english is the lingua franca of the internet. Sifuentes: So the questionnaire is broken up into several sections about arts, immigration issues, intercultural experiences. There's also a "graffitti" page which functions as an instant bulletin board where people can post and have discussions and spray paint the site, so to speak. We also invite people to send us images, sounds and texts about their imagined Mexican or Chicano of the 90s. GGP: Basically we want to bring a Chicano-Mexican sensibility to cyberspace. We see ourselves (these words might not be translatable) as web bags. That's a pun on wet back, which is derogative for Mexicans. We see ourself as kind of immigrants in cyberspace. We also see ourselves as coyotes, as smugglers of ideas, because we do believe that there is a border control in cyberspace and that the internet is a somewhat culturally, socially, racially specific space. Q: What kind of reactions do you get? GGP: Whenever someone confesses to us during a live performance, there is a moral implication, a moral contract. They look into our eyes, we look into their eyes. Their voice is being recorded, and they know that; therefore they tend to be a bit more careful, a bit more sensitive. But once you get onto the internet, there is total anonymity and people can impersonate other identities: men can become women, whites can become blacks, young people can become older etc. So there are zero moral indications, and people can really engage in an exercise of imagination, of extreme fear and desire. And that's when it gets really interesting. ?: Can you give some examples of the confessions that you got? RS: We ask questions of the internet users. For example: If you had a gang member covered in tattoos, or an Native American in full regalia, or a Mexican macho dressed as a postmodern Zorro in a gallery what fantasy would you have them perform for you. And People answer us: "I would want the Zorro to sling me over his shoulder, stick a chicken up his ass and run around yelling: Bob Dole is a homosexual." Or they write things like: "I would have the cholo tattoo the Native American with cave drawings." - "I would like the Mexican to rip my clothes off with a machete, so I can bath in chili ancho sauce in order for him to wrap me in a warm tortilla, so at the end he can eat me with a shot of tequila." Q: Do you feel personally hurt by such derogative messages? RS: It is very disturbing. Of course, many comments like these have been personally directed towards me. I feel that it is very revealing of the psyche of America. It is a barometer of the intolerance of other cultures. So I feel anger, which keeps me going and which reinforces that we have to do this kind of experiments and this type of work. Q: The myth is that internet users are typically well- educated academics in their twenties and thirties. You wouldn't expect this kind of comments coming from them... GGP: In fact, we do appeal to as many communities as we can. In our live performances, we appeal audiences that don't have access to the internet, and also through our telephone confessional. So in fact we are not just talking to academia. The constituencies we are engaging with in dialogue are multiple. Sadly, most of the stereotypes seem to remain similar. RS: But you are right, it is very disturbing given the demographic breakdown of the internet which is, you know, white male liberal academic intellectuals, these supposedly tolerant and liberal minded people - that these are the responses coming from them. Q: But aren't asking for it? Aren't you producing these stereotypes, when you ask such questions? GGP: Not really. We want people to hang themselves. Currently there is a national denial about the state of race relations and racism in the United States. In fact there is a backlash, and people are unwilling to discuss these issues in public forums, and that that is one of the reasons why we decide to bring the darkest zones of the subconscious to these internet questionnaire, where people are as free as possible and linguistically unpoliced, and they can be as sincere or insensitive or direct as they want to be, and there will be no moral repercussions. So in fact we are creating an extreme reverse anthropology. RS: This is important, because when we started this project, the internet was seen as sorft of the last frontier, the final refuge where issues about race relations don't have to be discussed, where race doesn't matter - as a strategy of avoidance. So it was important for us to venture out into the internet, and when we first "arrive there", we started getting responses back like: "There goes the virtual 'barrio', there goes the neighborhood. The mexicans have arrived." Literally, people send us mails like that. GGP: And also a lot of metaphors connected with: the Mexicans seen as a virus, seen as a fly, or as a disease, contaminating the purity of cyberspace. With "CyberVato", the piece doesn't really get completed in cyberspace. The website is just an instrument to attain information that would be impossible to attain through fieldwork. What we have done with this webpage, is create an incredible survey of American psyches. We have tapped into American psyches and fears in regards to Otherness, to immigration and to people coming from the south. And when we gather this information, we process it and create these composite identities, these Mexican Frankensteins that later on we involve or reinterpreting through our performance. ?: So waht are these perfomances like? GGP: The true completion of the piece takes place in the live performance. That is when we are able to "reproduce" or reinterpret these ethno-cyborgs created by the collective imagination of the net users. When people get to see their own innern monsters and their own innern demons - that is where some kind of purging takes place. And then a process of reflexivity gets triggered, which might eventually lead to a betterment of consciousness. ?: Do you think that if more people have access to the net, that there will be more diversity on the net? Or will it add to the seperation between different social groups? RS: I don't think that the nature of the internet is such that people don't stay in their own area. I guess it is more fluid. You often find things that are unexpected. People find our website, because they navigate their way through the net. GGP: What is very disturbing to us - at least in the electronic arts community - is how deeply desized the debates have been up until now. I know that in the last years, people from the feminist community, cultural critics and people from "Third World Countries" have been allowed to the tables of discussion. But it is not enough, and there is only a handful of voices. And still discussion about priviledge, power, access are not entirely adressed the way they should be. In the entire chicano arts community might not be more than twenty artists who have access to the discussions. ?: How is the situation in Mexico? Is online-access easily avalable, or is it a privilege? GGP: It's an uncredible priviledge. Only people in the upper classes, or people affliated with big corporations or government institutions who really can afford to buy a computer, and the servers are incredibly expensive. Also, the telephone company makes sure that only the major cities can connect to the net. Let me just give you one example: Subcommandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatistas, is a techno whizz. He sends his legendary poetic press releases directly from the djungle, and a group of canadian liberals post these messages to one of the Zapatista website. So he has a direct contact to the international intellectual community. However, the mexican telephone company impedes that people who live in the country side and have access to computers plug into the net. So, unless you live in Mexico City, you don't have access to what the Zapatistas are saying on the net. ?: Do you think that the internet could be a means for artists in the so-called Third World to circumnavigate around the traditional art system that excludes them? RS: Yeah, it is happening and growing more and more. People are using the internet to communicate in ways that were impossible before to gain access to the works of other artists. It helps us out too, because the two of us live on different coasts, so our collaboration is often conducted via the internet. But of course, it is merely a tool. It can't ever substitute human interaction, the exchange of ideas across the table, people getting together and making work together. ?: At a festival like ars electronica, do you feel excluded? GGP: Artists like Roberto and I are insiders and outsiders at the same time. But we benefit from this condition of being partial insiders. In fact, I might say, for us the art world is a laboratory to develop radical ideas. But once you have developed these ideas, the true objective is to step outside of the art world, and into politically meaningful territories, into the media, education, direct political action, or other realms of social activity. But I still treasure the art world, because in the 90ies it is one of the few places where radical thinking and radical esthetic behavior can take place. It is extremely important for us to partially operate within the art world. Netprojects by the Sifuentes and Gomez-Pena: Mexterminator II http://www.dlcwest.com/~neutralground/project.html Cyber-Vato http://riceinfo.rice.edu/projects/CyberVato/ The Dangerous Border Game http://www.sirius.com/~jrg/danger.html --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl