[nettime-lat] FW: <nettime> The US-Mexico Border (DJ Spooky a Coco Fusco)

["luis humberto clinton" <cybercholito@hotmail.com>]

------ Mensaje reenviado
De: "Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@mail.earthlink.net>
Responder a: "Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@mail.earthlink.net>
Fecha: Tue, 4 Sep 2001 18:51:03 -0400
Para: "nettime-l@bbs.thing.net" <nettime-l@bbs.thing.net>
Asunto: <nettime> The US-Mexico Border

Coco - it saddens me a little bit to see you come down so hard on
something that essentially, is trying to raise consciousness about
the issue. I think that almost anything that raises awareness of
what's going on down there is helpful and should be supported.
Perhaps this is a generational issue - polyvalence (as I've seen with
old left charlatan folks like Mark Dery) is incredibly difficult for
more... uh... "literary" approaches to these issues that don't do
anything except describe the situation in theory speak... and I give
crazy props to Fran for trying to deal with the issue in an actionary
and dynamic way rather than "re-actionary" rehashing of theory.
Praxis makes this alot more fun. Hey! More dialog is better. Whatever
happened to that old spirit of debate? I'd love to have people air
their opinions on this kind of thing alot more often... it's much
more refreshing than the usual Euro oriented "cyber-crit" stuff that
goes on on this list...  is it all that difficult to be a fan of BOTH
Electronic Disturbance Theater and the Border Hack concept? C'mon,
there's room for all of this.... How about Ricardo and Fran have a
debate posted through Nettime? That'd be fun to see, and enlightening
as well. Not to mention would bring a refreshing multi-cultural
ambiance to Nettime. Any thoughts? New thread?

okay,
peace as always,
Paul

>ps, I loved the section of your essay that deals with issues that I
>think that Fran has been trying to explore as well. To quote you:
>"the artists in question [in Coco's essay] examine the
>human cost of "progress." They all describe a world in which some human
>beings can exist impervious to the demands of the social while others are
>viewed as cumbersome weight. They make work about societies in which power 
>is
>best expressed as the ability to commodify all elements of life, and whose
>impoverished majorities are subject to modes of objectification that the
privileged hide from view."
I think that Fran could have some material to add to this...




>      [also To: <faces-l@yahoogroups.de>]
>
>In the wake of borderhack2 (which I did not attend) and the heated debates
>about its legitimacy and validity on nettime-latino (in which I did
>participate), I have received several emails from Europeans, Americans and
>Mexicans full of questions and comments that make painfully clear that 
>there
>are several overdetermined structured absences in the net.art/activist
>dealings with the US-Mexico border. Cybertheory's overemphasis on spatial
>conceptualization of the virtual and its tendency to unquestioningly 
>conflate
>abstract concepts with physical realities is encouraging a superficial
>"flanneur" approach to the border that equates "knowledge" with a quick 
>tour
>of the border landscape, yet another version of leftist culture tourism. 
>The
>fetishistic reduction of technology to computers occludes the possibility 
>of
>understanding how metaphorical " hacking", recycling, detournement of
>American machines has been part of the Mexican and Chicano strategy of real
>survival and culture jamming for decades -- the culture of low rider cars
>being only one example.  The history of border art that has addressed the
>power relations that structure intercultural exchange appears to be unknown
>or willfully forgotten.  Worst of all, to my mind is the absence of
>comprehension about the psycho-dynamics of intercultural relations that
>border exchanges make so apparent. One particularly painful exchange with a
>Mexican cyberfeminist who wanted to discuss Sandy Stone and Helen Cixous 
>with
>me while she dismissively equated her compatriots who make art about the
>border with those who make bad art about indigenous Mexicans in order to 
>get
>grants revealed what I already suspected - that Euro-American cybertheory
>may, however inadvertently, be a form of escapism when reconfigured in a
>neo-colonial context. The Europeans and Americans involved with borderhack
>appear to have very little understanding of how their techno-formalism and
>postructuralist extrapolations of borders and hybrids easily serves the
>interests of the neoliberal technocratic elite now managing cultural 
>affairs
>in Mexico that wants to do everything possible to obfuscate the 
>relationship
>between new technologies, militarism,  privatization and the immiseration 
>of
>the indigenous and mestizo Mexican majority, and to promote art works 
>devoid
>of direct references to social, economic and political crises in Mexico
>brought on or exacerbated by free trade policies.
>
>In light of these problems, I am posting a chapter from my forthcoming book 
>(
>The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings, Routledge/iNIVA, 2001) 
>that
>reflects upon the work of several artists who have responded to the impact 
>of
>free trade on Mexican people and social life.
>
>Coco Fusco
>
>The Unbearable Weightiness of Beings: Art in Mexico after NAFTA
>© 2001, Coco Fusco
>
>"Death is a mirror which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living."
>         Octavio Paz
>The Labyrinth of Solitude
>
>     When I arrived in Mexico City in the summer of 1994, just six months
>after the Free Trade Agreement went into effect and the Zapatistas launched
>the first indigenously based, electronically savvy revolution, there were 
>two
>conversations I remember hearing at every gathering. One was about the
>eloquent letters appearing in the press by Subcomandante Marcos that were
>making the damas in the wealthy neighborhoods of the capital swoon. Many
>people I spoke to were impressed that news of the rebelsí occupation of San
>Cristobal had reverberated around the world, and this ha

------ Fin del mensaje reenviado

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