[-empyre-] Embarking toward understanding

[Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet <rfbalanquet@cartodigital.org>]

Amigos Eduardo and Christina;

Thanks for opening the territory.

Arte Nuevo InteractivA'05 opens June 16 and will run until end of July.

I would like to thank Heidi Figueroa, Lucrezia Cippetilli, Jooser
Alvarez, Eduardo Navas, Raquel Herrera and Lucas Bombazzi, all part
of Arte Nuevo InteractivA'05 for embarking with me in this journey in
this "public" fora.

I have been following the discussion around issues of class and
capitalism wondering how, in the region that we live -Latin [Luso]
America, the Caribbean and the USA, the relationship to class,
capitalism and power are, indeed, conditioning the way in which we
deal with new media and the arts.

I just got back from Havana, the place where I was born, ten days
ago. As you all may know, Cuba had a violent class revolution that
started during the time of the Spanish colonization, was sabotaged by
US intervention in 1898 and then was appropriated by the Cuban left
bourgeois in 1959. I had the chance to grow up there the first 20
years of my life in a very ambivalent period when these issues
(class, power, imperialism, Marxism and equality) were the talk of
the day.

Inequality and access are two key elements in the discussion of new
media and art in our territories and Havana, with its decaying
buildings and the invasion of tourists showed me, once again, how
inequality to new technologies depends on the economic conditions:
access to Internet in Cuba is a headache. An hour to a very slow
connection costs $ 5 pesos convertible, one dollar is worth 80 cent
of that currency, so in US dollars, access costs $6 US dollars per
hour. As you all may see, the technological infrastructure of
information systems is limited to an elite and to the tourists.

And I can talk about places I have lived such as Dominican Republic,
Los Angeles or Yucatan where the majority of Latinos don't have
access to the knowledge or the money needed to enter the information
systems where, we, a very distinct class, could sustain these
intellectual discussions. I also should point out that a lot of
people in our territories are not interested in new technologies of
communication. They live disconnected of the information
infrastructure and a great number will continue living without the
stress, the fear, the surveillance mechanism, the power dynamics, the
constant updating and discharging of technologies, the use of
networked satellites blocking the movement of the natural wind, the
ergonomics and body issues produced by the repetitive movement and,
of course, the type of knowledge and social interactions that we have
acquired via these technologies.

The lives of these people opens an avenue to imagine a post
technological world -Havana with decaying building could be a great
metaphor-, where social interaction, the social networks are the ones
conducing the knowledge and the sustainability. This is not a
regression, but a gesture of reclaiming Mayan thinking which places
the past in the future to prepare the culture for what is coming.

I also would like to argues, as my dear friend the Canadian cultural
theorist Rinaldo Walcott has pointed out: our ancestors, the slaves
-the natives, women, the Africans and the Asians-, were the first
technology employed by the machinery of European capitalism and Marx,
with all of his great analysis of class never mentioned the
conditions of the women and the slave, at all, in his philosophy.

 Our ancestors had the power of knowledge independently of their
sociological conditions. The slave, dreaming of freedom, planned the
road to the forest, to the Quilombo, They sensed the right moment to
break away, and even though they could die in the attempt, they ran
as much as they could to detach from the apparatus of oppression.

A lot of us have forgotten, thanks to the rationalist educational
system, how to trust our senses. Critics of Empirics argued that the
downfall of this way of thinking is that we could fail into
subjectivity. Nevertheless, in the last twenty years, I have seen,
heard and read a lot of discussions about the subject, subjectivity
and plurality. We have understood that the real is not one, but many
realities conformed by the diverse experiences informing the way in
which feel, act, mark, travel, exchange and mediate the "real". For
some reason, I never can forget what happened to Galileo when he
asserted that the earth was round. He could not prove it, but he felt
it. We know how he ended.

And I want to end this posting because I need to get back to the
'real' work of Arte Nuevo InteractivA and have a meeting with a
sponsor university in a few minutes.

Arte Nuevo InteractivA came to live as I sensed the inequalities that
artists from many regions of the world were/are facing as technology
came to be as crucial as "it seems to be" in the present cultural
arena. What others see as "underdeveloped" became a source of
inspiration. Nada Nuevo, nothing new. It has happened over and over
in our territories with other artists such as the modernists, the
antropofagos, the estredentistas, the graphic artists of the 60's and
the great filmmakers of the new Latin American cinema. Our subjective
reality has informed our senses, the production of knowledge and the
creative in our territories. The places of enunciation informing our
creative practice encompass a historical reorganization moving us
away from capitalist dynamics into the construction of social
networks allowing the formation of a cooperative process, the kaos
rizoma fueling the process of Arte Nuevo InteractivA.




--
Raúl Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet MFA
Curador Ejecutivo/ Arte Nuevo InteractivA
http://www.cartodigital.org/interactiva
interactiva@cartodigital.org