“Art and Ar­ti­fi­cial Life in Latin Amer­ica: the His­tor­i­cal Legacy Takes on the Artis­tic Es­tab­lish­ment” presented by double/delete

Symposium:

• ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• VIDA: New Discourses, Tropes and Modes in Art and Artificial Life Research

• Art and Ar­ti­fi­cial Life in Latin Amer­ica: the His­tor­i­cal Legacy Takes on the Artis­tic Es­tab­lish­ment

• José-Carlos Mariátegui

Venue(s):

• Sabanci Center, Istanbul, Turkey

• Panel: VIDA: New Discourses, Tropes and Modes in Art and Artificial Life Research

  The his­tory of media art in Latin Amer­ica dates from the avant -garde move­ments of the early 1920s, in which Latin Amer­ica played a key role both lo­cally and in­ter­na­tion­ally. To give a full ac­count of this his­tory some ex­per­i­men­tal sci­en­tific pro­pos­als that lat­er­ally ex­panded the di­men­sions of media art in Latin Amer­ica need to be in­cor­po­rated. For ex­am­ple, in the 1970s the Chilean bi­ol­o­gists Hum­berto Mat­u­rana and Fran­cisco Varela in­tro­duced the con­cept of au­topoiesis which de­fines and ex­plains the na­ture and com­plex­ity of liv­ing sys­tems and which today has be­come a fun­da­men­tal tenet of ar­ti­fi­cial life.

  The sci­en­tific con­tri­bu­tion of Chile is com­ple­mented by the con­tri­bu­tion of the coun­tries in the Ama­zon basin, which have a strate­gic ge­o­graph­i­cal lo­ca­tion and rep­re­sent the biggest lab­o­ra­tory of biotech­nol­ogy in the world. My pre­sen­ta­tion is in­tended as an ac­count, within the con­text of ar­ti­fi­cial life, of the last decade of artists and pro­jects that form part of the elec­tronic art scene in Latin Amer­ica. I will offer a time­line of the de­vel­op­ment of Latin Amer­i­can elec­tronic art in the last decade based on a group of VIDA pro­jects that have won awards and in­cen­tives for pro­duc­tion. Most of these pro­jects offer an in­no­v­a­tive stance that ex­pand the field of ar­ti­fi­cial life: the chaotic as­sem­blage of large cities that in­spires and re­veals com­plex urban and in­for­ma­tional processes, the con­text of re­cy­cling tech­no­log­i­cal waste and the de­vel­op­ment of an­tag­o­nis­tic ways of life that cre­ate hy­brid ecosys­tems where both bi­o­log­i­cal and syn­thetic species co-ex­ist. I will dis­cuss how the as­sim­i­la­tion of ar­ti­fi­cial life is often af­fected by so­cial and cul­tural pat­terns that process and an­a­lyze it in dif­fer­ent and com­ple­men­tary ways, al­low­ing not only a crit­i­cal per­spec­tive but also an in­no­v­a­tive path.

Category:

• Panel