Latin American Digital Culture

What is it about?

This book explores one of the central issues that has been debated in internet studies in recent years: locality, and the extent to which cultural production online can be embedded in a specific place. The particular focus of the book is on the practices of net artists in Latin America. The book looks at how their work interrogates Latin(o) American identity through both their on- and offline cultural practice. Six particular works by artists of different countries in Latin America and within Latina/o communities in the US are studied in detail, with one each from Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, the US-Mexico border, and the US. Each chapter explores how each artist represents place in their works, and, in particular how traditional place-based affiliations, or notions of territorial identity, end up reproduced, re-affirmed, or even transformed online. At the same time, the book explores how these artists make use of new media technologies to express alternative viewpoints about the locations they represent, and use the internet as a space for the recuperation of cultural memory.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Locality and place have often been debated when discussing the internet. The popular view of the internet as a globalized, placeless realm is not actually the case. As several researchers have begun to show, people in fact use the internet to re-affirm their commitment to geographical place. This book makes a contribution to these debates by studying these six particular works, and looks at how they are embedded in the Latin(o) American locale in which they were developed.

Perspectives