Two years ago, when I first became interested in the phenomenon of Internet video in the Spanish-speaking world, I was able to locate over a thousand sites including articles and video projection and download sites – a large, but still manageable number. In August 2005, there were 265,000; a quick check in October turned up 700,000 (of which 18,000 were download sites). Even taking into account the vast amounts of duplication on mirror sites, I would be reluctant even to guess at the range of discrete locations that will appear by the time this chapter sees print. The well-known US-based...

The interdependencies between film and the city have been the object of much critical investigation.¹ Likewise, the lateral connections imposed or encouraged by urban existence have long been coded in terms of the dissolution of boundaries between the human and the machinic, with the city being understood as a technology for moulding the body to the forms of industrial manufacture and consumption.² Latterly, the massive emergence of cybernetic cultures has collapsed at its very base the distinction between the sphere of industry – the technological transformation of the material world – and the (ideological) sphere of representations. If representations –...

Within the last decade there has been a vigorous response to the challenges to established orders of knowledge posed by the ʹdigital revolutionʹ from Brazilian artists, theorists, and practitioners, who have gained great influence within what the US social theorist Gregory Coyne has termed the new cultural axis emerging in the Americas, extending from Florida to Brazil (Hinchberger 2004). Brazilian artistsʹ engagement with and contribution to the international cross-fertilisation of ideas within the numerous discourses of modernity is not, of course, a new phenomenon. Practitioners of the new media in Brazil are working within a tradition that was already highly...

Despite the very real concerns about the politics of connectivity in Latin America (outlined in the introduction to this volume), in this chapter I intend to challenge such pessimistic visions, arguing that, by hook or by crook, grassroots and activist organisations in the region have contrived to make strategic use of the Internet – and earlier, more localised networks – for pro-democratic networking and consciousness-raising activities, as well as some hactivism proper, since the late 1980s. In so doing, I thus hope to counter the prevailing misconception that only the educated and wealthy elites of such countries have access to...

The Internet is frequently heralded as a positive alternative space for the exploration of new identities, allowing the imaginative creation of a new self – or selves – that may or may not be carried through into everyday life (Laurel 2001: 110). The artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña invites Net-users to project themselves imaginatively onto othersʹ lives, to explore alternative life narratives and purge their demons through his different projects. Through his work as a multimedia artist working both on- and off-line, he aims to make others aware of issues such as race, class, gender, and national allegiances, using multiple – often...

Cyberspace is most often placed by urban theorists in opposition to more traditional ideas of space, like neighbourhood or ʹlocal communityʹ. For although the term ʹcommunityʹ appears frequently in Internet rhetoric, it is used to describe groups that establish ʹvirtualʹ connections based on affinities other than living near each other – professional, intellectual, leisure, and consumption affinities being the most common ones. Discussing the modern megalopolis, Néstor García Canclini states that ʹsocial identification is more and more based on semiotic models provided by the culture industry rather than on the signifying structures or the temporality of the neighbourhoodʹ (García Canclini...

Communications theorist Joaquín María Aguirre Romero surmises that ʹthe digital magazine cannot be an object in itself but rather an instrument servicing the diffusion of worthy contentʹ (Aguirre Romero 1999). Emphasising the new opportunities afforded by digital media, he calls for authors and editors of electronic publications to bear in mind the ʹimportant missionʹ of e-publications, that of dissemination of information and widening access, and to approach new digital media with a ʹnew mentalityʹ, conceiving of e-magazines within new media itself, as opposed to traditional print models, and taking advantage of all the resources on offer. As Internet connectivity has...

This dialogue, which appeared from 2004 to 2005 in Fran Ilich’s Net-filmBeing Boring, originally available through his website,delete.tvcontains several elements that I see as characterising Northern Mexican border authorsʹ online work. In the film, two young women, without their television for a week, try to avoid ʹbeing boringʹ. After the exchange cited above, they take their first ʹrevolutionaryʹ action by hitting an ʹenterʹ button. The young women, like the border authors, ponder how to make their time meaningful, reflect on the power of new media, and attempt to negotiate using that power. Their conversation also signals the...

There is no doubt that Jorge Luis Borges is a major literary precursor of contemporary interactive and multimedia works. It is almost commonplace to see tales such as ʹFunes el memoriosoʹ [Funes the Memorious], ʹLa biblioteca de Babelʹ [The Library of Babel], or ʹEl jardín de senderos que se bifurcanʹ [The Garden of the Forking Paths] as prefigurations of cyberliterature. Borgesʹ web presence is vast – from sites dedicated to ʹWebmaster Borgesʹ, which claim that ʹthe greatest influence on the Argentine writer was a phenomenon invented after his death [namely: the Internet]ʹ (Wolk 1999), to the all-encompassing site of the...

In 1963 the novelRayuela[Hopscotch], by Julio Cortázar, was published in Argentina, two years before Ted Nelson coined the word ʹhypertextʹ (Labbé 1996). The rapidly gained cult status and reputation ofRayuelaowed much to its physical appearance and entity as a big black brick of a book, which when opened immediately cast off its guise as a novel and announced itself as a labyrinth of texts whose reading order could, if the reader chose, be ordained by a numerical chart. This was presented with the following gloss: ʹthis book is many books, but above all it is two...

The intersection of literature and information technology prompts a number of theoretical questions. These are not necessarily new, but they take on new dimensions as the Internet reshapes the cycle of production, transmission, and consumption of the written word. Such questions include the changing roles of reader and author made possible by the advent of hypertext and the practice of the collective creation of texts, as well as debates about the notions of author and work, in the light of the intensification of techniques such as collage, montage, appropriation, and re-creation as processes of artistic creation, and the ongoing erosion...

With the arrival of digital formats changes have occurred in the process of literary creation. In the traditional book, whatever the narrative voice or voices used in the text, the point of view corresponded solely to the author who worked alone, concerned only with his or her text. This is no longer the case. A hypermedia work will not usually have a single author, given the complexity of its conception. The creation of a multimedia narrative requires the involvement of a number of disciplines and therefore the intervention of numerous authors. The contrasting points of view of the artists involved,...

In the article cited above Jesús Martín-Barbero explores some of the key issues thrown up by the development of audiovisual, and, increasingly, digital culture as it pertains to Latin America. In particular he focuses on the question of space, exploring the relationship between cultural products and their ʹembeddednessʹ in a given space such as the nation; and on that of time, examining how changes in the conceptualisation of time in new media may accommodate a distinctively Latin American perspective on history and narrative. What this chapter proposes to do is to test some of Martín-Barberoʹs arguments by applying them to...

Within the rapid growth of the use of the Internet as a form of expression in Latin America, the weblog, more commonly known by its shorthand ʹblogʹ, has taken a particularly strong hold in several Latin American countries. Worldwide, the number of weblogs was estimated at over 100 million in 2005 (Duncan 2005) although given the explosion of the weblog format, this number will no doubt already be out of date. The sitebitacoras.com, a portal for blogs in Spanish, currently links to 148,566 Hispanic blogs (accessed 2 March 2006), with some 598 blogs in Mexico City alone. Other, smaller...