Zonas de contactoArt History in a Global Network

Category

Exhibition

Year

2022

Institution

DAHJ, Berkeley

Comment

Twenty years ago, Mary Louise Pratt proposed the notion of a “contact zone” as a place where culture is negotiated and challenged. Art can bridge or destabilize disciplines and methods in ways that reframe histories and bring new insights. Still, on a global scale, there are many issues of inequality in terms of access to technology. While scholarly perspectives offer valuable contextualization, artists can address issues of technology and global networks through embodied practice and direct intervention. Artists are uniquely positioned to create paradigm shifts in values and ethical issues by employing data infrastructures and information systems in their work.The feature artists address themes of digital art of the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world, broadly defined, including colonial histories and frontier technologies, imagined futures, post-colonial realities and networks, ongoing global or historical inequities, latinx challenges and barriers (linguistic, sociological, and infrastructural), and artifacts as data or data as object.