Neither Center nor Periphery: Hacking the “Latin Americanness” within Artistic Practice, Media Archeology and Digital Culture

Planetary Atoll: Connecting Latin American Dots is an exhibition dedicated to a set of net art works that were produced by artists from the region throughout the last three decades.

Surrounded by bipolarities, we are trying to liberate ourselves from nationalist ideas while needing to address specific issues. Whereas Internet based projects promise to outreach a planetary public, they also reveal otherwise forgotten regional specific situations. The Internet has become a political dicomotical ground, but it is also the place where a connective tissue is formed. Rather than adopting a cartography shaped by an up and down model, this exhibition examines the gap between the local and the global and how that in-betweenness emerges in certain digital artworks. This exhibtion is part of the Magical Hackerism project by SAVVY Contemporary in collaboration with panke.gallery, funded by the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa des Landes Berlin. The exhibition is taking place in the context of Berlin Art Week.

Molly Soda was born in 1989 in San Juan, Puerto Rico and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.F.A in Photography and Imaging from Tisch School of Arts, New York University in 2011. She uses different social media to produce and host her work, allowing it to interact with the platforms themselves. She is interested in Internet archival practices, often using her own image and figure as an online character.

Diego Gómez-Venegas is a media researcher and media artist based in Germany. With an ongoing focus on the history of cybernetics and its epistemology, Diego develops a media-archaeo/genealogical study on Chile’s project Cybersyn as PhD researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His most recent writings on this subject are “Towards the Operative Objects of Post-Capitalism,” with Zerené and Cotoras, in APRJA (Aarhus, 2021), “Forgetting / Cybernetics” in Chronus Art Center Editorial (Shanghai, 2020), and “Cybersyn and the symbolic memory of paper” in Artnodes (Barcelona, 2019).

Previously, Diego was an assistant professor at the University of Chile, in Santiago, where he taught at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism and in the Faculty of the Arts. In that context, he developed a series of research-creation projects in the intersection of media arts and experimental design. Examples of this are Searching for Euclid (Santiago, 2016), Informe (Santiago, 2016), Algorithmic Mediations for Agonism (Santiago, 2016), and Remoteness of Light (Reykjavík, 2015).

Additional information about this and his current activities – which unfold as theory-fiction essays, book editing, curatorial activities, media art pieces, and workshops – can be found both on his personal website, as well as on the online platform of the Bucles research collective:

http://www.gomezvenegas.com/ http://bucles.info/

Óscar González-Díaz (US/MX) holds an MFA (2017) in Fiber and Material Studies from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Philosophy and Linguistics from The University of Texas at El Paso. He has exhibited in the USA, Mexico, Germany and S. Korea. He lives in Chicago, IL., enjoys discussions about wallpapers and occasional displays of human kindness.

This exhibition is part of Magical Hackerism which is a SAVVY Contemporary project in collaboration with panke.gallery, funded by the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa des Landes Berlin.