***  Haus der Kulturen der Welt: Forum1 Archive  ***
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   [Date]: Wed, 08 Dec 1999 08:36:24 PST
   [From]: "Raul Ferrera-Balanquet" <ferrera98@hotmail.com>
     [To]: forum1@hkw.kbx.de
[Subject]: The Anxiety of Access


Access, Fears, Miedos and La Politica de Hoy

Anxiety, anxiety, anxiety! Here in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, the city where I 
am working, there is no other artist working in the Internet. Nevertheless, 
everybody is talking about the impact of the Internet and Access. To be an 
Internet artist is a class thing, hombre that is clear. No too many people 
in Latin America have access to a computer. May be in the States, where I 
have lived the last 20 years of my life, Latinos have more access, but that 
is because the economic conditions.

I found out recently that only 1.8% of the total population of Latin 
American have access to the Internet. As Gerhard Haupt pointed out in own of 
his posting at the forum    -  http://www.hkw.de/forum/forum1/english.html   
, housed by the House of World Cultures in Berlin, there countries in Latin 
America where people can not dream of having access to the Internet because 
the government denies the access to it. Recently, I organized a web art 
exhibit for major museum in a Latin American city 
http://www.artswire.org/krosrods/interactive/fibras/index.html . Event 
though, I was invited to mount the exhibit, the museum does not have a web 
site or access to the Internet. Thanks to the collaboration of a well know 
university, the ITESM-Campus Queretaro, we were able to mount the exhibit. 
That is how access pictures itself in this part of the world.
In order to have access to the net one have to be an Internet artist or 
programmer. To become one you have to reshape the way of communicating and 
producing audiovisual and interactive images. There are programming 
languages, graphic software, writing abilities, etc, that one needs to learn 
in order to become an Internet artist. Where are the educational spaces, the 
people to teach the Latino and Latin American artists and the people? The 
few I know live in frenzy trying to bring their perspective to the web and 
work at odd jobs.

Anxiety, demonios! There is not a community, somebody I can talk about the 
difficulties I am experience. Isolation, fear of being behind, or not being 
able to be update, of being boring, of doing tricks that are passe. The 
Internet world is like the fashion world. You feel like if you have to be on 
the loop, if not you are gone. To be more specific, in order to be 
recognized by the interactive museum, you need to be associated with a 
technological development which we do not have in Latin America.  As one of 
the Latino Web artist I know, Juan Diaz Infante, www.altamiracave.com , 
pointed out, the majority of the curators and museum people dealing with 
interactive art do not have a clue of the economic, political and cultural 
conditions in which we, Latinos artists, produce our work; and why for some 
of us using HTLM hyperlinks still a revolutionary act and the must simple 
way to give access to the users.  And at top of all of that, if you do not 
live in one major metropolitan center you are out of the circuit. For some 
of Latino Latin American artists, who live in provincial towns, isolation 
becomes a major issue. Maybe, traveling to the net, you will find some 
exhibition spaces, and connection. Nevertheless, for us, who are still 
hooked to oral traditions, communicating our knowledge in a physical space 
still very rooted. So how could we talk about access under these conditions? 
Even if we succeed in producing a web site the money, the time and the 
effort could be sent to obscurity if there is not the right marketing 
strategy to advertise and promote the site. This is an intrinsic part of the 
web and a valuable knowledge that still deny to us.

And crossing up and down all the levels, there is the constant anxiety; who 
funds Latino Media Arts? Who buys Media Arts in general? How we support 
ourselves?
My fears, miedos horrendos, also come from my internal oppression, that 
colonial state that constantly tries to work inside of me. There is a 
mechanism telling me that I am not good enough and in cases, like this one, 
I get stuck because I have to fight with my internal oppression and move 
into a freer territory. Thanks to the workshops in racism, homophobia and 
personal healing, I am able to continue the work, even if it takes to 
recycle the old html tags and the open windows JavaScript. Functionality 
comes to the surface. How could you be functional, when still the conditions 
in which the Latinos and Latin American Artist produced are subject to a 
global market ideology? Who said that the Internet was bringing democracy to 
the world? The economic infra structure of the new media are bound to a 
systematic oppressive mechanism. Please, let be aware that today, it is a 
luxury to know how to built web pages, even to use WYSIWYG software.

None of my Latin American artist close friends here in Mexico has the money 
to rent a space in a server. Most of them are looking at the political 
uncertainty of the country wondering how the Zapatista in Chiapas are over 
the net. Here in Mexico, the most liberal say that the left bourgeoisie has 
romanticized the indigenous movement, led by a non-indigenous person, giving 
them money to survive and be all over the net. Merida is militarized. In 
every corner of downtown, there are two or three army men with they big 
guns. It has become a costume, but their presence has terrorized the 
citizens and re-inscribed the constant fear in which we live at the end of a 
century and of the millennium. The country is broken by political agendas 
wanting to appropriate the national resources. Tourism has become the new 
colonial paradigm. Europeans, Japaneses and North Americans travel all the 
way to the concrete built resorts located in what they used to be playa 
virgenes, virgin beaches. They had transported their economic living status 
to the beaches in the third world, and they never will really figure out how 
the people live here. You wonder how many dollars, francs, rubles, yen and 
British Pounds stayed at those beaches and who benefit from that ecological 
damaging colonial tourism.

And there is go... I must rethink the politics of my arts. The privilege I 
have because thanks to the social movements of Latinos, African American, 
Jews and Native American in the 60's, I was able to get grants to study at a 
North American University who did not teach me how to be a Latino Artists, 
but wanted me to become an assimilated into eurocentric notions neoslave 
thinking they truly gave knowledge to be a free person.

El proceso of liberation, which take me, back to my roots, still working. I 
am a cultural worker, a warriors transforming old traditions, keeping the 
good and leaving behind the old rhetoric imposed by the colonial history. No 
matter how pushed I have been by the colonial system, my upbringing within 
the historical framework of the Cuban revolution motivates me to continue 
working. Not again the colonial system, but in a constant process of 
liberating my own discourse from the repressive formulas. Those who talk 
about art as something out the contemporary global economics are living in 
the 19th century. Art is an industry in today's world. Some us still believe 
that were are separated from the consumer/market dichotomy.  The fact is 
that thanks to my skills as photographer, writer and translator, I can sell 
my abilities and eat, produce and have the luxury of having a multimedia 
computer and has access to produce web sites. There still, the art, such as 
the web site I produced for a queer exhibit, 
http://www.artswire.org/krosrods/interactive/shop_site/index.html that 
pretended, yes pretended, to be above the global market.  Nevertheless, the 
curators decided not to include the site in the exhibit because I was not 
using "Flashy Technology," which I know how to program, but limit the access 
to most of the users who do not own the right equipment, software and plug 
ins.

At this moment, the construction of this frenzy discourse has taking back to 
a level of tranquility. The opportunity to voice what has been inside for 
the past week placed me in a healing space, a traveling territory in which I 
can look to the cultural, political and economical condition on my diasporic 
territories and said: "Fuck, we must continue healing ourselves, the true 
revolutionary process is that of liberating yourself." This is not pop 
psychology, it is a reaffirmation of one self and the recognition of the 
every day realities affecting the Latinos and Latin American artists engaged 
in the production web art and the lack of access we experience in our 
cultural territories.

Raul Ferrera-Balanquet
Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, December 8, 1999.