Digital Art in Latin America

Abstract

The emergence of new Media Art in Latin America is an extraordinary heritage but it has been under-represented in the art historical discourse. Pioneer Latin-American artists have neither been recognized nor absorbed in mainstream literature. Our project on Digital Art in LatinAmerica is especially oriented toward a perception of a digital art prototype that evolved as a response to infiltrations of technology in Latin America. Our emphasis is first, on the rise of those forms of proto-electronic art in the mid twentieth century in terms, which were initially represented in structural invariances of optical and also pre-digital templates. Leading artists like Julio LeParc were experimenting with projection of light on reflective materials. In Brazil, Abraham Palatnik tried transpositioning colors through mechanical movements. Waldemar Cordeiro and Otávio Donasci were similar innovators, one with punch card applications, the other with video and performance. Chilean Carlos Martinoya and Naum Joel created the Abstratoscopio Cromatico, to anticipate an entirely new artistic usage of polarized light effects, which the world had never witnessed before. In Mexico, Manuel Felguerez, produced innovative pictorial compositions using a paleocomputational programming in an age when the PC was nonexistent, Pola Weiss embraced video art. The archival project on digital heritage preservation is an attempt to save the history of this transformation in the arts and to restore the place of Latin-American artists in the trajectory. It is an archival project in the making that seeks therefore to set across a view of sunrise in the intersection of a new universe.