Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with the relationship between offline place and online interaction in the work of Latin(o) American cultural producers, including examples from Uruguayan Brian Mackern, the Chilean project Memoria histórica de la Alameda, and Latino artist Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga.

Paper long abstract:

This paper engages with one of the central questions that has arisen in internet studies in recent years: the relationship between offline place and online interaction. As user-generated content has grown exponentially, and as a wealth of applications now allow users to refer to their geographical location, add geo-coordinates to their photographs on online platforms, or link content to online maps, amongst many others, the internet is increasingly offering ways of allowing people to make important connections to, and re-affirm their affiliations to, their physical, offline location. This paper engages with this dynamic, and focuses on the work of Latin(o) American cultural producers, investigating how, in their online works, they engage in re-imaginings of and representations of offline place. Taking examples from Uruguayan Brian Mackern's 34s56w.org, the collaborative Memoria histórica de la Alameda by participants in Chile, and Latino artist Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga's Vagamundo, the paper explores how offline struggles for the control of and meaning of place are re-enacted and re-shaped online. The paper contrasts the approach of these three works, exploring how in some cases, online-offline interaction is used to question earlier periods of dictatorial power, whilst in others, it is the interrogation of the workings of late capitalism that comes to the fore, as the artists confront the new configurations of power under late capitalism, its structural inequalities, and the waning of the nation-state in the face of the increasing powers of transnational corporate capital.