<nettime> NMF: Troyano Collective Interview

[Eduardo Navas <eduardo@navasse.net>]

INTERVIEW (Focus on Santiago, Chile): The Mediated and Political. Troyano,
The Art of Creating Digital Communities by Lucrezia Cippitelli

http://newmediafix.net/daily/?p=3D472


This interview is published in Italian, Spanish and English

Read Spanish version: http://newmediafix.net/daily/?p=3D473
Read Italian Version: http://newmediafix.net/daily/?p=3D474

Troyano is a collective of independent Chilean artists from Santiago, which
organizes cultural activities relative to art and technology.

The collective participated at the VII Video and New Media Biennial (18-27
November 2005) participating with a critical position in the section dedicated to
New Media and organizing an international symposium. Their project is called Elena
in the honor of the virus which installs itself in a hard disk to then erase its
data. This project aims to give a critical picture of cultural, critical and
artistic production which in the last ten years has been consciously relying on
emerging technologies.

They want to propose in the contemporary Chilean society a debate on the
"creative" use of media in opposition to a purely economic, utilitarian and
commercial vision of technology diffusion. Chile has been in close commercial
relationships with Japan, Taiwan (and now China) for decades, it's an important
copper producer (the copper is a fundamental component to produce technology) and
it has been always projected to a reliable and dynamic "modernity" (but also
neo-free trader and reassuring for Western Countries) so the critical position of
the Troyano group appears without a foundation.

But taking sides with the critical and social use of Media is a resolute and
radical position to take in a Country which has just come out of ten years of
Pinochet's Dictatorship. A Country which is still guided by the same military
dictatorial bureaucracy, it has spent the last ten years in a pitiless
privatization of the social state (like Argentina ), and it has not legalized
abortion yet (and it obtained divorce in 2004 only). In Chile contrasts and
conflicts are still radical and they are often simplistically worked out in the
dualism "Official nature" vs. " militant revolutionary Pan Americanism".

The interview of three of four members of this group (formed by Ignacio Nieto,
Italo Tello, Ricardo Vega ed Alejando Albornoz) can be described as a collective
reflection on Troyano's experience at the Biennial.

L.C. Why did you decide to participate as an artist collective by proposing a
curatorial project?

Ignacio Nieto: It was an emergency: since now there is no New Media geography in
Chile. Everything started at Rosario , Argentina , where we participated at a
festival dedicated to new media. We became aware that in our Country there were no
specific interests on this subject. We participated in the Biennial as a
collective to show some contemporary cultural practices related to new
technologies.

Ricardo Vega: In this Country despite a huge commercialization of electronic and
digital instruments there is no awareness of the possibilities these new
technologies offer. On the side of the government one finds the idea of innovation
and progress ( Chile is the Latin American state with the biggest number of
internet connections, more than Mexico ) the reality is that this country doesn't
produce technology, it just consumes it. What kind of dialogue can we have with
technology if we just consume it?

Italo Tello: In our Universities there are multimedia labs but we do not have a
great technological awareness. Nobody wants to know how a machine is built and
developed, there're no academic courses about it. In addition there are no local
cultural references to new media. Students of art study Picasso and Duchamp, but
they are not interested in studying technologies because - unlike Argentina -
artistic academic courses don't consider Net Art, Hacking=8A


L.C. Do you know something about the international debate during the last years on
these "new" artistic practices?

Italo Tello: here in Chile artistic referents are mainly theorists and artists who
worked during the 70s and the 80s.

Ricardo Vega: There are some well prepared theorists but they are "isles". It's
difficult to incorporate and spread the theme of technologies in the contemporary
art debate and its critics. I'd like to underline also our interest goes beyond
art: I'm a designer but I'm interested in these practices, in these new
hermeneutic models and communicative paradigms in the society. At the collective
level not only at the individual level.

Lucrezia Cippitelli: you said Chile is investing a lot of money in technology.
Some stops of the Santiago 's subway have a Wi-Fi free internet access (not even
Paris has it). You also have a New Media Biennial which has come to its 7th
edition (14 years of activity!). So what's the matter?

Italo Tello: There is no will to go beyond consumption. As a collective we'd
like to show that even with minimal economic investment, if it's a logical
investment and you really want to communicate something, you can make incredible
things happen.

Ricardo Vega: We are Latin America 's pioneers regarding connectivity but we
don't know how to use it. The New Media Biennial is an example of this. It has
been a Video Biennial since last year and even now it remains a kermis dedicated
to video. There's no adequate content on the container. The official
infrastructure proposes a technological improvement without substance, it's just a
commercial method to advertise the idea of a "developed" and "advanced" Chile
which doesn't exist.


Lucrezia Cippitelli: =8Aand even "democratic" and "trustworthy"=8A

Ricardo Vega: =8Aand on the other side there's the society that doesn't take
advantage of this "development".

Ignacio Nieto: People want to buy the super expensive last mobile model and then
they don't know how to use it. It's just a status. Touching back on our initial
comments, historically Chile has developed an important avant-garde musical
production. Electro acoustic music in Chile has a fifty year history. It's a
circuit which is very close to technology production and engineering studies but
it's a very exclusive circuit: pioneers of these experimentations built up
themselves the machines they work with. Computers with a 7kb memory=8A

Italo Tello: As Ignacio was saying here if you visit a very poor house in a very
humble area you'll find they have a huge TV or the last mobile model. The problem
is they don't use it as a means of expression and to critic the system. Chile is
divided into two parts. There's a Chile that has developed a critical and
expressive language deriving from Pinochet's dictatorship and they resort to the
aesthetics of barricades, to the themes of counter-culture , desaparecidos ,
politic and suburb. On the other side there's a generation who's grown up with
Mtv, Nintendo and videogames.

This generation has no cultural models. In Chile there are no critical referrents:
people who analyze New Media cultural production.

Lucrezia Cippitelli: Is there a Hacker community?

Italo Tello: Yes, there is but it's completely involved in hardware and software
development. Hackers, here, don't deal with politics, they don't build
communities.

Lucrezia Cippitelli: A definition of New Media.

Ignacio Nieto: It's not easy to give a definition of New Media. I find this name
very commercial, a melting-pot od different practices.

Italo Tello: It's a standard term, it's wrong to connect it with computers only.
Every epoch has its new media, it's not correct to give this term a strict
significance.

Lucrezia Cippitelli: Why did you chose to present yourself as a collective? Where
does the idea of a virus come from? How did you chose artists?

Italo Tello: At the Biennial we attended at everything concerning New Media. We
wrote an open call and we divided it into three themes: Net Art, Software Art,
Tactical Media. We also included some experiences of working with new technologies
from a social point of view. For instance the pirate television channel Se=F1al
3 that broadcasts from its quarter la Victoria or the Software Libre
Association.

Ignacio Nieto: As a collective we worked as archivists. At this moment a critical
work on new media would be too pretentious and complicated. As regards virus,
virus is a code entering a computer. We found its name in the McAfee archive of
virus definition: there were funnier names but we chose "Elena" because it fitted
our collective name Troyano and Helen of Troy. The characteristic of Elena's
virus is it installs itself on the hard-disk of a computer erasing all its data.
We wanted to install ourselves in the Biennial erasing its presuppositions and
re-writing a new story.

Lucrezia Cippitelli: I think the most interesting aspect of this experience is the
building up of a network among persons who had the possibility to present their
works, meet and share their ideas, skills and resources in a much less academic
way. How are you developing in the future the work you started with this project?

Ignacio Nieto: First of all we got to put the editorial material we developed
during conferences online.

Italo Tello: We have to capitalize everything we said and heard and record it in a
catalogue or a DVD which will become the missing local New Media point of
referrence.

Lucrezia Cippitelli: What are in your opinion the best results of Elena's project?

Ricardo Vega The existence of a practice, a way of acting which is shared among
persons with completely different origins. We know we use instruments which aren't
stable yet but now we know we can work together. I also think the concept of
hard-disk re-writing was positive.

Lucrezia Cippitelli: I think the Elena's project had the positive effect to
connect -- at both local and international levels -- music, free software,
activism and cultural critics.

Italo Tello: Someone said we're pretentious and too elitists, that our proposals
can't get a wider audience. Now I can say we showed it's not true.

Lucrezia Cippitelli: In your opinion is New Media an important form of
communication and expression with possible potential for the so-called developing
Countries?

Ricardo Vega: We only talked about very elitist practices in the ecosystem of a
Southern Country. I'd be very interested in analysing the possibilities beyond
"media centrism" elitism.

Italo Tello: The access theme is central. I work at a public school in a very
suburban area of Santiago , a very poor and problematic area, and I teach music to
children. A national project realized the set up of multimedia labs: dozens of
computers connected to the Internet. I realized that the teacher who has to
instruct the children is regularly outmoded by them. They are incredible.

Ricardo Vega: ...in a Country where there is Wi Fi in the subway and the New Media
Biennial.

Ignacio Nieto: Here's a metaphor on Chile : at the Biennial they installed on fake
raw wood tables a very scenographical series of Sony Vaio Laptops. This area was
called Media Lounge. Here computer were chained to tables and personal computers
didn't have internet connection. In a Biennial dedicated to New Media...

www.t-r-o-y-a-n-o.cl
www.bienaldevideo.cl






#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net