At Your Service:
Latin Women in the Global Information Network
By Coco Fusco

From The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings
(London and New York: Routledge/iNIVA, 2001)

Introduction:

The following essay took shape in the course of 1998. While I was working on it and presenting parts of it at different public events, I was also conducting research that served as the basis for a short piece for public radio about a maquiladora worker in Tijuana who had sued her former employer, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. for violation of her civil rights; my video installation, Access Denied; and finally my play, The Incredible Disappearing Woman.

Together these works constitute my critical assessment of the emergent field of cybertheory, its problematic treatment of race and the limited consideration of globalization and its impact on Latin America. It took me several years to figure out how to enter a discourse that I found so profoundly troubling, and even more time to create artwork that spoke of the issues I have just listed in a manner that was neither simplistically topical nor didactic.

Click image to view

I distinctly recall my skepticism in 1994 when artworld engagement with digital technology reached the point of obsession. Though I could clearly see the advantages of using email and surfing the net for information, I could not understand why so many of my colleagues had adopted an unrepentantly euphoric view of digital media, or why they were acting as if there were something new about forging alliances between art and technology. I found myself leaving conferences in a daze, wondering if I had been sent in a time capsule back to the time of the Futurists. I winced as young bucks turned the metaphors of Paul Virilio and Deleuze and Guattari into a literal description of hardware that was developed by our military industrial complex. I felt pangs in my stomach watching bureaucrats grin about new alliances with corporations that would do cheap R & D by letting artists play with their toys. I listened in disgruntled silence to artworld arbiters who had professed commitment to cultural equity just years before abandon those concerns in favor of what they now touted as the only important change in their field at the end of the century.

For the first few years, I wanted to close my eyes and pretend this would all be gone shortly. But it didn't. I started to grasp that the celebration of the digital was a perfect antidote for an embattled non-profit sector of the artworld that had run out of steam after the culture wars and longed for an escape from politics. Not only did the rhetoric of the brave new world invigorate them, but it resonated with a monied class of technocrats and designers who were ready to finance and consume this new culture. That language also appealed to new generations of youths that had grown up in a forest of technologically induced simulations, from computer animation to video games to theme parks to electronic billboards, CD Roms and action flics with high end special effects. I recognize that sensibility in many of my students, and thus feel compelled to understand it.

So I forced myself to look and read. Though the complacency of much of the writing I discovered disturbed me, I found a handful of allies who were also concerned about how the electronic domain reflects the goals of a new corporate controlled, ultra privatized and guarded society. In the fall of 1998, I was invited to give the keynote address at the annual International Symposium of Electronic Art that was held that year in Liverpool and Manchester in the UK. The irony of celebrating the digital revolution in the cities that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution made the invitation doubly appealing. I wrote an essay recalling all those 19th century utopians and philosophers who spoke of working conditions in British factories and dissected capitalism's ills in the same halls through which I was to pass. 

In the three years since I began to work on this piece and other related projects, I have witnessed a shift in discussions and actions within cyberculture and progressive activism. The euphoria that I describe below is beginning to fade, due perhaps in part to the signals from the stock market that the Internet boom turned out to be the shortest cycle of prosperity in recent history. Several extremely cogent publications containing pertinent critiques of the colonialist tendencies of Internet culture have appeared in the United States that complement other writings from Europe, Canada, Australia. Those writings share the sensibility of the chroniclers of a growing network of activism against what author Naomi Klein calls "branding:" the corporate takeover of every aspect of waking life. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, electronic subversion has grown increasingly sophisticated and has been embraced by both net.art communities and grassroots activists. Consciousness raising via the Internet is not limited to the distribution of alternative information, but has been extended to include alteration of the system itself. The best example of this change can be found in the work of Electronic Disturbance Theater, some of which I discuss in another essay ("The Unbearable Weightiness of Beings: Art in Mexico after NAFTA.") in my forthcoming book The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (London and New York: Routledge/iNIVA, 2001.)
Click to continue...

All photographs copyright © 1998 by individual photographers. Every effort has been made to locate the owners of copyrighted material and to make acknowledgment of its use. Errors or omissions will be corrected immediately if notification in writing is received by the website.