Towards a posthumanistic knowledge production. Multimedia artistic research during the rise of neoliberalism in Mexico

ABSTRACT

Although for the government officials who inaugurated the state-run Centro Multimedia (CMM) in 1994 in Mexico City it had less to do with artistic experimentation than with the promotion of a neoliberal agenda of national modernization and competitiveness, CMM has come to embody a reformulation in artistic research and education via new media. Focusing on one specific form of knowledge production that CMM promoted – the Biomediations Festival and its proposal of an open-ended Living Book – this article will conceptually frame CMM as a space of artistic research that appropriated and circulated academic knowledge. It will also argue that the way in which it translated that knowledge has strengthened the path towards what shall be termed posthumanistic knowledge circulation. CMM’s paradoxical relationship with the neoliberal agenda in which it originated made room for a posthumanistic ethos that has challenged acquired notions of author, knowledge, and ownership that are the backbone of the hegemonic global copyright laws prevailing since the rise of neoliberalism during the 1990s.

RESUMO

Embora para os funcionários do governo que inauguraram o Centro Multimídia (CMM) estatal em 1994 na Cidade do México tivesse menos a ver com a experimentação artística do que com a promoção de uma agenda neoliberal de modernização e competitividade nacional, o CMM acabou encarnando uma reformulação na pesquisa e educação artística por meio de novas mídias. Com foco em uma forma específica de produção de conhecimento que o CMM promoveu – o Festival Biomediações e sua proposta de um Living Book aberto – este artigo enquadrará conceitualmente o CMM como um espaço de pesquisa artística que se apropria e faz circular o conhecimento acadêmico. E, também, que a forma como traduziu esse conhecimento fortaleceu o caminho para o que se convencionou chamar de circulação do conhecimento pós-humanístico. A relação paradoxal do CMM com a agenda neoliberal em que se originou abriu espaço para um ethos pós-humanista que desafiou noções adquiridas de autor, conhecimento e propriedade que são a espinha dorsal das leis de direitos autorais globais hegemônicas prevalecentes desde a ascensão do neoliberalismo durante a década de 1990.

RESUMEN

Si bien para los funcionarios que inauguraron el estatal Centro Multimedia (CMM) en 1994 en la Ciudad de México, éste tenía menos que ver con la experimentación artística que con la promoción de una agenda neoliberal de modernización y competitividad nacionales, el CMM ha acabado encarnando una reformulación en la investigación y la educación artística a través de los nuevos medios. Centrándose en una forma específica de producción del conocimiento que el CMM impulsó – el Festival Biomediaciones y su propuesta de un Living Book abierto – este artículo enmarcará conceptualmente al CMM como un espacio de investigación artística que se apropió e hizo circular el conocimiento académico y, también, que la forma en que se tradujo ese conocimiento trazó una senda hacia lo que se podría denominar circulación poshumanística del conocimiento. La paradójica relación del CMM con la agenda neoliberal en la que se originó dio lugar a un ethos poshumanista que ha desafiado las nociones adquiridas de autor, conocimiento y propiedad que son la columna vertebral de las leyes hegemónicas de derechos de autor globales que prevalecen con el auge del neoliberalismo desde los años noventa.

KEYWORDS:

• Centro multimedia
• Centro Nacional de las Artes
• new media art
• authorship
• living book

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:

• Centro multimedia
• Centro Nacional de las Artes
• arte eletrônica
• autoria
• livro vivo

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Centro multimedia
• Centro Nacional de las Artes
• arte electrónico
• autoría
• libro viviente

Mexico officially joined the ranks of global neoliberalism when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed with Canada and the United States took effect on January 1st, 1994. Emphasizing the role of the private sector, NAFTA eased commodity and financial circulation among the three countries and, especially, celebrated the privatization of telecommunications with the selling of the public telephone company Telmex in 1990, and the airing of a new private Television channel TV Azteca in 1993. Media companies and image circulation would become key actors in this new economic order, its relevance sanctioned by a new copyright law introduced in Mexico in 1997 just before the United States approved the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998. Both making explicit the centrality that legal authorship and the exploitation of intellectual property were meant to play in the globalizing economy (Haggart 2014).

At the time NAFTA came into effect in 1994, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional’s uprising took place in Chiapas, and its denunciation of the government’s neoliberal agenda and disdain for indigenous forms of social organization and ownership gained rapid global support via new media technologies (Cleaver 1998). That same year, the Mexican federal government inaugurated Centro Multimedia (CMM), a venue devoted to new media and artistic experimentation. CMM was conceived neither as an art school nor as a research institution, but as an experimental middle point in which new media knowledge production and dissemination would become a defining task. Entangled with the government’s implementation of neoliberal policies, CMM became both the locus for training artists in an increasingly commodified audiovisual environment and an untested path for the institutionalization of artistic research amidst the global social unrest of the late twentieth century.

This article will (1) conceptually frame CMM as a form of artistic research that blurs the sharp differentiation between theory and practice and that, in so doing, attempts at translating academic knowledge experimentally producing its own strategies of knowledge dissemination; (2) present some of the most significant interdisciplinary projects that CMM undertook and its relationship to knowledge production, translation and circulation; (3) focus on one specific and exceptional form of knowledge production that CMM promoted, the Festival Biomediations and its proposal for an open-ended Living Book; and, finally, (4) interrogate CMM’s paradoxical relationship with the neoliberal agenda in which it originated and that made possible a project such as Biomediations. This article will show how the way in which CMM had appropriated and circulated academic knowledge made eventually room for a project such as Biomedations, that embodied key practices of what shall be termed posthumanistic knowledge production. The posthumanistic ethos that animates Biomediations challenges acquired notions of authorship, knowledge, and ownership that the hegemonic legal framework prevailing since the late 1990s had sanctioned. By stressing these implications, this article seeks to underline that although it may have been motivated by the Mexican government’s bet on free market competitiveness, the uncharted character of CMM’s new media artistic research also fostered a more open and unpredictable relationship between academic knowledge and multimedia artistic practices.

1. Artistic research as translation

The labeling of certain art practices as “artistic research,” “research in the arts,” “practice-based research” or “practice-led research” has spread in the last two decades. This has mostly happened in English-speaking countries and Scandinavia (Hannula, Suoranta, and Vadén 2005; Macleod and Holdridge 2006; Nelson 2013) but also, more recently, in Spanish-speaking ones (Pérez Royo and Sánchez 2010; Verwoert et al. 2011; Blasco 2013). Two main reasons are normally offered to account for this surge: a shift in governmental policies regarding the role of art in higher education (Frayling 1997; Strand 1998; Candlin 2001)¹ as well as experimental developments in art practice itself (Balkema and Slager 2004; Sullivan 2005).

For some years now, it has been a commonplace to talk about contemporary art in terms of reflection and research. Although reflection and research were closely tied to the tradition of modernism from the start, they are also intertwined with art practice in our late modern or postmodern era – not only in terms of the self perception of creators and performers, but increasingly in institutional contexts too, from funding regulations to the content of programmes at art academies and laboratories. Particularly in the last decade (following a period when ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘new media’ were the watchwords), research and reflection have been part of the verbal attire sported by both art practice and art criticism in public and professional fora on the arts. (Borgdorff 2007, 2)

However, there has been intense debate regarding the exact definition of artistic research. Whether it has to do with its object, the methods on which it relies, or the sort of knowledge it produces is open to discussion (Gray and Malins 2004; Hannula, Suoranta, and Vadén 2005; Macleod and Holdridge 2006). After reviewing this debate, Borgdorff (2007) characterizes three kinds of relationships between art and research. The first is “research on the arts,” that has art practice in the broadest sense of the word as its theoretical object. The second sort of relationship is “research for the arts,” that “can be described as applied research in a narrow sense […] Examples are material investigations of particular alloys used in casting metal sculptures, investigation of the application of live electronics in the interaction between dance and lighting design [etc.]” (5). Finally, the third kind of engagement between art and research is “research in the arts” and it is “the most controversial” since

[i]t concerns research that does not assume the separation of subject and object, and does not observe a distance between the researcher and the practice of art. Instead, the artistic practice itself is an essential component of both the research process and the research results. This approach is based on the understanding that no fundamental separation exists between theory and practice in the arts. (5)

Even though, CMM has undertaken these three kinds of research on, for, and in the arts, this article focuses specifically on the ways it has experimented with academic knowledge in the more “controversial” field of “research in the arts.” What does characterize research in the arts more specifically? Borgdorff advances a definition:

Art practice qualifies as research when its purpose is to broaden our knowledge and understanding through an original investigation. It begins with questions that are pertinent to the research context and the art world, and employs methods that are appropriate to the study. The process and outcomes of the research are appropriately documented and disseminated to the research community and to the wider public. (2007, 8)

So, in general terms, research in the arts – or what is generally labeled “artistic research” – (1) broadens knowledge, (2) begins with significant questions, (3) relies on appropriate methods to undertake its study, and (4) disseminates the research to the wider public. As Borgdoff has argued elsewhere regarding the type of knowledge produced,

[…] artistic research seeks not so much to make explicit the knowledge that art is said to produce, but rather to provide a specific articulation of the pre-reflective, non-conceptual content of art. It thereby invites ‘unfinished thinking’. Hence, it is not formal knowledge that is the subject matter of artistic research, but thinking in, through and with art. (2011, 44)

It is important to stress that

A potential benefit of arts-based research is that it might reveal new ways of researching and provide insights and understandings beyond the arts themselves. This would occur if arts-based research offered something new to the academy in terms of its methods and outcomes rather than simply its interest in art. The ‘something new’ that it might offer is a change to the dominant knowledge model. (Biggs and Karlsson 2011, 2)

In this sense, as the authors note, academia has been dominated by a predominantly scientific concept of knowledge building that is quite impersonal and is expected to deliver something objective regarding the world.

If the term knowledge can be applied to the arts, then it seems unlikely that knowledge will be of this kind. Artistic knowledge seems to have more potential in relation to the human individual […] and their embodied relationship with the world rather than something as abstract as the scientific concept of knowledge. (Biggs and Karlsson 2011, 2)

This general characterization of artistic research applies at least partially to the work CMM developed since the mid-1990s. However, we emphasize that while CMM may have been engaged in what can retrospectively be named as artistic research, what it was actually doing was trying to translate academic knowledge, and in doing so building its specific institutional form and ways of knowledge dissemination. In this sense, a defining aspect of artistic research is the form that knowledge takes and the way it spreads out. Following Bruno Latour (1994), “translation” means here “displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies two elements or agents” (32). In the process of translation, “we inscribe in a different matter features of our social order” (Latour, 46). This process of inscribing knowledge from other fields in “a different matter” is what CMM seemed to be attempting. “Art thereby transcends its former limits, aiming through the research to contribute to thinking and understanding […] These specific ‘border violations’ can spark a good deal of tension. The relationship between art and academia is uneasy, but challenging” (Borgdorff 2011, 44).

Some of the projects in which CMM engaged broadened knowledge via experimental artistic methods disseminating it to a wider audience while implementing its own devices and strategies. In this sense, “translating” implies a process of dissemination that makes CMM use knowledge as a specific “material semiotic actor.” This “unwieldy term” is intended to portray the object of knowledge as an active part of the process without ever implying its final determination (Haraway 1988, 595). If artistic research assumes the blurring of theory and practice, subject and object, then knowledge circulation is just one mutating element in the complex network in which it is enacted. Although CMM dealt with and supported more traditional forms of artistic and theoretical production, its engagement with the uncharted territory of new media artistic research also led to projects such as Biomediations, in which, as we will see, the experimental translation of academic knowledge went hand in hand with its dissemination to a wider audience.

2. Centro multimedia: instituting artistic research?

Since its inception in 1994, CMM has been housed at the National Center for the Arts (CENART) in Mexico City. This is a governmental complex located on a 1.3 million sq. ft. site that in addition to CMM hosts 5 national art schools – theater, dance, music, film, and visual arts –, 4 research centers and archives on these fields as well as concert halls and auditoriums, and a multidisciplinary art library. CENART sought to bring all these together “and allow students of the various disciplines to learn from and collaborate with each other” (Legorreta 1994). It was conceived as “the axis of a profound restructuring process in arts education in Mexico, creating an environment especially designed for the training of Mexican artists in the 21st century” (Di Castro 2006, 371). It was within this conceptual and spatial framework that CMM was inaugurated to provide “meeting points between different disciplines inside and outside the academic sphere” (Monreal 2020, 120).² The government’s economic support for this task was conspicuous. According to Escobedo Contreras, by 1993 more than 6 million dollars had been invested and, once it was inaugurated in 1994, two more millions of dollars were added (2015, 140).

CMM provided courses and workshops sharing “knowledge about the behavior of technical images, sound, interactivity and multimedia at large” (Monreal 2020, 127) for those other more traditional art schools lodged at CENART. From this perspective, CMM was expected to be a venue for artistic experimentation and knowledge dissemination by researching new media. In CENART’s ambitious program, CMM was defined as “a ‘common space’ to foster multimedia in different fields, such as dance, theatre, visual arts and music” (as cited in Monreal 2020, 119). As such, CMM was planned “for experimentation, research and knowledge production […] in which full time staff labored” (Monreal 2020, 119). It had a top-down structure with a team headed by a director and made up of area coordinators, programmers, designers, managerial and administrative staff, and interns. The original team included researchers and academics with graduate and undergraduate university degrees in computer programming, graphic design, and visual arts (Monreal 2020, 116).

In these conditions, CMM made new media operate as a hinge. Not only was it expected to connect the working of different art schools and research centers but also to turn academic knowledge and artistic know-how into cutting-edge research. For Andrea Di Castro, its first director, CMM had to experiment by gathering different workshops because “there was no school that taught you multimedia” (as cited in Monreal 2020, 117). That teaching, thus, had yet to be devised and disseminated. A step before what Borgdorff characterizes as artistic research in the early 2000s, CMM was dealing with new media and multimedia for “research and reflection” both for art practice and its criticism. “Thus, the ‘multimedia project’ entailed an artistic research plan, given that it produced knowledge on the artistic uses of technology, but it also implied the production of knowledge about media and sound and image behavior” (Monreal 2020, 130).

CMM was organized around a series of workshops – currently known as “labs” – devoted to research and production on the overlapping of artistic practice and new media technology “to provide possibilities for artists to experiment with cutting edge technological devices” (Quintero 2010, 472). Originally, there were 5 workshops: audio; graphic design; moving image; virtual reality; interactive systems, and digital publishing.³ The intertwining of these workshops still sustains a set of key programs that has come to define CMM’s operation:

Research and experimentation promotes interdisciplinary projects while aiming at “strengthening the research areas of CMM and producing new fields of knowledge from these disciplinary crossings” (Centro Multimedia 2009, 9).

Training in art and technology offers to the general public CMM’s technical capabilities by way of “courses, workshops, seminars and tutorships” (Centro Multimedia 2009, 11) that span from open access hardware to video managing for the living arts, low tech electronics and philosophy of technology.

Public programs comprise exhibitions, concerts, and performances. This program used to host the international video and electronic festival Transitio_MX (2005–2017), that promoted three initiatives – exhibitions, a Prize, and an international conference on digital technologies and electronic media.

Artistic residencies – running from 2003 to 2012 – and grants to “stimulate thinking and production in the field of digital-electronic media in México” open to artists and researchers nationwide (Centro Multimedia 2009, 21).

Along the lines of these different programs, some of the projects CMM produced since 1994 relied on new media to experiment in different degrees with various forms of knowledge and, also, with strategies for its dissemination.

As Monreal has pointed out, CMM originally centered its work in what it called “digital graphics.” This did not imply any specific visual style but the “use of images as signifiers that were used and reused, shifting from one media to another, being cut, pasted and edited” (Monreal 2020, 121). In this vein, many initiatives during CMM’s early existence translated images from different disciplines and media. Such is the case of Natura (Adriana Calatayud, 1997), that digitally combined geographical and anatomic representations to produce “hybrid images” (Centro Multimedia 2009, 73) or Monte Albán (C. Sentíes, J. L. García Nava, and M. Prieto, 1998) that produced an interactive virtual tour from archeological documents and remains of the Monte Albán archeological site in Oaxaca.

In 2004, 17 taxi drivers used cell phones to report their everyday life via a web platform. Initially gathered by new media artist Antoni Abad at CMM, they photographed, audio and videorecorded, tagged, and localized their actions in a collective map by means of GPS. sitio*TAXI (2004) was not just a collaborative digital redrawing of Mexico City by taxi drivers that challenged hegemonic media representations but also the enactment of a collective that resulted from technological mediation. As Abad (2004) recalls:

They hold regular face [to face] meetings, in which they analyse[d] the evolution of the webcasts and decide on the strategies to develop for their common matters. Visitors of the web site are able to provide their views, becoming active users of the communication device.

In Urban Parasites (2006–2007), Gilberto Esparza collaborated with the Electronic interfaces and robotics workshop to produce out of technological waste robots conceived as artificial life organisms that were capable of surviving in urban environments by extracting energy from the electric grid. These robotic parasites moved and emitted sounds to communicate and became part of the urban environment (Centro Multimedia 2009, 51). And, finally, Data Lab (2003–2005) was a 26-program TV educational series on art and technology made up of interviews, workshops, lived and recorded presentations aimed at reaching larger audiences. The series was mediated via a web page where the contents could be discussed and further developed. In different degrees, what these projects show is that CMM engaged with the experimental translation of disciplinary images, scientific knowledge on robotics, energy or archeology, and its dissemination via TV or collaborative web platforms.

3. A paradox at the core

According to Quintero (2010), CMM’s programs represented “a research and experimental process on the diverse possibilities that technologies brought from other fields” (474). It is especially telling that CMM was labeled a “centro” (or center) rather than a research institute, gallery or school. This points to the fact that it was not envisaged just to exhibit – but work with and research on – nontraditional artistic media in Mexico such as video, computer, and installation art. In this same vein, the Mexican federal government inaugurated two other “centros” in Mexico City in those years – Centro Cultural Ex Teresa Arte Actual in 1993 devoted to performance art, and Centro de la imagen in 1994, meant to showcase traditional photography as well as computer art, video, and electronic photography (Monreal 2020, 112–113). The CMM's very name stressed that its work was open to more flexible practices than those of an academic or artistic institution. Former CMM director, Tania Aedo (2004–2007), emphasizes this flexible condition when she argues that:

[i]f you have a Center and therefore a space where you can investigate, you can generate knowledge where this knowledge can be systematized in some way without stabilizing it and without making it a rigid program, then there is this possibility, from experimentation, to create a training program. (qt. in Jasso 2004, 25)

The pressing issue was how could knowledge be meaningfully systematized “without stabilizing it.” Since its very beginning, CMM was to operate from an unfolding condition given that, as noted by Di Castro, “A crucial point in the success of the project was the search for work-team members, devoted artists and technicians who were zealous in the pursuit of their own work, yet were facing a major challenge: self-training” (2006, 372). As collaborator at CMM since its inception, Humberto Jardón recalls “we felt that we belonged to a very special class of cultural workers, one that did not exist before us” (2011, 10). This seems to imply that as there really was not an established canonic knowledge to be transferred then CMM had to mutate with its own findings and experiments. This would explain why the Research and experimentation program aimed both at producing new fields of knowledge from disciplinary crossings and, at the same time, nurturing the different areas that made up CMM. These crossings took CMM original focus on “digital graphics” towards broader issues of digital media cultural politics – such as the reflection on the philosophical significance of new media and experiments on new media critique, and cultural appropriation in Mexico (Quintero 2010). Thus, from a narrower focus on multimedia and its artistic mediations in the 1990s, CMM went on to organize the First Technological Re-Writings National Forum in 2016, that gathered grassroots collectives beyond the new media art field to discuss the “emancipatory possibilities of new technologies” (Tisselli and Cortés 2016, 6).

Attending to its programmatic layout, CMM was meant to promote what art should become in a global neoliberal Mexico (Jasso 2004; Monreal 2020; Méndez Cota and López Cuenca 2020). Situating CMM’s experiment with multimedia alongside traditional understandings of art and art education as CENART did,

[c]learly resonated less with international trends in artistic experimentation and theory, than with the discursive agenda of a neoliberal government that sought to promote Mexico’s entry into global competition. Hence, the enthusiastic promotion of new media art was at least partly instrumental to the neoliberal agenda of reframing national culture in terms of ‘competitive’ attractiveness for international business and investment. (Méndez Cota and López Cuenca 2020, 6)

In this sense, CMM was a key representative of neoliberal cultural policy. As Monreal (2020) has argued, new media was wielded to destabilize traditional artistic pedagogies and to inaugurate a path for cultural modernization in a globalizing Mexico (171–172). CMM engaged in artistic research with new media but was tied to governmental institutional reform and its discourse of media market deregulation. For instance, it was tasked with developing web pages for public institutions and projects for museums, as well as training government workers in interactive tools and virtual environments (Monreal 2018, 278–279). Even though it funded it generously, “the government did not have a very clear line to follow regarding a center of such characteristics” (Jasso 2007, 28). Thus, while facing the prevalent conception of art at the time – as a unique object produced by an outstanding subject in isolation that the State supported, collected, and exhibited given its supposedly extraordinary condition –, CMM strived to develop more experimental, playful, and conceptually dense artistic practices. Some of these practices later were interwoven with complex social and technological processes that expanded beyond the neoliberal agenda of modernization and competitiveness that the Mexican government had promoted. The exceptional global digital response against neoliberal policies that the EZLN’s uprising originated (Vlavo 2018) would eventually permeate CMM. Former director, Tania Aedo, pointed out that “the Center tries to open up, to listen to concerns and create spaces for discussion” (qt. in Jasso 2004, 27) rather than to program events in a top-down manner or “stabilizing” the knowledge that it produced (25). This seems to convey that artistic experimentation at CMM could at least partially evolve into forms of critical multimedia literacy and political empowerment (Méndez Cota and López Cuenca 2020).

The rise of artistic research itself must also be located along these elusive lines set by the neoliberal ethos (Butt 2017; Holert 2020). As Sheikh (2009) has argued,

[t]he notion of knowledge production implies a certain placement of thinking, of ideas, within the present knowledge economy, i.e. the dematerialized production of current post-Fordist capitalism. And here we can see the interest of capital become visible in the current push for standardization of (art)education and its measurability, and for the molding of artistic work into the formats of learning and research. (6)

Artistic research imposes a demand on artistic practice to become some sort of discernible knowledge so that it can still be unpredictable and experimental yet useful and measurable. As we have seen, Borgdorff (2007) has emphasized that artistic research does not assume a separation of subject and object, a distance between the researcher and the practice of art, a gap between theory and practice (5). What was at play in this dissolution in the working of CMM was its capacity to intervene as a tool of neoliberal deregulation that stressed the destabilizing and productive edge of new media artistic practices. And, at the same time, this blurring enabled CMM to institute artistic research as experiments of knowledge dissemination and circulation that could not be easily framed within that neoliberal ethos.

Thus, while CMM is the direct result of changes in governmental policies regarding the role of new media and art in a broader political agenda, it also answers to specific social demands and artistic practices. Some of them engaged in experiments of knowledge translation, as the Transitio_MX Biomediations Festival shows. At the core of Biomediations was the translation of knowledge or, as Latour writes (1994, 32), its mediation. In this process of mediation, it is not only media that is at stake but the articulation and circulation of what is mediated. Then, what Biomediations mediated was the fundamentally, but unevenly, dialectical process in which institutionalized media “are involved in the general circulation of symbols in social life” (Silverstone 2002, 762).

4. Biomediations: writing a living book

One of CMM Public program’s projects, the biannual International Festival of Electronic Arts and Video Transitio_MX, is a representative token of how CMM could inscribe academic knowledge in the “different matter” of new media. The Festival dealt with specific themes and comprised exhibitions, a Prize, and an international conference. The profiles of its artistic directors – spanning from artists to academics and curators – and the range of issues that it covered tell of its heterogeneity. The list of topics and curators of the seven festivals is revealing in this regard:

Imaginaries in transit: poetics and technology (Iván Abreu, 2005)

Nomadic frontiers (Grace Quintanilla, 2007)

Autonomies of disagreement (Karla Villegas, 2009)

Collateral affections (Roberto Morales, 2011)

Biomediations (Joanna Zylinska, 2013)

Shared changes (Ricardo Dal Farra, 2015)

How shall we say ‘us’? (Pedro Soler, 2017)⁴

Tania Aedo characterized the singularity of the first Transitio_MX Festival in 2005 as a space that was “academic” and, also, “experimental” (qt. in Jasso 2004, 26). According to Aedo,

the festival is like a link, like a space for mediation, for connection, for party. The community of artists and theoreticians in collaboration with the State. Beyond the fact that the initiative of the festival should come from the Center, let’s say that the Center tries to open up, to listen to concerns and create spaces for discussion. (qt. in Jasso 2004, 27)

In this sense, Transitio_MX produced specific material forms to gather, translate, and disseminate highly heterogenous academic discourses and experimentations on new media. As Borgdorff (2007) has noted in his characterization of artistic research, a crucial component of the research process and its results is that “no fundamental separation exists between theory and practice” (5). What forms, then, did this blurring between theory and practice take at CMM? How was it specifically enacted?

The 2013 edition of Transitio_MX was devoted to the concept of “biomediations.” The Festival’s approach to the notions of “life” and “media” as well as the ways it disseminated them were a singular process of knowledge translation. Former Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, Joanna Zylinska, stated as the Festival artistic director:

Biomediations is a new word, it does not exist in Spanish or English. It is a term that can be understood at the corporal level, from two assumptions: (1) life mediated by cultural, social and artistic factors, and (2) electronic media as living entities – composed of biological and technical elements. The festival seeks to generate a dialogue between these two themes. (Zylinska 2013b, September 19)

Biomediations elaborated on this uncertain connection producing, as Latour has pointed out regarding his notion of “translation,” a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies two elements or agents (1994, 32). In this sense, the Festival experimented with different forms of knowledge mediation. It spread “in 7 venues with 63 participants from 15 countries, who present[ed] their work in the international exhibition and debate[d] and dialogue[d] in a symposium, in addition to eight workshops” (Rodríguez Tirado qt. in Machorro 2013). The goal of these multiple events was:

to offer ‘biomediations’ as a new framework for understanding the relationship between media, art and creation […] The Biomediations festival thus served as a laboratory in which various biomediations could unfold, be observed and then recorded on a performative level. (Zylinska 2021, 211)

In the curatorial statement, Zylinska delved into the philosophical and artistic challenges the Festival posed, in which different forms of media and life became its concrete “material semiotic actor.”

Focusing on ‘life’ understood philosophically, biologically and technologically, Transitio_MX05 showcases a wide range of living media that capture life: still and moving image, video and sound art, data visualisation and computer art, installation and performance. It also features bioart, a genre where genes, living tissue, blood, viruses and bacteria constitute the artist’s material. Last but not least, Transitio_MX05 critically engages with philosophies of life, with their accompanying notions of creation, duration, emergence, process and flow. (Zylinska 2013a)

One of the specific instances in which these experimentations between media and life circulated was Biomediations’ Living Book, wrote by a group of artists, professors, and students “gathered in a three-hour workshop to collaboratively ‘speed-edit’ an online reader on life and media” (Zylinska 2021, 209).⁵ A Living Book is a practice of knowledge mediation devised by publisher Open Humanities Press.

A living book is a curated, open access book about life – with life understood both philosophically and biologically – which provides multiple points of connection, translation, interrogation and contestation between the humanities and the sciences. A living book is itself ‘living’, in the sense that it remains open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating and remixing by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research – along with interactive maps, visualisations, podcasts and audio-visual material – into a book, the project is thus engaged in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative, non-profit, processual endeavour in the age of open access, open science, open knowledge and open education. (Hall 2013)

Biomediations’ engagement with book writing enmeshes it in a network of practices that pushes the limits of what is generally accepted as writing and academic knowledge. The point was “to experiment not just with concepts but also with modes of argument and expression through which concepts were being produced” (Zylinska 2021, 208). Writing meant, thus, copying, editing, sharing, and transforming preexisting texts, images and video recordings. But also, circulating what has been gathered in such a way that it kept mutating.

Hosted on a wiki, the books were positioned as ‘living’ in a metaphor­ical sense: they were open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by both their editors and readers […] Also, a living book was literally never to be finished: it was expected to gain ‘a life of its own’ online. (Zylinska 2021, 206)

A book that is never to be finished is not just a metaphor. An open-ended or unfixed book directly undermines key notions that underly the way academic knowledge is produced and circulated (Adema 2021, 199–200). In his demand for radical open access for academic knowledge, Gary Hall has deftly asked what is at stake in an experiment such as writing a Living Book.

What happens if and when writers and researchers stop attempting to transfer print-based aesthetics into the electronic medium and, as is already happening to a certain extent in the sciences and humanities (and in some contributions to Culture Machine), produce work that, although not entirely new or different, is nevertheless specific to the digital mode of publication; texts that are not restricted to the book or essay format, but that are ‘born digital,’ and are therefore perhaps not even recognizable as texts in the ink-on-paper sense? (Hall 2008, 63)

The academic assumption of notions of authorship, ownership, and originality are left in crisis. This experimental form of reading and writing academic and nonacademic knowledge does not conform to accepted values. It brings to the forefront “a number of extremely important ethical and political questions that are being raised by digitization concerning our relationship to knowledge, and concerning academic and institutional authority and legitimacy” (Hall 2008, 12). Who can publish? For whom? In what forms? How can knowledge be shared and appropriated? What is (and is not) acceptable to do with it? Who can benefit from this availability? In its very specific way, Biomediations’ Living Book experiment encapsulated some of the issues that CCM had been putting to the test, although it had not necessarily made them explicit.

5. Multimedia artistic research: towards a posthumanistic knowledge production?

Although CMM is originally trapped between the redefinition of artistic research and education and a commitment to the audiovisualization of culture that would characterize neoliberalism, the uncharted institutional territory it entered brought the center to support experiments that convened forms of posthumanistic knowledge production, as Biomedation’s Living Book shows.

Some definitions of posthumanism have tended to reduce it to “our co-constitutive entanglements with nonhuman entities” (Adams and Thompson 2016, 2), yet there are many forms posthumanist discourses and practices can take (Braidotti 2019; Colebrook 2014). We are specifically concerned here with the implications posthumanism entails for doing research and blurring the distance between theory and practice (Taylor and Bayley 2019). Ulmer notes that posthumanism as research methodology is characterized by being “situated and partial,” “material, embodied, and transcorporeal,” “interconnected and relational” and “processual” (2017, 5–6).

In this sense, as Cary Wolfe has argued, from a posthumanist perspective “the issue is not just what you’re doing (which is usually the easy and obvious part) but how you’re doing it. And this is a matter – in philosophy and in art – of the articulation of form and content […]” (2021, 324). This is why “it matters whether you have a humanist or posthumanist approach to the question of the ‘bio-’ of biopolitics and the thinking of ‘life’ in relation to political formations” (Wolfe, 327). And this was the point precisely at stake in Biomediations and its enquiry into life, media, art, and research.

If what artistic research has to offer to academia is “a change to the dominant knowledge model” (Briggs and Karlsson, 2), that is exactly what Biomediatons did. It directly hit core notions of the humanist worldview – human and nonhuman, life and death, art and knowledge. And the Living Book did so specifically with some of the dearest concepts of academic knowledge production – authorship, originality, ownership, book, writing. And this directly questions the notion of scholarly authorship that, as Adema (2021) has noted, “is integral to an increasingly hegemonic academic discourse related to originality and authority, to impact and responsibility, and linked to a humanist and romantic notion of the individual author-genius” (71). In her argument in favor of a posthumanist authorship, a critique of agency as a self-contained human capacity that authors exclusively exert is decisive. From her perspective, agency needs to reveal its collaborative and distributed condition. “Breaking down the barriers between human and nonhuman agency and acknowledging the agency of nonhumans, of material objects – among others, in scientific practices – while also refusing to take this human/nonhuman division for granted, would be a valuable starting point” (Adema 2021, 113). This precisely is the key assumption that seems to animate Biomediations and its Living Book, thus enacting a crucial tenet of artistic research – the blurring of subject and object, theory and practice.

The different forms of distributed agency that surge in the experiments of artistic research at work in Biomediations illuminate the path towards what can be termed a posthumanistic knowledge production and dissemination. One in which knowledge can operate in ways that differ “from the traditional liberal humanist model that comes replete with clichéd, ready-made (some would even say cowardly) ideas of proprietorial authorship, the book, originality, fixity, and the finished object” (Hall 2016, xiv). The way these notions have been invoked since the 1990s has made them complicit with neoliberal policies of market competitiveness and privatization. As this article has shown, while originating in these circumstances, CMM has also embraced some instances of situated knowledge translation that have eluded these ready-made ideas.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alberto López Cuenca

Alberto López Cuenca is Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy and Letters Faculty at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (México), where he teaches contemporary art theory. His research interests are Contemporary art history and theory, Intellectual Property and new cultural forms, creative labor, and urban geography. He has widely published and lectured on these topics, especially in Latin America. His contributions have been published in Afterall, Culture Machine, Third Text, Urban Studies and Revista de Occidente, among other journals.

Notes

1 According to Hannula, Suoranta, and Vadén (2005, 15–16) and Sullivan (2005, 21) this line has been developed mainly in the UK from a series of reports sponsored by the government (that of Frayling 1997 and another also from Thomas 2001 entitled Research Training in the Creative & Performing Arts & Design) and has spread to other countries such as Australia, where the pioneering report by Strand (1998) stands out.

2 Unless otherwise indicated in References, translations from texts originally published in Spanish were done by the author.

3 Electronic interfaces and robotics as well as a Research on art and technology workshops were later added. This last workshop started out from the idea of “generating research projects that dealt with contemporary issues, but that were located at the threshold of current debates, both in philosophy as well as in art” (Quintero 2010, 473). For a slightly different characterization of these workshops, see Di Castro (2006, 372).

4 This Festival’s edition was canceled due to an earthquake that severely hit Mexico City on September 17, 2017.

5 See: http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/w/page/69383731/Volume%206%20Biomediaciones%20%20Biomediations.