About the cover for volume 7

The invitation to create the cover for this volume of Tapuya has as its background an academic event whose repercussions will endure: the Trans-hemispheric Seminar on Race and the History of Technology, organized by the editors of History + Technology and Tapuya at Drexel University in Philadelphia, in September 2023. This seminar marks a turning point in terms of the type of discussions that normally take place around disciplines such as the History of Technology or STS, not only by geographically decentering these discussions from the Global North, but also by challenging many of the precepts of the discipline and field, as well as their methodologies and their epistemological margins.

Having this as a background, and as a horizon one of the central questions that this volume of Tapuya asks – “What is the future of facts in Latin America?” – the cover tries to put into dialogue our common representations about science with a visuality close to the aesthetic development of Latin America, which departs from conventional imaginations of science and technology.

The invitation from Vivette García Deister, Editor-in-Chief, was accompanied by a provocation to think about the relationship between the production of science, the development of technology, and the project of modernity. At the center of this relationship is a certain notion of objectivity, which according to modern thought is an ontological fact to which science and technology aspire. Contrary to this premise, displacing thought about science and technology from the project of modernity supposes, among other things, thinking about objectivity as the result of a discursive and institutional construction. This construction is coupled with the complex articulation of the nation state as a political representation of the modern project. In this sense, it is not surprising that the efforts to develop science and technology in the last century have been monopolized by the State, and that these initiatives are highly intertwined with the development and national identity discourses of modern states.

The link between modernity, science, technology, and the State is not at all foreign to the national narratives of Latin American countries. A particular case is Mexico, whose muralist artistic tradition, closely linked to the project of creating a post-revolutionary national identity, is heavily populated with representations of science and technology. In parallel with José Vasconcelos’ origin myth of the union between a traditional indigenous past and a modernity of European origin, what these representations portray is a trajectory that directs us from a series of traditional technologies focused on agriculture, towards a technological future of modern machinery, motorized transportation, state-of-the-art telecommunications, and cutting-edge science. More than a synthesis, what these representations offer us is a project with an unmistakable linear temporality. A past that is recognized, but that remains buried in the face of the imperatives of development. The ambiguity of technology is portrayed above all in the criticism of warmongering adopted by some muralists. The machine can be both an instrument of war and a means for liberation and development when the State puts it to work in favor of the development of the people.

More than once this narrative has been challenged and problematized in recent decades. The paternalistic place of the State, which for decades occupied the imagination of science and technology in our region, is now open to discussions about a “science from below” or a social appropriation of technologies, which aims to pluralize spaces, the agents, and epistemological assumptions of technological development. Likewise, the racialized and predominantly male characterization of scientific and technological development, which reinforced the linearity of the narrative between past and present/tradition and modernity, is now problematized to make space for a series of narratives that allows us to think about multidirectionality – both temporal and geographical – of technological development.

This series of critiques makes it more difficult than ever to think about the future of facts, but at the same time, it opens up great potential for thinking about alternative modernities, where the very principle of objectivity can be challenged to give rise to new forms, spaces, agents, and methodologies for the construction of knowledge.

The cover of this issue tries to synthesize some of these reflections by recuperating one of the figures that is constantly reiterated as a representation of science in twentieth-century Mexican murals. From the famous murals of UNAM's central campus (http://www.comitedeanalisis.unam.mx/murales.html) in Mexico, through the murals of the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation (https://elmirador.sct.gob.mx/reportajes-especiales/los-murales-del-centro-scop-ii), to the remarkable Man Controller of the Universe (https://museopalaciodebellasartes.inba.gob.mx/el-hombre-controlador-del-universo/) by Diego Rivera, the figure of the atom is a representation of modernity and the possibility of control over nature. The illustration on the cover tries to appropriate and subvert this symbol by synthesizing it with the aesthetics of the Talavera of Puebla. Not only is this an aesthetic gesture to think about our representations of science and technology from a different visuality, but also to subvert the narratives of development and control linked to these representations. This cover is an invitation to think about and from other spaces and other dimensions of science and technology, to open up the possibility of an alternative future.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leonardo Aranda

Leonardo Aranda (https://medialabmx.org/leonardo/statement.html) is an electronic artist and media scholar from Mexico City. He holds a PhD in Media Study from SUNY Buffalo, a master's in philosophy from UNAM, and a bachelor's in visual arts from UAEM. He is the director of Medialabmx, a non-profit research organization focused on the links between art, technology, and politics. His work focuses mainly on the use of new media and the possible intersections with politics, participation, and citizenship. He has exhibited internationally in group exhibitions and festivals in Mexico, Germany, Russia, Austria, the United States, Spain, Canada, and Brazil. Leonardo worked as a researcher in the Multimedia Center in Mexico City from 2009 to 2012. In 2015, he was part of the curatorial team of Transitio_MX 06 International Electronic Arts Festival. In 2016, he participated in IDEAS CITY Detroit, at the New Museum. In 2017 he was part of Interactivos at Medialab-Prado, Madrid, and of Radical Networks in Brooklyn, NY, and he was a resident of the Solitude- ZKM web residency program in 2020. His work is part of the Electronic Literature Organization, third and fourth collections. He was a visiting professor at the Department of Art and Humanities at UAM-Lerma and was recently a fellow at the New School Institute for Critical Social Inquiry in NY. He currently teaches in the Doctoral Program in Technoaesthetics at the Tres de Febrero University in Argentina. His academic work has been presented in conferences such as SHOT (2018) and published in journals such as Actio Journal of Technology in Design, Film Arts and Visual Communication, International Journal of Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace, and Theory: Journal of the College of Philosophy, UNAM. He recently participated in the History+Technology/Tapuya Trans-Hemispheric Seminar on Race and the History of Technology.