Aesthetic and Design of Latin American Technology

Presenter 1: Dafne Cruz Porchini, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), “The artist Fermín Revueltas and the Visual Imaginaries of Technology in Mexico: the mural Allegory of Productivity (1934)”

• Summary: This essay will discuss the visual imaginaries of technology, developed by Fermín Revueltas (1901–35) in one of his last works, 1934 fresco mural Allegory of Productivity, commissioned by the Banco Nacional Hipotecario y de Obras Públicas de México (formerly Banobras). This commission presented the uneven developments between the emergent transformation of urban Mexico. Revueltas--who had participated very actively in the estridentista movement--not only transferred the aesthetic and visual program of modernity into the mural, but he also wanted to include content aimed at fostering a better exploitation of natural resources. The main "character" in this fresco is an engine or dynamo, an artifact also linked to labor. Similarly, the landscape appears populated by electrical cables, towers and chimneys. Revueltas had taken photographs of the industrial and rural environment of Mexico from where he surely took several models that, eventually, inspired some mural sections. In analyzing this large-format work in detail, I provide evidence on how Revueltas evokes a technological and industrial utopia in total correspondence with Mexico's post-revolutionary nationalist project at the time. The essay structure is the following: a) The artist and the mural in the context of postrevolutionary Mexico; b) The machinery aesthetics. A depiction; c) The possible visual models.

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Presenter 2: Leida Fernández Prieto, Institute of History, National Spanish Research Council (CSIC), "Trompe l'oeil of the Nation: Visual Aesthetics, Agriculture, and Slavery in Cuba"

• Summary: This chapter analyzes the aesthetics of slavery produced by colonial science sites through the Havana Botanical Garden. In other words, it seeks to answer how colonial science contributed to the narrative of whitening through a design of modernity, civilization and urban progress of the city, whose influence continues to this day where there are no architectural elements or monuments that rescue the enslaved within the collective memory of the city. By doing this, I argue that the colonial institution silenced the existence of slavery, including an informal cemetery for the enslaved, based on a design of modernity and leisure for the city that responded to the influence of the beautiful according to the ideal of French aesthetics, which crossed the borders of the Spanish empire. Traditionally, colonial science has been analyzed as uncontaminated by slavery within the historiography of Cuba. Also the aesthetics of slavery has paid more attention to the landscape and sugar factories since ecocriticism. In recent times, we have found new approaches that rescue the voices of the enslaved within the modernity of the city, where my work is inscribed from the intersection of the history of science, aesthetics, and slavery.​

Presenter 1: Vanessa Freije, University of Washington, "Imaginaries of Satellite Technology in Hidalgo, Mexico”

• Summary. In 1985, Mexico became the ninth country in the world to put a satellite into orbit. Launched nearly three decades after the so-called global space race began, government officials heralded a new era of “information sovereignty.” Not only would the country presumably be freed from imperialist control over communications, some described the satellite system as “rescuing [rural people] from marginality” by connecting far-flung communities seemingly overnight.[1] The rapid development of communications technology over the previous decades had raised pressing questions about the role that information should play in society: In whose hands was information safe? What did it mean to democratize information and whom did it benefit? These were questions that were debated in elite Mexican newspapers, academic circles, and halls of power. But the meanings and consequences of these new technologies were also acutely experienced and contested locally.
• In this paper, I will examine how local imaginaries of technology, modernization, and communication were shaped by the space satellite. Nearly two decades prior to Mexico’s satellite launch, the first satellite earth station was installed in Tulancingo, Hidalgo, just north of the Federal District. This station formed part of a broader government effort to increase the country’s broadcasting potential for the 1968 summer Olympics. The earth station would enable the Olympic Games, hosted by Mexico, to be broadcast live around the world for the first time.

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Presenter 2: Mikael Wolfe, Stanford University, "Visual and Aural Aesthetics of the 1970 Ten million-ton Sugar Harvest in Cuba”

• Summary. This presentation explores some of the visual and aural aesthetics of Cuba’s mass mobilization for the 10 million-ton sugar harvest of 1970. In November 1963, just over a month after Hurricane Flora struck eastern Cuba and caused unprecedented devastation to the eastern half of the archipelago, Fidel Castro announced that the country would produce at least 10 million tons of sugar in 1970. This would surpass the previous record of 7.2 million tons set in 1952 and be far above the highest yield since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. In addition to massive investments in agricultural machinery, irrigation, fertilizers, and transportation, the Cuban government also produced billboards, posters, print advertisements, and television broadcasts, to mobilize the population to achieve the ambitious goal, which fell short at a still record 8.5 million tons. There was even a popular musical band called “Los van van” based on the government slogan “Los 10 millones van” (the 10 million tons move forward), a band which virtually all Cubans to this day know about. How these visual and aural aesthetic dimensions of the 1970 sugar harvest influenced this mass mobilization is the focus of the presentation.

[1] “SCT: el Morelos I rescatará de la marginación a los mexicanos,” El Universal, December 8, 1986.

Presenter 1: Mónica Salas Landa, Lafayette College, “A Postcard View of Progress:” Pemex’s Visual Propaganda and the Aesthetics of Mexico’s Technological Nationalism, 1950”

• Summary. The 1938 Mexican oil expropriation has been the subject of substantial study among scholars of post-revolutionary Mexico. In addition to the legal and labor conflicts that prompted it, academics have begun to pay more attention to the propagandistic efforts that the Cardenista state, through the Department of Press and Publicity (DAPP), carried out to increase the authority of the government and build support for its proposed economic nationalism. According to these studies, there were two different discourses that animated this nationalist oil propaganda: one "radical and anti-imperialist" (emphasizing the nation’s need to break with economic subjugation and exploitation) and the other "traditional and patriotic" (emphasizing the nation’s integrity and sovereignty). While these studies have enriched the literature on oil nationalism, the state's invocation of technology has nevertheless received little attention, even though the visual materials produced by the DAPP demonstrate that the revolutionary regime made a concerted effort to transform oil infrastructures into icons and actors in the nationalist spectacle that would frame the expropriation of the oil industry and its subsequent expansion by the state oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX).
• This chapter analyzes how, after the disappearance of the DAPP and the Cardenista project, the postrevolutionary regime continued to invest materially and ideologically in oil infrastructure developments and, in doing so, fabricated a distinctive "technological nationalism." To determine how this process developed and how it acquired affective purchase by midcentury, my analysis focuses on PEMEX's corporate advertising and propaganda. Through consumer ads, pro-government articles, and touristic brochures, PEMEX sought to reinforce the notion that drilling rigs, storage tanks, and refineries were visible symbols and conduits of revolutionary achievements: emblems of national progress, modernity, and development. By exposing the representational strategies of PEMEX's publicity campaign I will demonstrate how the technological nationalism that PEMEX fueled through it, prompted Mexicans not only to be consumers and spectators of an industrial-driven modernity but also to overlook its human, environmental, and political costs.

 
Presenter 2: Lucas Erichsen, Instituto Nacional da Mata Atlântica - Brasil. Places for a first and last look: slaughterhouses, aesthetics, and technology in 19th Brazil.

• Summary: Eating animal meat is an act inseparable from human history, topologically dispersed, immersed in different historicity, and by a multitude of things: evolutionary, biological, gustatory, cultural, technological, aesthetic, economic, ecological, ethical, and perceptual elements. It was throughout the 19th century that public slaughterhouses emerged, places built by the State where killing animals for human consumption was regulated and conducted. Public slaughterhouses were also environments of constant interaction with the biophysical world and spaces constituted by the insertion and development of technologies, techniques, and gradual recognition of aesthetic elements that combined, aligned with the production and distribution of meat in Rio de Janeiro. 
• My essay explores three public slaughterhouses in Rio de Janeiro between 1854 and 1882. It was during this period that Rio de Janeiro underwent intense transformations and where we can find three public slaughterhouses in operation. Analyzing this junction illuminates how the State, conceptions of modernity, technology, and aesthetics played a significant role in the history of one of the activities most rooted in Brazilian culture and still neglected in Brazilian historiography, in the history of technology and the history of Brazil."  

Pete Soland, “A Bird’s Eye View of Latin America: Aviation Technology and High Modernism in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru”

• Summary: The innovation of aerodyne flight at the end of the nineteenth century sparked popular enthusiasm worldwide, and inspired modernity-obsessed nation builders across Latin America to reimagine their countries, quite literally from the top-down. Aeronautics technology provided wealthy playboys, revolutionary fighters, artists, intellectuals, and even city-planning bureaucrats an empowering vantagepoint from which to re-order their world. Aviation not only promised a speedier means of traversing terrain where it was difficult to build roads and railways, but also, as James Scott noted, the view from the cockpit “flattened the topography as it were a canvas” and “encouraged new aspirations to ‘synoptic’ vision, rational control, planning, and social order.” Political leaders, in particular, viewed airplanes as tools for achieving national unity by overcoming geographic obstacles like the Amazon frontier, the Andes mountains, and the ruggedly diverse landscapes of Mexico. The technology’s war-time applications also earned it admirers among military circles, during a time when armies frequently wielded significant influence in the national affairs of their respective countries. 
• In this essay I examine how the development of aviation in countries like Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru contributed to the aesthetics of so-called high modernism throughout Latin America during the first half of the twentieth century. The proliferation of airplanes across Latin American skies made a bird’s-eye view of the region possible, which proved crucial to national modernization efforts that relied on the visual simplification of both land and people. I argue that the aviation aesthetic tended towards a homogenizing effect that typically rewarded the authoritarian impulses of state-builders, regardless of political ideology.

Presenter 1: Francisco G. Tijerina Martínez, Washington University in St. Louis, "From the Cosmopolitan to the Planetary: Ecological Aesthetics in Contemporary Mexican Haikus"

• Summary: In the context of the intersection between our current climate crisis and late capitalism, I explore the cultural significance of minimalist poetry, specifically haikus, in the Mexican context of the last century. Drawing from Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s Otro día… (poemas sintéticos), a contemporary response to José Juan Tablada’s Un día… (poemas sintéticos), I seek out how ongoing aesthetic practices use digital tools, such as search engines and the images sent on the Voyager in the 70s, as a methodology to critique the trinomial globalization-capitalism-anthropocentrism. By analyzing both texts side by side, I aim to shed light on the social anxieties that inspired the publication of each book. On the one hand, we have José Juan Tablada as a key actor of cosmopolitanism who imported the haiku as a software update that reinvented poetry written in Spanish. While he was an already well-known member of the Mexican intelligentsia due to his participation in the Modernismo movement, this contribution helped consolidate him as a prominent figure of the Mexican avant-garde. On the other hand, we have Verónica Gerber Bicecci and her rewriting of Tablada’s text as a response not only to the myths of globalization and progress, but to the centrality of men and humans as the structural axis of our daily practices. By resignifying Tablada’s effort, which was linked to the goals of Latin American avant-garde movements and intellectuals, Gerber Bicecci manages to point not to a global perspective but to a planetary approach on literature and its cultural referents. The stress she puts onto these categories is, as Susan Stanford Friedman states, a work that encompasses “multitudes on a global grid of relational networks”, including those who have been obscured by the binary dichotomies like human/non-human and men/women.

 
Presenter 2: Yohad Zacarias, University of Texas. Austin, "Aesthetics of lighting: Electrical substations and the extension of technology in Santiago de Chile. 1900-1940"

• Summary: This presentation will explore the technological and urban consequences of the insertion of the first lighting and electrical substations in Santiago de Chile between 1900 and 1940. Based on the photography from the Electric Company historic Archive, newspapers, engineer's documents (Instituto de Ingenieros de Chile), and municipal and business sources (Actas de la Municipalidad de Santiago), the presentation will expose how the construction and development of the first lighting and electrical substations presented a series of material and aesthetic inequalities in the city. First, I will explore how the electrical substations –that fed the urban center– were installed in the periphery, where people only had gas or kerosene, evidencing a technological coexistence for the users. This technical expansion also led to an increase in the urban radius in previously considered peripheral and the beginning of the first techno-electrical experiences by the inhabitants of Santiago in public spaces. Depending on the location of their places of residence and how far –or not– from the center they were in, they experienced electricity in lighting and electrical substations in different ways. Finally, electrical supply networks, such as substations, exemplify that the inhabitants of sectors far from the urban radius did not have access to this electricity but did cohabit with electrical elements. Second, I will mention how, in the urban center, the electrification of public buildings and the installation of lighting with a modern decorative aesthetic purpose were chosen. In this first part, European and North American electrical transfers are evidenced in the urban space, showing a model of European extension but with North American touches in its materiality in the city. To conclude, my project's significance is evidence of the conformation of urban spaces with the extension of technology and its aesthetics in Santiago. Beyond the notions of progress and modernization associated with the insertion of electricity in cities, the article seeks to exemplify the specificities -and inequalities- of the urban ramification of this energy in Santiago and thus compare it with other Latin American capitals.

Yovanna Pineda, University of Central Florida, "Caudillo Techno-Aesthetics"
Moderator: Mikael Wolfe, Stanford University
Abstract: Caudillo Techno-Aesthetics

In this chapter, I examine the language and aesthetics that liberal elites used to promote their vision of the countryside as a space to advance science and technology before 1880.  They perceived an empty space requiring the use of science and technology to develop the land for the convenience of human settlers. The goal was to convert this space to productive land was for the international exchange of commodities.

Drawing on archival materials, fieldwork, literature, traveler accounts, lore, and material culture, the elite developed a secular discourse of science and technology to be embedded in culture as common sense.  As prolific writers, thinkers, and administrators of the nineteenth century, Eduardo Olivera, Domingo Sarmiento, Estanislao Zeballos, and many others invented the language that would become the foundation for Argentina’s imagined destiny or future (el porvenir) as a civilized, modern nation. Their books were translated in different languages and widely read during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their narrativity represented the logic of the period. These writers, along with others, created an identity for future generations to emulate, accept, or contest—and continue to reproduce or build upon. 

Update: Owed to Hurricane Nicole arriving to central Florida on 11/10, Yovanna's talk will be rescheduled to December 8 and will present together with Diana Montaño. 

• Presenter: Yovanna Pineda, University of Central Florida, "The Techno-aesthetics of rural men, farm machine repair, and climate in modern Argentina"
• Discussant & Moderator: Diana J. Montano
• Summary:  Rural men constructed different masculinities according to available physical, ecological, and social resources in the Argentine pampas region. During the twentieth century, the pampas was fertile land for crop farming, but was also prone to drought, excessive rains, and locust invasions. Different types of rural crises threatened men’s sense of masculinity as providers of the family farm, but it also offered opportunities to reshape and create new male identities. Farm communities developed an alternative narrative of rural spaces through the use, repair, and design of heavy farm machinery, in particular the combine harvester in the breadbasket region of Santa Fe province. Regardless of the task, men, engaged in manual labor on a farm or skilled in operating, designing or repairing machinery, were considered honorable men that could weather the adversities of the region’s challenging ecology. Drawing from archives, interviews, material culture, media studies, and ethnography, this proposed paper examines the intersection of ecology, repair, and masculine identity. The case study is from the communities in and near San Vicente, Santa Fe Province. It suggests that the town celebrated the harvester as a provider of family and became central to local male identity.
• Related topic of the paper - https://repair.uni.lu/blog/spaces-of-design-repair-in-twentieth-century-...

Thursday, 10/13/22, 1:00pm-2:30pm EDT 

• Presenter--Lucas Erichsen, Instituto Nacional da Mata Atlântica - Brasil. Places for a first and last look: slaughterhouses, aesthetics, and technology in 19th Brazil.

• Moderator: Yovanna Pineda 

Abstract: 
Eating animal meat is an act inseparable from human history, topologically dispersed, immersed in different historicity, and by a multitude of things: evolutionary, biological, gustatory, cultural, technological, aesthetic, economic, ecological, ethical, and perceptual elements. It was throughout the 19th century that public slaughterhouses emerged, places built by the State where killing animals for human consumption was regulated and conducted. Public slaughterhouses were also environments of constant interaction with the biophysical world and spaces constituted by the insertion and development of technologies, techniques, and gradual recognition of aesthetic elements that combined, aligned with the production and distribution of meat in Rio de Janeiro. 
My essay explores three public slaughterhouses in Rio de Janeiro between 1854 and 1882. It was during this period that Rio de Janeiro underwent intense transformations and where we can find three public slaughterhouses in operation. Analyzing this junction illuminates how the State, conceptions of modernity, technology, and aesthetics played a significant role in the history of one of the activities most rooted in Brazilian culture and still neglected in Brazilian historiography, in the history of technology and the history of Brazil."    
 

September 8, 2022 - First Round 

• Presenter: Daniel Rebouças, Federal University of Bahia, Electric paths: chapters on the representations and social revolts of the electric tram (Salvador, Bahia, Brazil; 1897-1930)
• Moderator: Yovanna Pineda

 
Daniel Rebouças, Federal University of Bahia
Short Bio: Daniel Rebouças is doctor of history at the Federal University of Bahia. He is a group member of "History of Humour in Brazil (1989-1930)/ University of São Paulo, Brazil" and authored The City of Bahia and the Electricity: A political, economic, human and cultural approach, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century (Salvador: Caramurê Publishing house, 2018).
Presentation title: Electric paths: chapters on the representations and social revolts of the electric tram (Salvador, Bahia, Brazil; 1897-1930)     
Abstract: This essay examines the social and political relations between part of the population of Salvador, capital of the State of Bahia, and one of the greatest electrical inventions of the late 19th century: the electric streetcar. From the immense initial expectations around the new means of transport, the article shows how this invention came to be seen – and represented – as a synonym of violence, social oppression and a symbol of the nationalist struggle, in the 1930s. For this, I will mainly use series of photographs deposited in the Siemens Museum Archive, in Berlin, in the Neoenergia Archive, an electric energy company in Bahia and in the Public Archive of the State of Bahia.
 
Documents are posted via our Google Drive. Please join the group to receive the link to the papers. If you have joined the group and still have not received the link, please email Yovanna Pineda at ypineda@ucf.edu to receive the link and/or paper. Thank you for your interest in our group! 
 

October 13, 2022

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• Presenter #1-Yohad Zacarias, University of Texas. Austin. The aesthetics of lighting and electrical substations and the unequal extension of technology in urban space. Santiago de Chile. 1900-1930.

• Presenter #2-Lucas Erichsen. Places for a first and last look: slaughterhouses, aesthetics, and technology in 19th Brazil