Aesthetic and Design of Latin American Technology

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.