SIGGRAPH 2017: Unsettled Artifacts: Technological Speculations from Latin America

• SIGGRAPH 2017: 44th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques

• Paula Gaetano Adi -
  • Rhode Island School of Design

• Alejandro Borsani -
  • Rhode Island School of Design

For the first time in SIGGRAPH history, the Art Gallery is dedicated exclusively to works by Latin American artists and designers: speculative artifacts that apply digital technologies to map alternative futures. The gallery presents 10 provocative projects from seven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, and M?xico.

Uncertain. Agitated. Disobedient. Unstable. Troubled. Historically, the Latin American artifact has been, above all, an unsettled object of study. Recent decades have demonstrated the impossibility of reducing the Latin American artifact to a single homogeneous concept, simply because the idea of Latin America is itself unsettled. The SIGGRAPH 2017 Art Gallery illuminates this reality and reimagines possible new worlds. It explores technology-based artistic practices produced beyond the traditional centers of industrial and technological development in territory that is often underrepresented, excluded, or ignored in the global narrative, and it shares new insights on how Latin American artists create, adapt, and use technology to critically confront a rich cultural context shaped by long histories of imperialism, colonization, and global asymmetry.