It is an uncertain moment of the 19th century or barely the beginning of the 20th; the setting is a Viennese-like coffeehouse with well-dressed gentlemen and good Catholic (alcoholic) women who are listening to the sounds of avant-garde composers working with strange electric sine waves performed by an eccentric composer very much influenced by the objective sounds cast by the trajectory of Mars, or the Selenite inhabitants of Earth’s own natural satellite. And even if no one knows how to behave, everyone is properly silent, as this seems to be the trend of the moment. They are dressed (depressed) in what appears to be in vogue in European fashion, as they sip wine or nod to each other across the hall. Outside of this white-gallery landscape, sweaty indigenous masses are crowding the streets, riding the subway to and from work, which they perform in miserable sweatshop conditions. But it is not the 19th century; it is the Mexican new media scene of the 21st century. And even it computers are present and globalization is sweeping the world – with peasants meanwhile sowing transgenic corn imported from the USA on the lands that gave birth to maize itself – they are not used as the indispensable hardware to process and access information in a networked world, but as a tool for virtuosos that allows social mobility; instead of being a liberation instrument, they are more of a status-quo accessory.
If at the beginning of the 1920s the Mexican modernists were using technologies such as the photographic camera, typewriter, radio, printing press, film and of course murals to communicate with the faceless oppressed proletariat masses on issues at the time regarded as revolutionary, ranging from public health, education, running water, the electrification and industrialization of cities, to class and race issues – 70 years later, during the last decade of the 20th century, Indie writers and artists were using the zine as a means to link their bedroom rants into a broader inter-city network, spending their hard-earned pesos on self-publishing their texts and doing lo-fi reproductions of their visuals, music and even videos on what would be a very well-linked communication system of artists and activists, who nevertheless, even if media savvy, failed to counter-attack basically all manifestations of corporate media, let alone create many successful media outlets that still exist (of course, there are some outstanding examples). In fact, at most what the members of this generation were able to achieve was to assimilate themselves as specialized technical workers into the same mainstream media they passionately declared to hate. Where are these zines nowadays? Or were they just objects used to catapult careers into the skyrocket heavens of bureaucratic art and culture institutions and commercial conglomerate media?
In the middle of the 1990s, a state institution in Tijuana went so far as to say they wanted to print an »institutional zine« (as if something like this can possibly exist), then brought together what they considered the best »pens« in the local alternative scene and offered to give some quality and recognition to the publications. This meant better paper, similar to brown paper lunch bags. They used the same tabloid format as »Cinemátik« (an autonomous publication on electronic, rave and street culture done by a few high school teenagers), and imitated the logo, an ellipse with the name of the magazine inside it. The title of the »institutional zine« was »El Puente,« which literally means »the bridge.« This successfully camouflaged the disloyal competition move behind a game of mirrors and a mirage-like metaphorical title like »the bridge,« which could have looked like an innocent enough attempt by the cultural managers to give something back to the independent scene, even if none of the participants in the publication received a fee. Additional evidence of a corporate scam is that the publication was distributed free of charge, while the lesser, uglier zines cost from a couple of cents to as much as a few dollars. The result was that publications such as »Cinemátik« (which was edited and designed on my PC with contributions from many other teenage friends, and which was able to generate enough income to print one thousand copies, allowing us to buy electronic equipment for audio, photo, video, etc and even to give money grants and lend equipment to colleagues) were forced to disappear. The institutional zine had a strong impact in economic terms, both making it hard to compete with something that looked more professional and being given away for free. On the other hand, it created a divide between the artists and writers who were included and those who were not. We were included, but that only made it harder for us, as inadvertently we became complicit in our own demise. Ten years later, it would be interesting to ask what happened to many of the contributors to »El Puente«: Where have they gone? What are they doing today?
With the introduction of the Internet, and of the telcos and dot coms, many of the previously printed initiatives experienced a premature revival, and the middle-class electronic Indie bohemia was brought back to life in what it seemed to be a pixel bonanza where anything could happen. Networks were built, and all email addresses were perfect candidates to become hostages of mailing lists. Everyone was a dot com entrepreneur, castles were made of html and thankfully not everything that shined was Flash. Virtual communities that aspired to become civilizations were popping up like mushrooms on every server, and this of course brought inspiration and endless opportunities to my generation. We were back on track and this time it didn’t mean lighting fire to whatever money we could get a hold of. We slowly started a whole new routine, which meant having a real life in boring suburbias during the work and/or school hours, and then a virtual life on the vast and infinite Net. But meanwhile the Internet scene didn’t mean much to people looking for concrete material results in the form of books or exhibitions. For others, the borders between real and virtual life became blurry. In my case, I became the editor of »Sputnik,« a printed and online digital culture magazine that had national distribution and an FM radio show. Writers all over Mexico were discussing word-processing techniques, the pros and cons of writing with ink on paper, and even electronic books, which were promising to kill the publishing industry in the weeks to come.
At the same time, a different political party won the elections for the first time in more than 70 years – this meant democracy. This meant transparency was to come, access to information; soon everyone would be able create their own weblog. The big loser in the presidential election had promised »English and computers as basic education,« which everybody in Mexico wanted. But even if modernity was a thing of the past under the new regime, this didn’t mean a return to antiquity, but was more like an unfulfilled promise: The bodies of hundreds of women who had worked in transnational factories were being found one by one; an indigenous rebellion in the southeast was being led by a Mestizo subcomandante wearing a mask and asking not for revolution but for recognition of the right to autonomous education, health, equal rights and opportunities; agricultural workers were fighting against the federal government’s plans to reclaim their lands in order to build a newer international airport for Mexico City; the millions of Mexicans migrating over decades into the USA for economic reasons developed into the most important revenue source for the country, even above oil and tourism, becoming more visible and soon organizing themselves, creating alternative economic networks and even calling a nationwide strike using sites like myspace.com. The digital divide, which became a priority for the first so-called democratic government in Mexico, also made more visible the urgent need for education, health and other issues. But no, the priority still was computers and Microsoft software, even for open-air schools or regions without electricity. And in the metropolitan areas, a newer form of expression was introduced in the salons. It became known as net art. Many of the proponents argued for the term web art or even net.art, or that everyone could access this art from any computer without having the need to go to a museum or travel to another city. But who could read such works? What kind of education and cultural references were needed? Let alone what type of processor or DSL connection. Net art in Mexico made excellent art for embassies.
Five years later it was almost time for another presidential election. At that time I decided to start a new enterprise, »Sab0t«1, a tabloid to bring some of the subversive net.culture and art strategies into the streets and the world of activism, as opposed to bringing activism into the galleries. It was then that Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos made a timely reappearance out of the Lacandon jungle, calling on civil society to meet with the Zapatistas. I was among those naive city-dwellers who traveled for hours to a land without cement or running water, wet-dreaming of proposing to him borderhack and interactive telenovelas for Zapatistas. What happened instead was an exchange. I came back from their village with the idea of setting up a cooperative server based on their autonomous towns, and so possibleworlds.org was born. Soon the Zapatistas hosted their website on possibleworlds.org in support of the server, and so have another 40 or so artistic, collective, literary and social projects mainly from Mexico, but also from Germany, Peru, Spain, USA, etc. It is there that an online mediatheque, a virtual community bank2, was set up to lend and grant money to like-minded projects (yet we still can’t print our own money). Independent art and social projects, and even telenovelas have been published on possible worlds, the last one of them »Fea y rebelde« (»Ugly and Rebellious,« a free version of the Colombian series »Ugly Betty / Verliebt in Berlin« and the Argentinean RBD soap opera, with involuntary cameos by the Colombian singer Shakira and Subcomandante Marcos). »Fea y rebelde« was censored by Youtube upon the petition of Televisa regarding alleged copyright infringement. As I write this, possibleworlds.org is to open an autonomous research and production space3. The paper and the pixels are being remixed, and the idea that another world is possible, like the never-ending beat, just goes on and on.