4 - Ludic Recycling in Latin American Art : From Remixing the City to Sampling Nature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
In this chapter I foreground an ecologically aware, ludic approach to crafting public art experiences, drawing primarily from interviews with four prominent Latin American artists. Conditions observable in the global South that influence these artworks include urban sprawl and shanty towns, electronics waste sites accumulating from the rapid production cycles of electronic hardware, and the environmental damage of natural habitats. My intent in this chapter is to offer a view into a field of public art production in Latin America where artists and critics have over the past few decades developed a sophisticated, yet inclusive visual, interactive, and playful dialogue with the public.
Keywords: Ludic Art, Public Art, Recycled Aesthetic, Environment, Latin American Studies, Urban Geography
From the derives of the Parisian Situationists in the 1950s, to the mixed reality games that London-based group Blast Theory played with mobile devices in the early 2000s, to more recent commercially produced augmented reality games like Niantic's Ingress and Pokémon Go, artists, architects, and designers have been experimenting with playing games in urban spaces (Schleiner ‘Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play’ 85). Meanwhile, artists and designers in Latin America, somewhat unrecognized by their gamic and media peers in the North, have also been developing ludic remixes of urban space, inspired by conditions and urban survival tactics in their own cities. As urban poverty, disparity in wealth, and precarity increase even within more wealthy nations, from homeless encampments in Los Angeles and San Francisco, to refugee camps in Europe, the work of Southern ludic recyclers also acquires Northern currency. Internationally exhibited artworks such as Mexican Rene C. Hayashi's playgrounds built from found materials in the shanty towns of Buenos Aires, Argentina and Jakarta, Indonesia, or Carolina Caycedo's CD of Shanty Sounds, a digital mix of ambient life and rap in Bogotá, Colombia, exhibited in the 2003 Venice Biennale, articulate a sophisticated aesthetics of ludic urban recycling and remixing that invites society's most marginalized to play. More recently, as I will discuss at the end of this chapter, some of these same artists are turning their attention from urban settings to samplings of nature that also address environmental concerns within the global South.
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- Transnational PlayPiracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games, pp. 81 - 94Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020