South@North@South
From REMAP
Fabian Wagmister
http://bigriver.remap.ucla.edu/sanas/
As part of an evolving long-term multi-year international research, exchange and creative collaboration between the UC-Digital Arts Research Network (UC DARNet) and the Centro Hipermediático Experimental Latinoamericano (cheLA), sanas is a project that it is at once cross-cultural dialogue, technological research, and public art production. This multilayered, multidisciplinary process seeks to investigate and generate a set of tools and processes for meaningful dialogues and exchanges between artists and akin communities from California and Argentina. We believe that such relational approach and collaboration would result in better understanding of both the local specificities and boundary-less commonalities of the rapidly evolving socio-cultural technological environments and their identity-defining effects. Ultimately the project’s objective is to enable the participating individuals and communities to take an active and self-determining stance towards technology.
Three specifically conceived researched projects by UC DARnet members converged to generate a comprehensive set of design specifications, functionalities, and interfaces for an integrative technological distributed system. The fundamental interconnectivity sought in this system is the enabling building block for these three projects and the longer-term UC DARnet-cheLA collaboration.
To realize the relational objectives and potentials of this approach the three UC artists and two graduate student researchers engaged in a rigorous in-residence research, development, and production program at cheLA. This farreaching concerted effort involving local partners, high-level technologists, and community groups is constructed and presented as a distributed form of performative public artwork.
