South American Visionaries in Digital Art

In the exhibition, machines chat with each other, give voice to the cosmic silence, resist technological domination, and recite poetry.

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In his March 1971 Arteônica exhibition, computer art pioneer Waldemar Cordeiro (Brazilian, born Italy, 1925–1973) brought together South American innovators who were creating art using electronic technology.

These creators were part of the artistic movement of the same name, led by Cordeiro between 1969 and 1973 in Brazil. Today, five decades later, this movement is more relevant than ever due to its critical reflection on technology’s role in society.

These pioneers began to form the history of electronic art in Latin America. At the 1971 exhibition, the public had a rare opportunity to see works made with computers, a novelty at the time, when only a few first world countries had ventured into digital art.

Now, in Long Beach, the public has the opportunity to be amazed by electronic works created in the 1960s by Cordeiro as well as works from subsequent decades by other extraordinary exponents of the Arteônica movement from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru.

The works have been assembled for the exhibition Arteônica: Art, Science, and Technology in Latin America Today, on view at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) through February 23, 2025. The show is part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, an initiative presented by Getty that includes art-related activities of various kinds at museums and other institutions across Southern California.

“Cordeiro was a visionary who saw technology as a democratizing tool for art and culture with the ability to reach the most dispersed corners of his extensive country,” explains Gabriela Urtiaga, MOLAA’s chief curator and director of the exhibition.

The works of the pioneers share space with those of artists who have continued the legacy of the founders in the galleries painted in the blue tone that evokes the computer screens of the past.

The Telephone Game

A prime example of these imaginative works is Fala (the Portuguese word for “speak”), which has been evolving since 2011. The idea resulted from Brazilian artists Rejane Cantoni (b. 1959) and Leonardo Crescenti (1954–2018) wondering what would happen if devices could talk to each other and what kind of conversation they would have. The pair concluded that it is an “invisible” conversation. But Fala achieved the impossible by providing a visual for the machines’ discussion.

The work consists of an independent, interactive talking machine, made up of 40 cell phones. “It is designed,” explains Cantoni, “to establish automatic communication and synchronization between humans and machines, and between machines and machines.”

In the montage, the mobile devices are arranged like choristers on a stage under the spotlights, ready to perform a beautiful symphony. The baton is a microphone, and the conductor is the viewer who says a word to begin a harmonious dialogue with the terms that the devices produce.

The cell phones are autonomous conversationalists that capture the word provided by the human and “speak!” They utter a synonym or phonetically similar term and also display it on their screen. When the viewer hears and sees the word, the person-machine and machine-machine dialogue is underway.

If the observer says “house,” the device might respond “home,” “roof,” “window,” or, given the phonetic similarities, “mouse,” and so on. With Fala, the dialogue begins one way, but its ending is uncertain, like in the Telephone Game. The human remains in control; if there is no human intervention, Fala will go on talking forever.

Spinning the universe

Khipu Electrotextile Pre-Hispanic Computer is another of the ingenious works exhibited at MOLAA. Conceived by Chilean electronic artist Constanza Piña (b. 1984), the piece consists of a stone on which there is an antenna connected to a lavish 10- to 16-foot-long “fan” with 180 threads that seem to fly into infinity. Although the installation looks like a fan, it is actually a re-creation of a khipu (Quechua word for “knot”).

Khipus were used by pre-Columbian cultures, particularly the Inca Empire. They were strands of hand-knotted string made of wool or other organic materials. According to researchers, most of the khipus were destroyed by Spanish colonizers and only a few survive, yet we are still unable to decipher them.

In today’s terms, khipus were portable computers that recorded important activities, such as censuses, taxes, calendars, food reserves, etc. The spinners, known as quipucamayocs (the programmers of the time), encoded the strings by making knots and then reading the knotted information to the chieftains to help them govern. “The knots communicated the wisdom of the ancient Andean civilizations,” explains Piña.

This Khipu: Electrotextile Pre-Hispanic Computer, woven by her and other women, is an astronomical khipu from 2018. “We got together to spin the universe,” says Piña. They knotted threads of alpaca interwoven with copper wires. The khipu depicts Boötes, the constellation that was in the sky in the northern hemisphere during the work sessions in the summer of 2017.

How would khipu technology have evolved if its development had not been disrupted? “The astronomical khipu designed by Piña speculates on a possible twenty-first-century khipu,” says Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui, a member of the curatorial team. Piña imagined that a khipu of our time would be an aural and artistic interpretation of the technology, science, and history of our ancestors.

“All around this installation space, there are electromagnetic waves that record—please forgive the repetition—the electromagnetic waves of the space and condense them into the antenna that generates a sound amplified by speakers,” Mariátegui adds. When people walk around the astronomical khipu, they hear reverberations that could well be the voice of cosmic silence.

Artisanal Computing

According to the curator Urtiaga, two of the many works that have particularly intrigued children visiting the show are Game of Life by Argentinean Leo Núñez (b. 1975), and Rana (Frog) by Swiss-Peruvian artist Francesco Mariotti (b. 1943).

Núñez’s 2008 piece is based on the famous algorithm Game of Life devised by British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. This algorithm, known at the time as “artificial life,” is now called “artificial intelligence.”

Núñez’s work is made up of a board arranged with exposed cables and flashing blue lights. The latter flash on and off based on the observer’s body movements. It is an intractable work that challenges and alters Conway’s algorithm. How? Núñez explains: “While the original was conceived as an object that, no matter how it begins, always ends the same way, I have given it humanity. My algorithm was designed to be disrupted by human bodies.” In this way, the work demonstrates resistance to technological domination, as it is the person who controls the algorithm.

One of this work’s lessons for young people is that it is possible to break the barrier between devices and the user. Another is that technology is not conceived and built in the blink of an eye. “The viewer sees the 3,000 points I welded by hand, providing a visual experience of the patience needed to create technology,” he adds.

The Frog Speaks

Rana (Frog), from 1987, is surprising because of how advanced it seems for its time. Mariotti is known for his “techno-zoomorphic” sculptures that combine technology and nature. In Rana, he used circuits, sensors, and computers to create a figure that appears to be alive. Some of his works, linked to Andean and Amazonian culture, “recite” what could be considered “poems.”

The computer resembles the body of a frog, referencing the Amazonian environment, animals, and intelligence—not artificial, but rather intelligence that is not human.

This is one of the oldest pieces included in the exhibition. “Rana is interesting because it talks. It says, ‘I speak, I speak Italian, I am intelligent.’ The fact that it speaks means that it is intelligent, but at the same time it wonders, ‘Am I intelligent? I speak. Do I speak?’” Mariotti explains. Given current discussions regarding artificial intelligence, Rana invites reflection.