Autopoiesis in Contemporary Bio-Arts in Mexico and Colombia

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Notes

¹ These works can be seen as heirs to Latin American art engaging cybernetics, a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this essay.

² Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1980).

³ Varela and Maturana, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 78.

⁴ N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago, 1999), 10.

⁵ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Canbridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948), 8.

⁶ Wiener, Cybernetics, 11.

⁷ Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 5.

⁸ Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 158.

⁹ Varela and Maturana, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 80.

¹⁰ Varela and Maturana, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 79–80.

¹¹ Varela and Maturana, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 80.

¹² Varela and Maturana, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 80.

¹³ See Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

¹⁴ Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 194. Beer wrote the preface to the 1973 English translation of Autopoiesis and Cognition.

¹⁵ See http://www.parasitosurbanos.com/parasitos/proyecto.html.

¹⁶ See http://www.parasitosurbanos.com/parasitos/ppndrs.html.

¹⁷ See http://www.plantasnomadas.com.

¹⁸ Quoted from the artist’s statement. See http://www.plantasnomadas.com.

¹⁹ See the documentary online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHF0MHousfM.

²⁰ Centro Documentazioni Conflitti Ambientali, http://www.cdca.it/spip.php?article1671&lang=it.

²¹ See Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects (Basel: Birkhauser, 2001).

²² Alejandro Tamayo, “v*i*d*a Lab: Rethinking Objects for Everyday Life,” in Design Education 26 (2009); available online at http://tdd.elisava.net/coleccion/26/tamayo-en/view?set_language=en.

²³ See Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, What Is Life? (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2000).

²⁴ Hamilton Mestizo, “Bioelectric,” in Balance-Unbalance Conference Proceedings, May 31–June 2, 2013, Noosa, Australia, 16; available online at http://www.balanceunbalance2013.org/uploads/1/3/2/6/13266267/balance-unbalance_proceedings_abstracts.pdf.

²⁵ See http://librepensante.org.

²⁶ The Media-Lab Prado is financed by governmental and private institutions, including Telefónica, a Spain-based telecommunications corporation.

²⁷ For documentation of Algas Verdes, see http://medialab-prado.es/mmedia/5073/view.

²⁸ See http://nanodrizas.org/index.php?/english-version/presentation/; and http://artedigitalamm.blogspot.com/2012/10/plantas-nomadas-de-gilberto-esparza.html.

²⁹ Valentina Montero Peña and Pedro Donoso, “Dissent and Utopia: Rethinking Art and Technology in Latin America,” in Red Art: New Utopias in Data Capitalism: Leonardo Electronic Almanac 20, no. 1 (London: Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014), 145.

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Claudia Costa Pederson

Claudia Costa Pederson is an assistant professor of Art and Technology at the School of Art, Design, and Creative Industries at Wichita State University. Her writings on play, games, digital photography, and techno-ecological art have been published in Afterimage, Intelligent Agent, and Eludamos. Forthcoming publications include a chapter in the anthology Latin American Modernism, on contemporary artists working with robotics; a chapter on contemporary feminist media in the anthology Indie Reframed; and an essay on female artists involved in the Maker movement in Latin America in the Journal of Peer Production.