Beyond Rebellion of the Net: Infrastructural Commoning as Critical Cultural Literacy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers a critical interpretation of the recent cultural and political history of artistic engagements with digital technologies in contemporary Mexico, considering some of them in relation to changing notions of cultural literacy under neoliberal globalization. While educational social research in Latin America has its own critical traditions for studying literacy as a social practice embedded in power relations, art theory and criticism in Mexico and abroad have barely raised the question of new media art’s specific relevance to questions of literacy. Through a cultural and media studies lens acting as a bridge between art theory and criticism on the one hand, and educational research on literacy on the other hand, this article shows how, during the neoliberal conjuncture, artistic engagements with digital technologies articulated cultural experimentation with grassroots political struggles and mediated wider processes of economic and technological transformation. We suggest that new media art, as a post-autonomous practice in times of transition, introduced questions of digital commoning as concerns for cultural literacy in a broad sense. We argue, however, for a non-instrumental and open-ended infrastructural understanding of art’s educational role in relation to ongoing historical conjunctures.