Los Cybrids: La Raza Techno-Critica
Collaborative Project - Praba Pilar, John Jota Leanos, Rene Garcia - 1999-2003
MANIFESTO || published in 1999
WARNING: This is not a self-indulgent exercise comparing the conveniences/inconveniences of digital technology for the PC user. This is not an encounter with technocratic fantasies, utopian visions nor renderings of maleficent technological dystopia. No mámes.
ATTENTION: This is a tactical assault on the cryptoreligious myths accompanying technological invention. It is a counteroffensive against the mili-corp monoculture that evolves and promotes Information Technology to stifle critical voices. ¡Eso!
BEWARE: We are not tech-optimists, digi-pushers, nor cyber-fanáticos. We are not neo-Luddites or Chicano hippies. We are criticones, techno-informants of the ‘other’ kind. We are . . . LOS CYBRIDS: La Raza Techno-Crítica.
Los Cybrids: La Raza Techno-Critica is a junta of three poly-ethnic cultural diggers of the Latino sort dedicated to the critique of cyber-cultural negotiation via tecno-artistico activity. Los Cybrids ascribe to the increasingly widening liminal spaces of culture, hybridity and decentered identities reinforced by the new electronic technologies. As "Latino" artists working with digital technologies, we represent a demographic…
PERFORMALOGUES
EL WORLD BRAIN DISORDER, 2002-2003
El World Brain Disorder: surveillance.control.pendejismo, explores the often hilarious dysfunctional convergence between surveillance technologies, military industrial complexes, the national police state and fundamentalist extremism that is accelerating the hyper-globalization of catastrophe and inequality.
2003 full performances at Carnegie-Mellon University, Brown University, and University of San Francisco - Lone Mountain Campus; 2002 full performances at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona State University, Phoenix; 2001 excerpt at SF Museum of Modern Art as part of Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post–Latin American Art
High Sweat Tech Shop, 2001
Los Cybrids' High Sweat Tech Shop performance uncovers the contradictions of digital labor's divide, where assembly line workers from Santa Clara are as disposable as those in Guadalajara or Jakarta. Have tech laborers been swept up, or swept under the rug by this e-conomy? Video features interviews with Jesse Drew and Raj Jayadev of Silicon Valley Debug.
Street Performance Event October 18, 2001 with video projections, audio and performance at the Lilli Ann mural; 17th and Harrison in San Francisco; Panel Discussion October 10, 2001 featuring Nancy Mirabel, Jesse Drew, Raj Sayadev and moderated by David Bacon, at the LAB Gallery; 2948 16th Street @ Capp.
High Sweat Tech Shop was funded by the Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize, a program administered by New Langton Arts. Further support has been provided by the Creative Work Fund and the LAB Gallery.
WEBOPTICON: Arquitectura of Control, 2001
This visuo-aural offline dialogo morphs issues of internet dataveillance, surveillance and panoptic vision to expose the emerging Global Information Infrastructure threatening to hijack our identities for state, corporate and military abuses. Do you need to be connected to be affected? Join us to explore the cosmological shift into the networked architecture of control extended by Information Technologies as we talk with experts in the field and performatively riff through the barrio convergence of the actual Webopticon. With Panelists: Jim Redden, Author of Snitch Culture and Paulina Borsook, Author of Cyberselfish.
Performed at the LAB Gallery, San Francisco, California
THE GLOBAL WARMAQUINA: The Internet and Its Discontents, 2001
A performalogue that brings to light the unpopular view that the Internet and Information Technologies are the advancing armies of global capitalism in a war to promulgate an American-dominated global monoculture. In performance and anti-panel discussion, Los Cybrids engage issues of the economic and environmental impact of IT as well as the corporate myth of the so-called "Digital Divide." With Panelists: Jerry Mander, International Forum on Globalization, Raj Jayadev, YO! & Pacific News Service and Jay Mendoza, Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.
Performed at the LAB Gallery, San Francisco, California
DIGITAL MURALS
ARTIST STATEMENT for The Last One to Cross the Digital Divide is a Rotten Egg! 2001
The concept of the Digital Divide arises out of a feverish Millennial marketing pitch that insists universal access to computers and the Internet will bridge the chasm between the rich and the poor. Through computers and the Internet, communities of color and the poor within the United States and the Third World will have access…
ARTIST STATEMENT for El Webopticon: You Don’t Have to be Connected to be Affected. 2001
The emergence of a technologically driven surveillance society is the central issue of El Webopticon digital mural on the wall of Galería De La Raza. "Whether residents of Latino barrios ‘opt in’ or ‘opt out of computers and the web, they are affected by privacy issues related to information technology," reports Praba Pilar, a member of Los
ARTIST STATEMENT for Manifest Tech Destiny. 2001
As consumers find comfort via their small cell phones which can track their every movement via the Global Positioning System (GPS), the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and corporations (Hewlett Packard, IBM, Xerox) look to construct technologies that will reconstruct the human form from the atom up with the use of MEMS and Nanotechnology. Los Cybrids see this exploration into the body as the latest manifestation of the colonialist ideal of Manifest Destiny. In a world that has been completely colonized, we
TECHNO PROMESAS: PUTOGRAFIA VIRTUAL EXHIBITION, June 22 - August 30, 2001. Galeria de la Raza, San Francisco, California
Multi media installation including videos, audio, obsolete Macintosh computers, computers from landfill, Single Channel video installation of TECH TV!!
From WIRED MAGAZINE article A Disturbing, Latino View of Tech, by Angel Gonzalez, June 2001
Stacked above an old PS/2 monitor is a Compaq Portable I, whose green monochromatic screen shouts "01/01/80" – time zero for PCs dating to pre-Y2K days, when the 8086 processor was king.
Up against a wall, a carefully constructed pile of orphaned Macs makes a spooky wailing sound, opposite a tropical jungle of hanging keyboards and mice.
This is the debris of the digital revolution.
"These computers come from a dumpster in the Bay Area," says artist Praba Pilar. "And these are just a single-day load," she says.
The garbage pile is part of "Putografia Virtual," an exhibit at San Francisco's Galeria de la Raza, where Pilar's group of artists, Los Cybrids, is launching a crusade against technological optimism from the very heart of the silicon empire.
At the heart of the exhibit is "Tech-TV," a mock Latino-themed tech-news broadcast that includes a TV game show called "NASDAQuina." The show awards humongous prizes to large corporations and displays video excerpts of people hooking serial cables into their arms as if they were heroin fixes.
As a mock-TV reporter, Garcia incites Latinos to "get those brown fingers clicking" and ends with a harangue for spending money on schools instead of on computers.
For a view from Salon Magazine on earlier work:
……. our sunglassed fifth panelist appears utterly unmoved by his peers' vehement calls to action and impassioned protestations. He looks like he's walked straight out of "The Matrix," and identifies himself only as Cybridputo #1 of Los Cybrids -- he's even wearing a nametag that attests to this cryptic identity. Cybridputo #1 is flanked by a tall man with an enormous head of black curly hair -- a wig? -- wearing a black leather coat and dark sunglasses, despite the utter lack of sunlight. He's none other than Cybridputo #2, of course.
Numero Dos is the only person in sight who is not only wearing a tie, but maybe has ever worn a tie. This fact alone makes him highly suspicious. Standing behind #1 throughout all the other speakers' remarks, big-haired Cybridputo frequently mutters into a hands-free microphone and wields, in a vaguely menacing manner, a Bond-like hard-case valise ……
at Blow up the Internet! As earnest lefties at a panel wring their hands over the fate of the Internet, three weird characters out of "The Matrix" steal the show, by Katharine Mieszkowski, Salon Magazine, July 24, 2000.
For our own writing in 2002, please visit “Cybridnetics: an ese from the Other Side of the Digital Divide” in Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics, Issue 6, Fall 2002.
Los Cybrids: La Raza Techno-Critica received funding from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Creative Work Fund, the Zellerbach Foundation, the Potreto Nuevo Fund, and support from Galeria de la Raza and the LAB in San Francisco.