El Tecolote June, 2001

Firing Warnings About Information Technology

By Charles Hack
El Tecolote Staff Writer

"Wake up!" says Praba Pilar, one of the three cultural critics that make up Los Cybrids: La Raza Techno-Crítica, because the police and the FBI are using finger printing and biometrics databases against you.

"You don't have to be connected to the web to be affected by all this surveillance and it is having a very real effect in the barrios -- in this community," she says.

Computers seem a long way away from the bustle of customers at the Cafe Fanari on 24th St. where Pilar, René Garcia, and John Leaños who make up the trio of critics, are firing warnings about the hazards of information technology.

Through art and interactive performances the group wants to critique widely held beliefs that computers inevitably will take over our lives. Los Cybrids are attempting to start a dialogue, from which alternatives to a computer dependent culture can evolve.

To begin this discussion, Los Cybrids have been putting on a series of

"Offline Performalogues," multimedia art installations and digital murals at the Lab on 16th St. at Capp and Galería de La Raza on 24th at Bryant.

Using Performalogues, Leaños says, "we bring people together so that we affect our community in the Mission." Performalogues mix panel discussions with multi-media performances. The group interviews cultural critics and activists, such as Jerry Mander, the Silicone Valley Toxics Coalition, Raj Javadev, Jim Redden and Paulina Borsook. Each guest is an expert in one of evils that information technology has on our community. For example, Javadev has explored the lack of well paid jobs going to high-school levers of color.

Jim Redden wrote "Snitch Culture" about militaristic and corporate surveillance, and Borsook, author of "Cyber Selfish," probed the world of the Internet and the people behind it.

Los Cybrids not only want Latinos, community activists and artists among their audience but also the people that run computer-training programs.

Los Cybrids criticize nonprofits that accept corporate sponsorship to train Latinos and poor people of color in computers, accusing them of creating a low-end workforce, such as temp workers, repair persons and factory workers. It is time to realize that computer literacy will not in itself make Latinos wealthier, says Leaños.

Leaños has also created a digital mural series to inform the local community. Five by five-foot vinyl panels, with images rendered on computers, are posted on the street. The "digitals," as they are called, merge the tradition of local Latino muralism, with the technology of billboard advertising.

The mural at 24th and Bryant on display throughout May is a montage of circuit boards, space trash, computers, and DNA code that explores the digital divide. It looks at how corporations make charitable donations of computers to schools and poor communities, only to make the people better consumers.

The digital divide will also be explored in a third Performalogue on July 20th, which will discuss how computer technology may be used to fight cancer or to animate artificial limbs. Only the wealthy will be able to afford the sky-high costs of such treatment and resources may be better spent elsewhere, Pilar says.

The event will also explore a subject that corporations would rather not talk about. Information technology can also harm health and the environment. For example, radiation waves from cellular phones and wireless technology, have been blamed for brain cancer.

"The environmental destruction caused by computers is nothing short of horrendous. The factories belch out toxic filth into our water supplies, junked computers lie waiting to be thrown out, and in the sky there is a celestial junkyard of more than 2000 satellites. What happens when they are due to come down?" wonders Leaños.

Los Cybrids would like to see more activist groups like the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, that have started a campaign for recycling computers, against dumping, and tried to hold producers responsible for the waste they produce.

"That's really where the answers are, in these activist groups, that we are trying to bring to the fore," says Leaños.

But in using computers to produce the art have Los Cybrids become part of the problem? Such an idea is to miss the point, says Leaños, "because we are critiquing the technology and using it at the same time that doesn't mean that there is a contradiction."

"It's like living in the U.S. capitalist culture and being a socialist, you can't get around it," adds Garcia.

To find out more about the upcoming Digital Murals, Performalogues and Art Installations by Los Cybrids log onto www.cybrids.com or visit the Galería de La Raza at 2857 24th St. at Bryant St. or The Lab at 2948 16th St. at Capp St.

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