Interview with the Medilabmx.
The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in Latin America, can be read here.
As I arrived in Mexico for a job interview, I took the opportunity to visit the Medialabmx, a space of technological resistance and experimentation in Mexico City. Located in the vast and lively La Merced market – an area that has been a trading hub since pre-Hispanic times, where an uncanny concentration of Niño Dios figures and anatomical religious icons, often dressed in elaborate custom-made costumes, fills the merchant’s stands – the lab sits at the intersection of a maker space and a research institute. Medialabmx also maintains close ties with the Institute of Network Cultures: books by Geert Lovink and other INC authors line its shelves, alongside a shared hacker ethic.
I first came to an event from Diana Millán, aka fearlessdiane, a spanish INC researcher and artist spending some time there with her project InternetCore. I wandered through the lab, taking in the textiles, printing machines, and various ongoing projects, before arranging an interview with Leonardo Aranda and Dora Barotti the following week. We sat around a central table one afternoon and began discussing the lab’s activities and methodologies, tracing a line from Mexico’s long-standing autonomous practices (both before and after the rise of the commercial internet) the country’s current political landscape.
What emerges from the conversation is their proposal of technology as a field of resistance and conviviality, shaped through collective practices, care, and situated forms of autonomy.
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What is your trajectory and what does Medialabmx do?
Medialabmx is a project that was born thirteen years ago. I am Dora Barotti and here beside me is Leonardo Aranda. We are an autonomous space and a collective that works at the intersections between art, technology, and politics. This is put into practice through different fronts. On one hand, there is theoretical research, where there are processes of articulating concepts and ideas, which involve appropriating and expanding other notions of technology to problematize and criticize hegemonic versions of it.
Another line of our work has to do with the development of projects from the perspective of art. Rather than the creation of objects as such, it has to do with the development of different methodologies of artistic research. Therefore, there are diverse processes and practices that are later taken to another line of action related to the socialization of those investigations and theoretical and artistic processes. This socialization occurs through workshops, courses, laboratories, and seminars, where we attempt to decenter the technological dimension of the devices and focus on critique and reflection through them.
Much of what interests us are the face-to-face processes and what can emerge from them. From there, we also work extensively with concepts such as tactical media, technological disobedience, the “do it with others” as part of our foundations, and convivial technologies. Another part that we work on a lot is technological development. Normally we collaborate with different actors, such as activists or journalists, and develop technologies based on their communication needs or to activate certain spaces for activism.
Much of what we work on is linked to the question of technological autonomy in two senses. On one hand, there is a constant question about what technology is and how to define it from the Latin American sphere. We are related to those types of convivial processes and with philosophies such as those of Ivan Illich. From that link with theory, we are interested in exploring philosophies that contribute to that reflection on technological media. Hence what was said about conviviality, which is this concept from Illich where he speaks precisely about autonomy as one of the bases of the technological.
Can you mention some projects?
Dora: One of the programs that form part of Medialab, and which I coordinate, is called Costurero Electrónico. It makes reference to these Latin American costureros [sewing boxes/circles], which are circles formed around textiles and political issues, where the textile is the materiality used to express oneself, generate denunciation, demands, etc. We work on the relationship between textiles and electronics and their metaphors to lead toward collective organization and action. Within this program, there are different projects and pedagogical activities.
One of those projects is Voz Pública [Public Voice], a participatory project featuring an online platform to collect personal stories of gender violence. Those stories can later be amplified through wearable electronic textiles in public space, which are socialized through laboratories of textile rebellion where they are replicated. But in addition to being replicated, the participants appropriate those same prototypes to be acted out collectively in public space.
There is also a series of projects about the forced disappearance of women, involving a series of mediations through textiles. There is an electronic sculpture through which you can present textile strips and record the question ¿la has visto? [have you seen her?]. That question remains linked to the strip and the absent identity. Later, those voices are amplified in public space through another electronic textile. Whoever carries that other textile makes those previously collected voices sound out, asking in an almost schizophrenic way: ¿la has visto? ¿la has visto? ¿la has visto? ¿la has visto?. When a passerby receives one of those strips, the voice in the textile is silenced, but with the poetic idea that the question continues elsewhere, asking eternally toward infinity.
In the middle of the pandemic we developed this project called Respirar Juntxs [Breathing Together] which played slightly with the metaphor of what it implies to re-tune bodies, but at the same time what implications breathing next to someone else had in the middle of a health crisis. It was designed for public space and the occupation of public space, but also with a lot of questions surrounding the communal and the immune. There were many reflections around how to develop a prototype that could allow for coexistence and at the same time care for one another, and return to re-tuning ourselves in a moment when the individual was what was being privileged.
We developed these masks that have a breathing sensor. Everything we work with in our projects are recycled or very cheap materials that any person can easily obtain. They are lids of coffee jars, for example. The whole idea is that you put on the mask and when you breathe, a sound is generated from the airflow. So you breathe and it sounds. It has a circuit and a series of speakers that allow for the amplification of that frequency. The idea of the activation of these masks is to tune the breathing of all those bodies in the public space.
Leonardo: And there are many reflections around the obvious political nature in the context of the health crisis that led us to that. The mask is also an appropriation of a bellicose object, which are gas masks, and the idea is to turn that around. I think the project Dora showed and this one we did collectively reflect very well this idea of achieving a reconfiguration of technology, even in aesthetic terms. That is to say, how technology looks. It is very different from the notion of technology as something bright, pretty, and elegant. Here, much of what interests us is that, and the other part is the construction processes of technology, which are always linked to this idea of collectivization, the ways in which people learn certain types of skills through the reproduction of the technological. There is also the formative aspect of the technological, because it could well have been just a face mask where they attached a pre-made device. But the object itself, through its means of activation, allows for a mobility of bodies, a presence, an action.
Other types of projects we do are alongside journalists. We made this map about violence in the state of Morelos. In this case, we worked with journalists whose problem was that there was no open and systematized database about violence, that there was a denial from the government to admit there was a wave of violence, and that there were a series of claims they made regarding a certain structure of the violence. Their claim was that all the violence was related to drug trafficking from Guerrero toward Mexico City, and that the state of Morelos was a transit place where violence occurred. But the government said that was not true.
We did a series of laboratories in which, with the information they had, we managed to build a database from which a cartography was created. The way they had worked to systematize their own information was starting from the nota roja [crime/blood news]. They took the information and kept it in a spreadsheet, but they said: “what do we do with this?”. What we did was take that information and translate it to the map. We worked on all the symbology of the map collectively with the project participants. We made an entire timeline to understand the evolution of violence in the state. There is always the link to the journalistic note, because that was the way they had systematized their information. And there is a more participatory part where, if someone wanted to continue feeding it, there is the possibility to keep updating it.
A machine from the lab.
Right now, we are doing one in the context of Palestine. We are working with architects in Palestine, very focused on the Negev desert, which is an area east of Gaza. That is where the military zone is from which all the planes take off. The theme with this part of the desert is that it is a region in which the majority of the population is Bedouin, and they are in a moment in which if they do not start showing their belonging to that territory, what has happened in the rest of Palestine will happen, which is basically that they are razed.
The map has become a participatory tool. They are there and we are making the infrastructure. The way it has been worked is that they upload documentation and we did a workshop on what types of spaces were interesting to register. One of the things that seemed important to us was to give personality to the map regarding iconography. All the iconography is based on a Palestinian textile technique, with the idea of using symbols that could be recognized by the people of Palestine, but that for someone external maybe was not going to mean anything more than “it looks pretty.” It is a way of, in plain sight, showing things and at the same time not showing them.
It has become a project that has been in evolution for a couple of years. At the beginning it was very much like: “we are going to portray the life of this region and certain important landmarks of the territory.” And then it started to happen that many of those things we documented have already been demolished, excavators have already entered, and everything that has happened in the rest of Palestine began to occur. So it also became a way to document that destruction. One of the categories that appeared later is the idea of ruins, which also becomes an integral part of the map.
What is the meaning for you of digital sovereignty and how has it been seen in Mexico in recent years?
Leonardo: I believe that in Mexico there is a very long tradition around the idea of digital sovereignty, not necessarily named as such, but certainly as a practice that has to do with the appropriation of technology. I would tell you that a bit of what we have investigated has to do with the community radio networks, which is very interesting because in reality that movement arises from an initial government initiative. We are talking about the fifties. The government says: “we need a way to socialize public information, but we have a population that mostly does not know how to read, so what is the medium for socialization?”. And they say: “radio”. So the government generates an enormous network of radios that covers the entire national territory.
At some point that project starts to lose interest from the government, but what they do leave is the infrastructure. And it is from that infrastructure that suddenly collectives within those communities say to themselves: “the government is gone, what do we do with this, with this radio?”. And what they start to do is reactivate those infrastructures, but now as they want. They basically learn how to repair the radios, how to operate them, how to generate content, etc. All of that is an incredibly strong moment that has occurred since the fifties and up to this date. That is, you still find a ton of community radios.
But in the nineties there was the digital turn. I was telling you about collectives like Rhizomatica, which is an important collective because some years ago they started generating infrastructure to bring telephony based on digital networks to a series of communities. And the way in which people have been organizing is over the work that already existed in terms of organization in several of those spaces around the radio. It was reorganizing those types of networks, but now around the digital.
I believe this is one of the projects that was very inspiring for thinking in terms of technological sovereignty in three distinct terms. On the one hand, technological sovereignty from an infrastructure level: what it means to have possession over these types of technologies, skills over them, the possibility of reproducing them. On the other hand, in terms of processes, in order to not reproduce the most harmful aspects of technologies, it is necessary to also rethink their material processes. That means what you work with, what type of technology you use, how you manufacture it, and what processes of work and organization occur around them. And what we already discussed, as a reflection that we could say is aesthetic, but the aesthetic has to do not only with how it looks, but with a reflection that crosses questions of who makes the technology and, in function of that, what type of values it prints and how it is experienced.
It is very different a technology that prints the value of “everything is transparent, everything is clean, everything is unpolluted” to a technology that looks a bit like what we showed, where part of that sovereignty over the technological also goes along with people recognizing themselves in the technologies and it not resulting totally alien. This idea of alienation, when basically the technology is alienating because you cannot recognize yourself in it. Our work, as Dora already said, comes a lot from the field of the arts, and is very much also about how to relate to technology from those places.
And what is the artistic context here and how does it relate to the spaces of resistance?
Leonardo: I believe there are two main antecedents of that link. It is a very generational thing. We as Medialab emerged at a time when there was an effervescence of certain discourses around the hacker, around free software, around all those types of things. When we started thirteen years ago, there was an effervescence here in Mexico. On the other hand, we are a generation that saw itself very influenced by and aligned much with, for example, movements like Zapatismo, with this idea about self-organization.
To us, that place arrives in a particular way. It is not that the discourse of Hakim Bey, an American anarchist theorist and writer, arrives first. It arrives through Zapatismo. Because rather Hakim Bey takes up ideas from Zapatismo and then posits the idea of temporary autonomous zones, because he is seeing what Zapatismo is doing. To us, it happened the other way around: we had to see all these types of social movements first and then see how they begin to develop toward the technological. So I believe those generations that were very linked to the beginning of the digital, and more akin to those types of discourses like the hacker, were marked also by those types of social movements and started certain types of projects.
I believe that now that scene is very limited. That is, I believe right now art is much more interested not so much in the critical, but in other types of things, you know, more the celebratory: “how incredible it is that now we can do this or that with artificial intelligence.” And I believe that we in that sense are a bit in the rearguard saying: “no, we still have to think critically.”
I believe the other important antecedent is the Rancho Electrónico. It was started mainly by a character called Jaime Villarreal, who was in the audio workshop of the Centro Multimedia, where Leo was also a part. The Centro Multimedia was that space where there were certain types of discourses that already started to generate certain types of questions, but at the same time the Centro Multimedia is a governmental, institutional space, funded by the federal government. Unlike that, Medialab and Rancho Electrónico are self-managed, independent spaces.
So there is a dissidence from the Centro Multimedia, a series of characters that come out of there. Jaime founded the Rancho Electrónico along with other people, also curiously very much from the arts, like Minerva Cuevas and other artists. On this side, another group of characters who also come from the arts opened Medialabmx. They were always spaces where there was dialogue, different collaborations and more. But I believe they are the two spaces where much of the critical discourse here in Mexico City around technology is articulated.
In the rest of the country, I believe the other important scenario is Oaxaca. Oaxaca has a strong history starting many years ago. The magisterio [teaching body], which are the teachers’ unions, establishes an important social struggle there, from which many other movements began to be articulated, not necessarily related to the magisterio, but which began to generate a lot of social struggle in Oaxaca. It becomes an important space for social graphics, for thinking about certain types of autonomies in cultural spaces, and much effervescence is found among certain collectives that are thinking precisely about technological autonomy.
I believe the important difference between these two scenarios is that many of the projects that arise there are more related to establishing digital infrastructures in rural territories, while here the scenario is more of urban youth: how you survive in the environment of a city like this and how you dialogue with the technological that exists here.
Dora: I also wanted to talk a bit about technological autonomy from something more contextual, which goes beyond the hacker or maker spaces or those who are already working directly with those concepts. It has to do with a formative question of life and daily routine: fixing things. I suppose that in other Latin American countries you have visited it is something you have noticed, that it is not so much a difference in how we relate to planned obsolescence or technological obsolescence. Our conditions, needs and precariousness lead us to catalyze imagination and creativity to resolve urgencies, whether they are urgencies of survival on a more physical level, but also of political survival and resistance.
Unless you come from a quite bourgeois and privileged place, we come from a pedagogy of fixing things, or knowing some space where they can be fixed. And then you generate a relationship with technology of not fearing opening things, not fearing understanding them from reverse engineering. That leads you to relate from another place, and it is not “it doesn’t work, I’ll throw it away,” but rather there are many spaces and many trades related to that. We have entire streets that are only dedicated to the sale of electronic components, and there are trades related to that.
To me it was impactful when I had the opportunity to leave the country already quite older and realize that needing electronic components to give a workshop was not about going to the space and relating with the people who dedicate themselves to that, understanding the commercial movements around that, but rather ordering everything by internet.
A bookshelf inside the Medialabmx.
In Brazil there is a word to describe that: gambiarra, that goes toward that.
Yes, and I believe the context is also important, because from there there is a series of investigations around the idea of vernacular technologies, which is also something we have been working on for many years, first from a more intuitive place, without realizing it, and suddenly things get named. It relates directly with the entire question of technological appropriation.
Leonardo: I believe many of those antecedents up to a certain point are scenes that right now are in a complex moment of crisis, not necessarily in the most active place. But where I do see that there is a recent moment of much effervescence is, for example, in techno-feminisms. The spaces like the Rancho Electrónico disappeared, and you could think that then an entire scene disappears. But women and dissident bodies that belonged to those spaces reorganized into collectives and colectivas, precisely through a rethinking of the technological from themselves. And from there feminist servers, feminist internet, feminist AI. There is an accent where I believe there is a lot of important work.
Dora: Yes, and I believe that above all it was like the counterpoint to the hacker spaces of fifteen years ago. Despite those being political projects and with many reflections on how things are done, they remained for the most part being spaces where masculinity had authority, with pedagogies that were not friendly at all with feminized bodies. That authority and that control and power of spaces continued belonging much to certain masculinities.
So I feel that techno-feminisms in a certain way are also a counterpoint to that, saying: “I also want to learn to program, I also want to generate my reflections in relation to technology, because technology is one of the bases that is constantly emphasizing heteropatriarchal relations.” So, how can I from this place propose those other spaces where care is put in the middle of the table? The rethinking itself of technological imaginaries: why are all technologies designed around the masculine model or an idea of a woman? And how does that reveal itself before the bodies? I feel that at the same time, from each emergence, other branches arise that continue counterpointing and unfolding all those questions about the technological.
Leonardo: And I believe that, for example, a result slightly of that is what we are showing you now as work. Because ten years ago maybe many of the philosophies of these spaces had this very hierarchical thing of who knows how to program, who knows how to make circuits, who knows electronics. “I am more hacker than you.” “I program more.” “I use Linux.” It was like a competition of who is more like that. And now I believe that, for example, many of those logics already detached from that very hierarchical and competitive thing of who knows what, to say: “no, let’s see, it doesn’t matter if you program or don’t program, rather what can you contribute in terms of thought, what can you contribute in terms of organization?”. How we expand the idea of the technological, which has been proposed for a long time, but in feminism was proposed in a much more concrete way. For example, cooking is a technology, textile is a technology, the body is our first technology of resistance. And from all the metaphors that can be unfolded, as well as all the material forms of being able to carry demands, denunciations, well yes, a ton of things around that.
Dora: I also feel that our work methodologically revolves around the idea of communities of practice. Not the community understood from a territorial question, like “you belong to this territory,” which is the most romantic idea about community, but rather how through the practices we propose and the activities we propose, we can summon a series of actors who are not necessarily linked directly with formations or disciplines related to technology or the arts. Suddenly a sociologist can come, an anthropologist, an engineer, an artist, a designer, but also a madre buscadora [searching mother]. The idea is to say: in reality what links us is an urgency or a shared interest. These are the questions we are putting on the table and based on sharing or guiding about these techniques, we are going to elaborate reflections or generate questions, and that is going to be taken to materiality.
We also work much from the idea of expanded temporalities, where suddenly someone took a workshop with us on a topic, and months later decides to take another, and suddenly meets another who already took another, and without realizing it an entire community is already being generated where there is already an entire series of reflections and bases that have been generated starting from this space. That is something that has interested us much because then you have a diversity of voices where you are also working on other things: what happens when there is disenso [dissent]? How do we work with dissent? How do we make collective agreements? How are we going to talk about autonomies if we don’t know how to make agreements? So that is where the pedagogical has a very important place. Sometimes we say that the technical part is the pretext. In workshops of electronic textiles, suddenly it is revealed that we are going to talk about bodies, about territories, about digital colonialism.
The Latin American perspective seems very interesting to me because there is a long tradition of technological dependence. Now, for example, in Europe we are also technologically dependent, and it occurred to me to think about the colonialists and the colonized. I think more things happen here than in Europe. I saw it also in Brazil, where there are very strong social moments, but there is also a role for the State, with initiatives such as PIX, which is a public payment infrastructure that radically changed the lives of citizens in three years. What happens here in Mexico? [La perspectiva latinoamericana me parece muy interesante porque hay una larga tradición de dependencia tecnológica. Ahora, por ejemplo, en Europa también somos tecnológicamente dependientes, y me pasaba a pensar de los colonialistas a los colonizados. Creo que aquí acontecen más cosas que en Europa. Lo vi también en Brasil, donde hay momentos sociales muy fuertes, pero también hay un papel del Estado, con iniciativas como el PIX, que es una infraestructura de pagos pública que cambió radicalmente la vida de los ciudadanos en tres años. ¿Qué pasa aquí en México?]
Leonardo: I would think two things. I believe here you can find a lot of reflection in terms of the relationship with this dependency regarding economy and technology since the seventies. The school of dependency is exactly a school of thought that crosses all of Latin America and you can perfectly map it toward current decolonial theory. It is like a very linear line of thought until what we now understand as decolonial theory.
I believe much of that theory is based on a premise which is basically the role of the State in generating those forms of autonomy or sovereignty. All that theory centers basically on saying: “how do we generate State policies that make us less dependent economically and, therefore, technologically?”. Here in Mexico and in Latin America, you can track it back to the seventies with a ton of theorists. But it seems important to say that this is the posture that has, for example, now the government of Mexico. They have recovered a ton of those discourses about developmentalism, about dependency theory, etc., and they start to say: “the policy of Mexico now is a policy of energy sovereignty, of technological sovereignty.”
In the previous government, the premise of CONACYT, which is now already a secretariat of science and technology, was that Mexico had to develop its own technology, that Mexico had to have an energy autonomy. Now I believe that we come from a completely different moment, because we think precisely that this autonomy, which is an autonomy solely at a state level, does not seem to us to contribute anything really to real sovereignty. Why? Because for us the role of the State basically would have to pass rather than facilitating the initiatives of the citizenry, and not so much by the State being the administrator of all the infrastructure.
The previous policy was about sovereignty, but in reality there was very little real technological development. That discourse was much more discursive than practical. And now, with Claudia Sheinbaum, it is not a secretariat but an agency of technological innovation. But what this agency has is basically how we implement last-generation technologies, like artificial intelligence, in government tasks. Returning to the normal scheme of how I put this chatbot within the normal tasks of government, how I utilize these technologies within the different secretariats. It is digitalization in the most traditional sense of innovation of public service, but quite limited.
And besides, precisely without a critical perspective. In the best cases, what I call a mere “tropicalization”: for example, “we are going to take a chatbot that has indigenous languages.” But if you are not attacking the infrastructure problems, if you are not attacking the ecological problems, if you are not attacking all this type of other problems that have to do with displacement, dispossession, etc., that precisely those communities suffer, then what good is it? It becomes makeup to say “we already have this super large initiative in Latin America,” a model of language that integrates Spanish as a central language but also indigenous languages.
There is a supercomputing initiative that the government of Claudia just launched a couple of weeks ago: “we are going to have the largest supercomputers in Latin America.” Without really entering into the same logic, basically of staying at the peak of development. So I believe that even the term sovereignty in that sense is a contestable term, because on one hand the State moves over the idea of energy and technological sovereignty, but I insist, it is a notion of sovereignty completely linked to the theories of the seventies. What interests us is thinking about sovereignty from another place, the so-called popular sovereignty.
In the end it is a question about who is the agent of technological development. In the response of the government, the agent of technological development is the State. For us, the agent of technological development must be absolutely everyone. It is not that everyone has to program, but rather recognizing the capacity of agency over technology in different dimensions, from imagining the technological to expanding the sense of what is technological.
The view from the internal courtyard of Medialabmx.
Is there any truth in this rhetoric of the Mexican narco-state, that it is completely sold out to the United States to do anything?
Leonardo: I believe the idea of the narco-State is very dangerous in more than one sense. Because in the end that is the discourse that right now the right-wing mobilizes against left-wing governments: “failed government,” etc. The history of narcotrafficking in Mexico in reality is linked completely to the right. It is in the right where it emerged, where it organized, where it took roots within the government, where there was a much stronger corruption. So there is a complex thing there.
Saying that there is a complete dependence on the United States also seems to me quite problematic. We are the first commercial partner of the United States, along with Canada. That supposes basically that there is a co-dependence more than dependence. The economy of Mexico is tied to that of the United States, it’s true. If the United States stops buying from Mexico, there is an enormous problem. But in the same way, if we stop producing, the production chains of the United States are completely linked. Not only the agricultural, it’s everything. There is already a regional integration which is one of the reasons why it is very difficult to apply all this imperialist logic, and it is one of the complexities they have faced at the hour of trying to put tariffs on Mexico.
It is also important to recognize the transition between the Mexico of the fifties, which was a Mexico maquilador [assembly plant operator] of technology. The first maquila in Mexico appears right around the fifties in Ciudad Juárez, manufacturing transistors under the idea that labor was cheaper here and that there was less labor regulation. The transistors of Silicon Valley in reality were made in Ciudad Juárez. But between that and now there already were a series of technological and knowledge transfers, in which it is no longer only that here the transistors are manufactured. In reality here part of that technology is already designed. So it is a false discourse to say that there is no local development.
I think rather in terms of economic co-dependence. And on the other hand, the relationship with the technological, if you want to propose it only from hegemonic terms, well maybe yes: if the United States is together with China at the head of the race for artificial intelligence, it could seem that we depend completely. But in reality technology goes beyond discourse. If you understand technology in terms of logistics, infrastructure, of organization, there you do see a much larger interdependence, because then the whole discourse that we depend completely falls down.
