edited by Nilo Casares, Brian Mackern – netart_latino database

edited by Nilo Casares

MEIAC, ISBN: 978- 8461343942
Supported by the work of the curator Nilo Casares, this book is unique. Not only because it’s printed in a limited edition number of copies, but more because of its content. Produced in collaboration with the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáno (MEIAC) in Spain, it focuses on Brian Mackern’s “netart_latino database” – the primary work of this Uruguayan visual, net and sound artist. It is an enormous collection of links to net artworks by South American artists, painstakingly ordered by country. It can still be easily considered a “latino net art history”, although half of the links don’t work anymore. But here comes the true role of this book. It’s a living contradiction, unfolding through the different essays written by South-American net artists and theorists. The marginality of this scene, the fragmentation of the vast continent, together with the difficulties of accessing the internet and connecting with fellow artists in the area, are well explained and narrated. The book itself is fragile in its own form (as with its content): the cover is embossed in ascii on a thick cardboard, inside it’s printed on very thin landscape size paper with a printout on fanfold of the original database hidden in a paper pocket inside the back cover. As the net art historian Josephine Bosma agreeably states “Brian Mackern’s history of Latin American net art is a work of art in itself.” The South America map turned upside-down on the ascii cover (by the Uruguyan artist Joaquin Torres Garcia) can now be seen differently.