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There is an abundance of books, magazines, films and internet-forums dedicated to graffiti. How this documentation has influenced and been a part of the graffiti subculture has not been studied much. Drawing on personal experiences, as a documentarian and publisher of graffiti media over 27 years, Malcolm Jacobson recollects how the positions of participant and observer incessantly have twisted around each other. This has been mediated through development in media technology as well as by the coming of age of graffiti and its practitioners.

This study presents an analysis of the appropriation of public space by cultural producers in Cuba, with a focus on art collectives, in particular, OMNI Zona Franca from Alamar, east of Havana. Based on primary research conducted with the artists, cultural producers, and scholars, I discuss OMNI’s work in the context of the history and formation of a nascent movement for civil society in Cuba, locating the collective’s work within the matrix of alternative and African diasporic cultural production. The latter is framed as part of a historical continuum and in the context of the discussion of race that emerged in Cuba’s public sphere during the 1990s with a concurrent movement among black Cuban artists to address issues of race. Situating OMNI’s work in a longer history of Afro-Cuban cultural production in Cuba as well as within the history of art collectives this study demonstrates how OMNI’s participation in the public sphere relates to social practice, appropriation of space, alternativity, and the forging of a wide coalition of civil and artistic alternatives among diverse communities. I draw on discourses on the production of space, particularly those of Henri Lefebvre and Raymond Williams, and argue that the unique and specific history of Alamar provided a fertile ground for alternative culture where multiple and countercultural expressions could be incubated and take root. The struggle over public space and the attempts by artists to create an autonomous public sphere in Cuba have led to continual conflict with the state. Using Gramsci’s theorization of civil society as incorporating both the hegemonic and contestatory realms, I contend that the level of contestation in OMNI Zona Franca’s work should be seen as counter-hegemonic expression aimed at altering the status quo. Producing new social relations, the collective’s practice is offered as an example of how art and cultural production is inaugurating alternative counter-spaces in the context of a demand for a more inclusive and representative Revolutionary public sphere.

El cambio de siglo trajo consigo nuevas posibilidades de acercamiento a la escritura. Desde el traslado de la frontera entre plagio y creación, y la reapropiación y reescritura de textos ya existentes, hasta el amplio abanico de posibilidades desatado por el estallido de las tecnologías comunicativas, la escritura ha dejado de ser el espacio de introspección autoral privilegiado por el romanticismo para convertirse en una experiencia de la comunalidad contemporanea. Los ensayos que componen este volumen se sumergen en el panorama actual de las letras para trazar una geografía siempre móvil y cambiante de sus posibilidades estéticas, éticas y políticas; pues, a fin de cuentas, la escritura no es un monumento arcaico sino la suma de todas sus manifestaciones, viejas y nuevas, y de cada acercamiento, cada lectura y cada interpretación. Índice Gratulabundus. Introducción Necropolítica y escritura. Una conversación. El estado de las cosas y el estado de los lenguajes: una crítica. Cadáveres textuales. El trabajo inmaterial y la resistencia de las vidas asombradas. #escriturascontraelpoder Fichas anamnésicas. I. La desmuerte del autor: David Markson (1927. 2010). II. De las estéticas citacionistas a las prácticas de la desapropiación: escrituras atravesadas en el español de hoy. III. Los usos del archivo: de la novela histórica a la ficción documental. IV. Mi paso por transcrito: planetarios, esporádicos, exofónicos. V. Breves mensajes desde Pompeya: la producción del presente en 140 caracteres. VI. ¿Sueñan las máquinas con el lenguaje del nosotros?: una curaduría. VII. Prácticas de comunalidad contra la violencia VIII. Desapropiadamente: escribir entre/para los muertos. Notas Acerca de la autora Créditos.

La Realtà Aumentata è una nuova forma di comunicazione sempre più diffusa che permette di sovrapporre contenuti digitali, resi visibili attraverso la videocamera di dispositivi mobile come smartphone o tablet, al mondo reale. Il volume vuole essere uno strumento d'informazione per conoscere la nuova frontiera della comunicazione digitale basata sulla georeferenziazione e sui contenuti aumentati. Fino ad oggi, infatti, l'informazione stava altrove rispetto ai luoghi e ai tempi in cui effettivamente era necessaria. Con la nuova tecnologia dell'Augmented Reality, al contrario, è possibile mettere in atto strategie di comunicazione in grado di portare i contenuti giusti al momento e nel luogo opportuno. Nelle aree ormai più varie, dalla formazione alla sanità, dagli spazi commerciali ai beni culturali, si racconta attraverso le esperienze internazionali più significative come le nuove Realtà Aumentate stanno riscrivendo le modalità di ibridazione fra reale e virtuale.

Contemporary visual poetry remains as hybrid and experimental an artistic modality as it was in the 20th century, with a continued emphasis on mixing temporal and spatial elements in a dynamic verbal–sound–visual structure. These essential aspects and techniques, still at work today, which originated in simple pattern poems from earlier centuries, reached their peak of sophistication with the Concretists and Neoconcretists. Today, however, intermedia practices have a tendency to focus more on certain aspects of our technoculture that resonate with an ‘altered’ mode of perception, keen on exploring uncharted territories through the newest technologies and the speed of information. To illustrate this attraction to the functional use of technologies, I have selected two representative artists, Bartolome Ferrando and Eduardo Kac. Their radically different lines of work and artistic intentions reflect, nonetheless, a similar conception of poems as (bio)dynamic objects, existing as living art within a continuum of possibilities. Ferrando is more interested in exploring the possibilities of condensing movement in a 2-D or 3-D surface, whereas Kac wants his poetic performances to interfere with the essentials of life itself. These authors prioritize the importance of non-linear sequencing with the organization of multiple levels of information in micro-units of space-time in order to manipulate the standard experiences and expectations of readers.

Quale esperienza di parole e immagini ci attende quando azioniamo dispositivi in mezzo a collegamenti ipermediali, quando ci facciamo strada tra link, tag e trigger, se ci sporgiamo da finestre elettroniche o vestiamo i panni di un avatar? E in quali modi la percezione e l'immaginazione rispondono oggi al carattere, per così dire, "vivente" di installazioni e artefatti neomediali, alla connessione comunicativa permanente, e ancora allo scambio ambientale tra produzione e fruizione dell'oggetto tecno-artistico? Il volume interroga i nuovi media e le nuove esperienze estetiche e comunicative globali a partire dagli inediti destini riservati a parole e immagini dal momento in cui, abbandonando i tradizionali scambi e conflitti, si misurano all'interno dello stesso medium digitale. Con percorsi che interessano i passaggi di soglia tra diversi media (Caprara-Velonà, Silvestri), i territori della comunicazione interattiva, anche pubblicitaria e le nuove forme di lettura e scrittura richieste dalla parola-immagine elettronica (de Kerckhove, Diodato, Gensini). Con incursioni nella web art e nella scrittura drammatica digitale, tra narrazioni, archivi, inventari e attori "sintetici" (Pizzo, Subrizi) e infine con le testimonianze di esponenti di spicco del panorama artistico, multimediale e comunicativo contemporaneo (Baruchello, Campus, Rosa/Studio Azzurro).

Centred around Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, this paper employs a critical globalisation theory framework to argue that the 1990s notion of ‘changing the world from below', understood as resistance to capitalist globalisation through a ‘transnational civil society', requires re-theorisation in the light of the contemporary developments in Our America. I make a methodological case for a neo-Gramscian approach to argue that ‘counter-hegemony', together with an adequate theorisation of the state and power, should be the preferred concept over the inherently apolitical and under-theorised ‘alter-globalisation'. Whilst the alter-globalisation movement's ideational and normative challenges to hegemony (captured in ex-British prime minister Thatcher's There-Is-No-Alternative-Doctrine, TINA) are undisputed, the transformation of the global geographies of power through local actors alone has remained illusory. Rather, the experience of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America - Peoples' Trade Agreement (ALBA-PTA) strongly suggests that counter-hegemonic globalisation theory will have to consider the roles of both the ‘state-in-revolution' and the ‘transnational organised society'. This will be shown through the analysis and theorisation of the ALBA-PTA as a multi dimensional inter and transnational counter-hegemonic regionalisation and globalisation project that operates across a range of sectors and scales.

Professionalization and political engagement are usually placed as incompatible in the case of journalism and the mainstream press, resulting in an identification of cultural resistance exclusively with alternative/amateur vehicles. I will use the concept of journalistic field as introduced by Pierre Bourdieu to review these assumptions and discuss a form of political resistance that acts in one's own area of knowledge, is not overtly political and whose effects are not immediately accountable for. Drawing examples from my research on two literary newspapers published in the 1950s in Brazil and Uruguay, this paper will focus on the implications of didacticism for literary criticism as a genre of newswriting. The analysis of these newspapers will lead to a reflection on two main issues: a) the conflict between the professionalization and democratization of literature; and b) the definition of resistance as necessarily an action that is against something. The article will reconsider education in journalism as a form of resistance, taking into account its risks of becoming political indoctrination and commercial manipulation, but emphasizing its potential as a way of expanding access to literature.

This article analyses a range of discourses articulated around the figure of the film archive between the late nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries, accounting for the various possibilities that they open up for considering audiovisual heritage as a potential space either for revolutionary change or for political or textual resistance. Focused mainly on archival discourses in Mexico, the article traces their interaction with both national-historical and anti-imperialist narratives, and the implications of digital and online culture for the encounter between the archiving of film and resistance. It accounts for the position of the archive in negotiations between state and private capital and spaces of artistic autonomy, and for the relationships between the archive, modernity, postmodernity and the notion of posterity.

In October 2007, over the course of a weekend, several hundred people descended on Coronel Pringles, a small town in the Argentine pampas. For two days they would participate, along with many of the town’s residents, in a series of workshops and performances held under the aegis of the Asociación Civil Estación Pringles, an organization founded in 2006 and headed by the poet Arturo Carrera. This inaugural event centered on the practice of declamation, one of the ‘viejas prácticas sociales y artı́sticas’ (‘timeworn social and artistic practices’) that Estación Pringles seeks to place into dialogue with the work of contemporary artists, writers and performers. In its founding statement, the project casts this dialogue in theatrical terms, calling itself ‘una plataforma o una escena donde prácticas estéticas dispersas en un espacio lateral puedan agregarse, articularse, hacerse visibles’ (‘a platform or scene where aesthetic practices, scattered throughout a lateral space, might come together, be articulated, become visible’). Indeed, an emphasis on theatricality would reappear in Carrera’s closing remarks to the 2007 gathering, in which he couches the practice of declamation in terms of a ‘teatrito,’ a ‘little theater’ (Estación Pringles).

Josefina Ludmer en el ensayo más esperado de la década deja de lado las categorías de la teoría literaria utilizadas hasta el momento en busca de nuevas articulaciones y nociones que recorran todas las divisiones actuales y permitan entender la configuración política económica y social de los años 2000 en América latina. El resultado es una serie de esbozos teóricos que parten de un universo sin afueras real virtual al que llama imaginación pública o fabrica de realidad. Un universo que no diferencia entre realidad y ficción y cuya lógica es el movimiento la conectividad la superposición y la sobreimpresión de todo lo visto y oído. La literatura es hilo conductor de la imaginación pública y la vía por la que la especulación entra en esa fábrica de realidad. Las temporalidades y los territorios que instalan las ficciones literarias latinoamericanas de los últimos años (como las de Fernando Vallejo, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Martín Kohan, Perla Suez o Diamela Eltit) definen una forma determinada de “realidadficción”. Un libro decisivo de una de las figuras más lúcidas de la crítica actual indispensable para pensar la América latina del siglo XXI.

Cardboard is hardly a material we associate with new media or digital technology in general. And yet in considering a series of recent editorial projects in several Latin American cities—editorial projects whose last name is always Cartonera and whose defining attribute is a trash aesthetic of hand-painted books made from recycled cardboard—it seems difficult to avoid confronting the present media ecology characterized by these technologies. These editorials produce, on some level, a kind of ‘‘new media,’’ although the mere novelty of their enterprise is only the most superficial of their affiliations with this concept. On the contrary, it seems clear to me that these projects also enact a form of production that should be interrogated within a discussion of the forms of sociality associated with new media and the politico-economic landscape they inhabit and condition.