Media Art in Latin America and Fabián Taranto’s “Search in Progress”: Politics, Participation and Memory

This paper proposes a reflective and situated review of Fabián Taranto’s net art work Search in Progress [Búsqueda en Proceso] (2006) in terms of the dialogue with other Latin American media art works. Without generalizing, we underline their shared perspectives on the construction and intersection of memory, politics and participation. We also analyse an aspect which is not an exclusive or intrinsic property of media art, namely, the growing tendency to go beyond symbolic representation to represent social problems in their own materiality.

Three fundamental aspects of Search in Progress are thus examined. First, we analyse the active and facilitating role of this work in (re)constructing and transmitting collective memory, emphasizing, in particular, how notions of presence and absence are expressed at different diegetic levels. Next, we look at a very particular use of databases and data visualization, understood as the “frustration design” approach. Finally, we describe how this art work operates within the logic of tactical tools, particularly as a device designed to depict re­sidual histories, submerged histories or histories omitted from official and hegemonic discourses.