Abstract

Brazilian production in the field of digital culture indicates an emerging technophagic tendency, a process that devours and grinds technology and which is mediated by a critical, creative use of the media. Such tendency appears in alternative economic models, artistic practices that promote other actions, and pirate systems devoted to collective uses of telecommunications. Technophagy is not a movement, but a conceptualization that I’ve developed to refer to operations that mix tradition and innovation, unusual arrangements between scientific knowledge and artisanal lore, and micropolitical actions on the appropriation of technologies. That tendency can be an initial version of a political and aesthetic practice that operates by means of the combination and the remodeling of equipment, the revalidation of the notions of hi and low tech, and the production of devices capable of promoting other forms of creation. Its context is the globalization and the process of digitizing culture at all levels.

• Giselle Beiguelman (BR) is a new media artist and professor at the Graduation Program in Communication and Semiotics of PUC-SP (São Paulo, Brazil). Curator of Nokia Trends (2008 and 2009), she is Artistic Director of Sergio Motta Institute. In her oeuvre she researches the cultural impact of the Internet and technology.  desvirtual.com

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