Algorithms, the Earth, and the Spanish State: The Politics of Making Digital Art

• Autores: Alexandra Saum-Pascual
• Localización: The Routledge Hispanic studies companion to twentieth and twenty-first century Spain: ideas, practices, imaginings / coord. por Eduardo Ledesma, Luisa Elena Delgado, 2025, ISBN 978-1-032-96468-3, págs. 571-585
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This chapter explores the imbrication of digital technologies in contemporary Spanish artistic and literary production, looking particularly at its engagement with concepts of environmental crisis writ large. It focuses on the work of three digital artists: Belén Gache, Joana Moll and Eugenio Tisselli, who reconfigure digital materiality not only in relation to its physical and signifying strategies but also regarding the Capitalocene and its exploitation of the Earth. By challenging the aesthetics of algorithmic abstraction that spring from most works of digital art, these artists are also highlighting the role of capital as a way of organizing nature in a global but, most importantly, local way. Rejecting the purported disconnection between land, matter and globalization’s free circulation of goods, these digital artworks – both in their algorithmic composition as well as in their existence within networks of capital – hold more than a political relation to nature; they are a relationship to nature and, correspondingly, to the state as well. In this way, digital art highlights the emergence of a new ethical relation to the Earth where the state has to be re-engaged with and transformed, opening an exciting opportunity to conceptualize what we mean by “Spain” and its cultural production.