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Walter Benjamin, con quien estoy de acuerdo en tantas cosas, escribió una de la que discrepo: "las relaciones alternantes de los hombres con las grandes ciudades se distinguen por una preponderancia expresa de los ojos sobre la del oído". Valgan las páginas siguientes como refutación, in extenso, de esa afirmación.
—Vicente Luis Mora, Circular 07. Las afueras (104)
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Nowadays, it might not seem revolutionary to claim that digital technology has impacted every aspect of twenty-first-century life and its cultural products. On the one hand, objects—and even experiences—that once existed outside the screen are now being digitized and uploaded onto virtual clouds, while, on the other, those digital products comprise an invisible network of relations where Web traffic has taken over the physical maps of our towns and cities. Digital technologies are behind the production of all labor practices, and it is impossible to find a creative industry that doesn't rely on digital tools of production: from graphic design, to music, and even to writing.
The remix of different creative practices in these fields seems as commonplace as the practice of remix itself as a new aesthetic category in which new products are built out of mashed-up fragments. We encounter fragmentation as the backbone of digital experience and, as this seeps into our physical reality, the latter also becomes increasingly fragmented. The belief that, in the society of information, scattered data jumps out at us from every screen and pocket has almost become a twenty-first-century truism, in the sense that information has abandoned the modern impulse of creating a unified discourse of our reality. In other words, just as information has been reduced to digital—fragmented—data points, so has our experiencing of the world. From measuring the outside temperature, to controlling the traffic lights in a big city, we rely on concrete bits of information to regulate our experience, situating fragmentation as the new measure of our lives.
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Taking these two ideas as a point of departure, this essay looks at Vicente Luis Mora's Circular 07. Las afueras (2007-on) in order to explore how the use of digital technologies replicates the fragmented experience of today's global cities, understanding urban living as paradigmatic of contemporary life and culture. In my analysis, Mora's work is...