The following interview with Mexican-American performance artists
Roberto Sifuentes and Guillermo Gomez-Pena has been sitting on my hard
disk for quite some time now. It was conducted at last year's Ars
Electronica, and for many moons I have been trying to get in touch with
Roberto or Guillermo to have my transcript approved as I usually do with
my interviews.

So if anybody knows how to reach one of them, or if you, Roberto or
Guillermo, are on RHIZOME please get in touch, I need more info. The others
remember that this interview is not yet "approved." So please don't quote
from it, especially not without giving credit, in the way that the people at
"Beyond interface" did…

Yours, Tilman

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The Border Patrol in Cyberspace

Tilman Baumgaertel: Tell me about your Net project "<a target=_window href="http://riceinfo.rice.edu/projects/CyberVato/">CyberVato</a>."

Roberto Sifuentes: We've created a kind of techno-confessional on the
WorldWideWeb where people can come and confess their intercultural cyber
sins to us. It's a form survey that asks questions about people's
tolerance for other cultures, tolerance to other languages, it asks
people about the hegemony of the internet…

Guillermo Gomez-Pena: …and why english is the lingua franca of the
internet.

RS: So the questionnaire is broken up into several sections about arts,
immigration issues, intercultural experiences. There's also a "graffiti"
page which functions as an instant bulletin board where people can post
and have discussions and spray paint the site, so to speak. We also
invite people to send us images, sounds and texts about their imagined
Mexican or Chicano of the 90s.

GGP: Basically we want to bring a Chicano-Mexican sensibility to
cyberspace. We see ourselves (these words might not be translatable) as
web bags. That's a pun on wet back, which is derogative for Mexicans. We
see ourself as kind of immigrants in cyberspace. We also see ourselves
as coyotes, as smugglers of ideas, because we do believe that there is a
border control in cyberspace and that the internet is a somewhat
culturally, socially, racially specific space.

TB: What kind of reactions do you get?

GGP: Whenever someone confesses to us during a live performance, there
is a moral implication, a moral contract. They look into our eyes, we
look into their eyes. Their voice is being recorded, and they know that;
therefore they tend to be a bit more careful, a bit more sensitive. But
once you get onto the internet, there is total anonymity and people can
impersonate other identities: men can become women, whites can become
blacks, young people can become older etc. So there are zero moral
indications, and people can really engage in an exercise of imagination,
of extreme fear and desire. And that's when it gets really interesting.

TB: Can you give some examples of the confessions that you got?

RS: We ask questions of the internet users. For example: If you had a
gang member covered in tattoos, or an Native American in full regalia,
or a Mexican macho dressed as a postmodern Zorro in a gallery what
fantasy would you have them perform for you. And People answer us: "I
would want the Zorro to sling me over his shoulder, stick a chicken up
his ass and run around yelling: Bob Dole is a homosexual." Or they write
things like: "I would have the cholo tattoo the Native American with
cave drawings," or "I would like the Mexican to rip my clothes off with
a machete, so I can bath in chili ancho sauce in order for him to wrap
me in a warm tortilla, so at the end he can eat me with a shot of
tequila."

TB: Do you feel personally hurt by such derogative messages?

RS: It is very disturbing. Of course, many comments like these have been
personally directed towards me. I feel that it is very revealing of the
psyche of America. It is a barometer of the intolerance of other
cultures. So I feel anger, which keeps me going and which reinforces
that we have to do this kind of experiments and this type of work.

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TB: What are your perfomances like?

GGP: The true completion of the piece takes place in the live
performance. That is when we are able to "reproduce" or reinterpret
these ethno-cyborgs created by the collective imagination of the net
users. When people get to see their own inner monsters and their own
inner demons–that is where some kind of purging takes place. And then a
process of reflexivity gets triggered, which might eventually lead to a
betterment of consciousness.

+ + +

TB: How is the situation in Mexico? Is online-access easily avalable, or
is it a privilege?

GGP: It's an incredible priviledge. Only people in the upper classes, or
people affliated with big corporations or government institutions who
really can afford to buy a computer, and the servers are incredibly
expensive. Also, the telephone company makes sure that only the major
cities can connect to the net.

Let me just give you one example: Subcommandante Marcos, the leader of
the Zapatistas, is a techno wiz. He sends his legendary poetic press
releases directly from the jungle, and a group of canadian liberals post
these messages to one of the Zapatista websites. So he has a direct
contact to the international intellectual community. However, the
mexican telephone company impedes access to computers that can plug into
the net. So, unless you live in Mexico City, you don't have access to
what the Zapatistas are saying on the net.

TB: Do you think that the internet could be a means for artists in the
so-called Third World to circumnavigate around the traditional art
system that excludes them?

RS: Yeah, it is happening and growing more and more. People are using
the internet to communicate in ways that were impossible before to gain
access to the works of other artists. It helps us out too, because the
two of us live on different coasts, so our collaboration is often
conducted via the internet. But of course, it is merely a tool. It can't
ever substitute human interaction, the exchange of ideas across the
table, people getting together and making work together.

TB: At a festival like Ars Electronica, do you feel excluded?

GGP: Artists like Roberto and I are insiders and outsiders at the same
time. But we benefit from this condition of being partial insiders. In
fact, I might say, for us the art world is a laboratory to develop
radical ideas. But once you have developed these ideas, the true
objective is to step outside of the art world, and into politically
meaningful territories, into the media, education, direct political
action, or other realms of social activity. But I still treasure the art
world, because in the 90s it is one of the few places where radical
thinking and radical esthetic behavior can take place. It is extremely
important for us to partially operate within the art world.