To talk about digital art is to bring up again the debate that comes up every time a new tool for artistic production appears, and even more so if it is strong enough to open our definition of art.  To talk about digital art is to reflect upon art and its philosophical complications: to define its limits, its scope and its essence.  Today, dealing with digital art implies contemplating a wide range of real and virtual products which are redefining the way in which we see and think about the world, even when they are not accepted as ART.   

But the debate going on the digital art 's legitimacy should not surprise us.  If it took photography 150 years to be accepted as art, issues questioning digital art will surely continue way after the products and tools with which it is produced are obsolete.  Technology is advancing at such an accelerated rate, that few artists or theorists are able to keep up with its changes.  Take the Internet, for example.  There is a forum called universe-in-universe (http://universes-in-universe.de/forum/english.htm) in which these issues are related.  Recently, more than 450 artists, critics and curators from every continent have embarked in a discussion on issues such as: Is art made with a computer, art?  Will digital art displace painting?  How did digital art start and who invented it? Is it an elitist art?  Does it have a democratic essence? Are artists from poor countries out of the ball game due to lack of access to technology?  In other words, we are still hashing over the same issues?

Since we don't seem to find absolute answers to these questions because is too complex a process, today I would simply like to trace some of the paths that digital art in Mexico has been through in order to exemplify the diversity of its possibilities.  

The daddy of digital art in Mexico is Manuel Felguérez.  In 1973, he presented an exhibition called El  espacio múltiple at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City.  Out of this exhibition and of his participation in the XIII Sao Paulo Biennale in 1975, he selected 50 designs in order to create a model which was fed to a computer with which he later created other designs.  Reading  La máquina estética , the book that documents this process is hallucinating because it reproduces the instructions of the program for one of these computers which was probably the size of a whole room.   It has nothing to do with today ' s laptops.   Experimenting with digital art made Felguérez was an exception among artists in Mexico of those days, although he himself never worked with it again.

The process towards digital art starts accelerating in the seventies, with the so-called Generation of the Groups, in which also a lot of individual artists participated.  As a result of their political convictions, members of groups such as Suma, Proceso Pentágono and the No-Grupo started experimenting with photocopies, heliographs, mimeograph, templates and other inexpensive massive image reproducing media.  Television and radio also became the support for performance or action art projects and the boundaries between disciplines such as literature, dance and visual arts were dissolved.  Although the processes used at the time were not digital, the aesthetic and political ideas of those days have nourished a lot of contemporary digital art.  The medium is the message,  but messages also make us develop new media.   More on the anecdotal side, I just wanted to add that at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Pásticas (ENAP), in the seventies, we took a cybernetics class with Oscar Olea, even though we never saw a computer.  Sometimes education is kind of schizophrenic.  Or maybe it was just somewhat romantic? 

The wealth of artistic research took lots of roads which led to the huge wave that today surrounds us in the shape of electrography, multimedia, video-art, CD-Rom art, net-art, virtual art, etc.  Thus, among the dinosaurs of these proposals we have artists such as Felipe Ehrenberg who became an expert in mimeograph, Arnulfo Aquino and Jorge Perezvega from the Mira group who worked with heliographies, and individuals such as Humberto Jardón, among others, in black and white photocopy.  Some artists, such as Carlos Aguirre, Rowena Morales and I , started transferring photocopies onto other supports such as paper. In those days we had mail art, the forefather of a lot of the precepts of net-art.  Mauricio Guerrero, a teacher here at the UAM, is one of the few artists who has been through the whole development of this genre.  Video-art was also starting, and among the first ones was to work in this media the late Pola Weiss.  For many of these artists , the most natural thing was to take a step forward and to plunge into digital art. 

Individual digital art production becomes normal in the nineties, even though during the prior decade spaces were finally opened in institutions that allowed some of the pioneers to work, among them Andrea di Castro, Cecilio Balthazar and Luis Fernando Camino.  Zalathiel Vargas began creating images in basic program in 1984, here, at the UAM.   

The first digital art exhibition in Mexico was E lectrosensibilidad , organized by the UAM in 1988.  It was shown at the Galería Metropolitana and other spaces.  This surely made the ENAP jealous, because in 1993 they organized a conference called Encuentro Otras Gráficas which was held at San Carlos, along with an exhibition at the Carrillo Gil Museum.  Not long after, in 1994, the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes opened their new facilities at the Centro Nacional de las Artes, the public works that crowned the money throwing six year term of president Salinas.  There you can find the Centro Multimedia, which had reality equipment almost from its start.  

Another chain in the legitimation and institutionalization process of digital art happened in the late nineties when the CENIDIAP, the National Art Documentation and Research Center, appointed two full time researchers to work on the subject of digital art.  They are Margarita Ramírez and Adriana Zapett.  The former has a small book published which is called, precisely, ARTE DIGITAL   

To talk about digital art is to talk about a large variety of products.  On one hand we have all the work done in photocopying machines and digital printers.  At the beginning of the nineties several projects of this type were organized.  One of them was Proyecto Mimesis, organized in 1991 by the artist run galleries Pinto mi Raya and Los Caprichos, and sponsored by Canon.  The portfolio included 25 works from different generations, starting with Gunther Gerzso,  who was fifty years older than Cesar Martínez, the youngest participant.  The work was made in the  CLC500 color photocopying machine, which had just arrived in Mexico.   

On the other hand we have computer made projects, where I distinguish two types of works:  those in which the computer helps create works made on conventional supports such as paper, and those that use the computer as a support.  An example of the first was the project  Electrografía Monumental sobre Papel de Algodón, in which Victor Lerma, Humberto Jardón and I participated by making large format pieces printed at Nash Editions in California, which specializes in prints on fine papers.  The interesting thing of this workshop is that they altered the Iris printer in order to be able to use all these papers.  Eventually the printer company integrated all these inventions to their equipment. 

It is logical to assume that the computer itself is the ideal support for digital art because only there can all its possibilities be taken advantage of.  However, as Pedro Meyer has said, A We are keeping information in tools that in the end are ephemeral.  Technology changes so fast that it is difficult to conserve digital art, and, for the time being, digital art on paper has a better chance of surviving.    By the way, Meyer, one of the great " guru 's" of digital art, editor of  ZoneZero (http://www.zonezero.com/), one of the most important virtual magazines, is also the creator of the first CD-Rom art work: I Photograph to Remembe r, from 1994. 

One of the characteristics of digital art is the possibility it gives the artist of using all prior art languages and to recycle their own or others images.  An oil painting, an etching or a drawing, are always defined by the limitations of the material with which they are produced.  But the computer can integrate all these languages.  This and the recycling of images, makes the function of the digital artist not the creation of images, but the selection and using of those already existing.  It is collage at its maximum expression.  It is the perfect tool of postmodernism, or maybe one of its causes.   

As of the second half of the nineties, several Mexican artists began fully developing digital works in which the computer was not only another tool,   but where they conceptualize digital art as a genre with its own research and specificities.  One of the artists who stepped over into the digital era with most success was Andrea di Castro.  There is a project of Andrea I love is  called Gráfica monumental con tecnologías globales (Monumental Graphics With Global Technologies ) whereby he creates drawings based on the satellite registration of his movements on the landscape.  It can be visited at  http://www.imagia.com.mx/gradesc.htm.

Among the most outstanding virtual artists is Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who was born in Mexico and lives in Canada and Spain.  I met Lozano-Hemmer when he came to Mexico in 1994  to teach a course on virtual reality at the Centro Nacional de las Artes.  Curiously, this course, as well as the one taught by Óscar Olea at the ENAP in the seventies, did not have the necessary equipment to make work because the Centro Multimedia was just being installed.  In order to commemorate the   new century and millennium, Lozano-Hemmer made a piece called VECTORIAL ELEVATION.  RELATIONAL ARCHITECTURE NO. 4 i n the main square in Mexico City which seems to me one of the most interesting proposals in the use of the most sophisticated digital technology, spiced up with a strong political content implicit in the structure of the piece itself.  Lozano-Hemmer placed 18 robotic lights around the Zócalo, as we know the main square, whose light designs were defined by the audience through the Internet.  Each design lasted only a few seconds.  His project attracted eight hundred thousand people from all over the world.  The information on this project can be found at  http://www.alzado.net.  

Another example is Minerva Cuevas, whose work is conceptual, with an activist essence,  and which uses the Internet as its support. Cuevas has created a project called Mejor Vida Corp.,  which can be found at http://www.irational.org/mvc.  Through it, the audience can purchase all sorts of wonderful free products such as international student cards for anyone, bar codes with lower prices than those for the product you want to purchase or pills to keep you from falling asleep while traveling  in the underground.   She also provides free typing services and occasionally walks into the underground to clean it. 

And lastly, just as with the rest of art, digital art requires a strong promotion.  One way of doing it is by organizing virtual exhibitions, such as Interactiva ' 01 (www.cartodigital.org/interactiva),curated by interdisciplinary artist Raúl Ferrera-Balanquet (Cuba/USA/Mexico).  The exhibition is integrated by works done for the Internet, so it ' s not that old boring story of having photographs of paintings in the Internet.  Thus, it also includes fixed and moving images, there are works with sound, animation, video, hypertext, interaction and all the other cute things the media offers.  Although the exhibition lives in the virtual space, it was opened at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Ateneo in Mérida, Yucatán in May.

Apart from its artistic achievements, Interactiva ' 01 is a valuable project because it emerges as an answer to the marginalization of artists in poor countries who find it difficult to have access to technology.  In the exhibition there is work by artists such as  Maris Bustamante, Juan José Díaz Infante, Fernando Llanos, Ricardo Loria and Fran Ilich, as well as the work of artists from other places such as Brazil and India.  Visit it when you have a lot of time, because some of the pieces are complex and you could get lost in the maze of the virtual space.

As a conclusion I would like to say that although the influence of digital technology in artistic production is undeniable, the impact of the circulation of specialized information through the Internet is probably stronger: today young artists in Chiapas, Monterrey or Colima are up-to-date with what is going on in the world thanks to the Internet.  The tools, the forms of circulation of information, the forms of distribution and consumption of images are changing.  More than talking about digital art, the fun part will be to see what art becomes as the digital era advances.