Keynote speaker: Alex Saum-Pascual

Maps of the Digital Fiefdom: An Exploration through Digital Art and Literature

Too large for human apprehension, capitalism’s digital infrastructures expand throughout the globe thanks to a logic of distribution and dispersion that carefully hides the connection between their virtual (abstract) dimensions and their physical infrastructures. The result is the re-mapping of the world into a new digital economic structure that, paradoxically, abandons future capitalist projections to look back to a hierarchical feudal system where each user needs to pay tribute to participate in a digital environment increasingly controlled by fewer parties. Unfortunately, while key actors in this re-mapping, most users are unaware of the consequences of their participation within these systems. In this talk, I present a selection of works of digital art and literature by Spanish and Latin American artists that, by emphasizing their entanglement in these digital fiefdoms, help us reconnect the broken link between abstract technology and material life on Earth.