Different Engines

Reviews / Votes

With a sovereign gesture, Andres Burbano puts Latin America and the Global South on the agenda of media archaeological research, at the same time opening up a perspective for them as exciting and indispensable agents in the deep-time interplay between the sciences, technology, and the arts. In his case studies, past, presences, and possible futures meet to form fascinating surprise generators.

- Siegfried Zielinski, Professor Emeritus of Media Theory, Universitaet der Kuenste, Berlin, and author of Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means

With five case studies, Burbano introduces a world of Latin American innovations that could potentially alter existing histories of media. Unifying historical research with experimental design, this book is required reading for scholars and students of art, media, and design practices and histories.

- Maria Fernandez, Associate Professor of Art History, Cornell University, Ithaca, and author of Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture

Different Engines offers fascinating insights into the history of Latin American media technology. Beyond this, Burbano proposes a promising new research approach that not only brings together ideas from STS, art history, media archaeology, and postcolonial studies, but introduces experimental interaction with historical media as an indispensable epistemological method.

- Margit Rosen, Head of Collections, Archives & Research at the Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe (ZKM), and editor of A Little-Known Story About a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer's Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961-1973

Different Engines: Media Technologies from Latin America constitutes the first genuine historical ontology of media artifacts from the much-ignored experience of the Global South. Whether focusing on early experimentations with analog sound and image or examining contemporary involvement with computerized media, what the author finds in these revealing Latin American cases is a lot of anticipatory, creative, and alternative technological paths that defy the conventional accounts and criteria of successful innovation. With Different Engines, Burbano emerges as the premiere decolonial and pluriversal media archaeologist in the world at present. His "experimental reconstitutions" of past experiences should become an obligatory passage point for those wishing to engage in similar reconstructions with other media or in other parts of the South. This eminently readable book will be of great value to those interested in science and technology studies, media studies, design, and cultural, decolonial and Latin American Studies.

- Arturo Escobar, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds