Street Net and Electronic Music in Cuba

Author:

Boudreault-Fournier Alexandrine

Abstract

Cuba has one of the lowest internet penetration rates in the world. This encourages Cubans to create alternative ways of coping with digital scarcity, including hidden wi-fi antennas and ethernet cables strung over streets and rooftops, and physical networks of digital media circulation that rely on memory sticks and other portable devices. These alternative networks counter the inefficiency and unreliability of the official media infrastructures, providing the population with access to digital media and to what presently circulates outside of Cuba. Electroacoustic and electronic musicians benefit from these physical networks of circulation by accessing text, audio, and image files, as well as cracked software, anti-virus definitions, and plug-ins. This chapter explores the creative impacts of evolving media infrastructures on the production and circulation of digital media in Cuba, looking at how wires, waves, and webs affect the creation of new collectives and new music during a period of rapid economic and political transformation. It addresses the strategies adopted by electronic musicians to access programs and software, and to create music in a context of digital scarcity and through illicit and legal infrastructures. The chapter discusses telecommunications networks and the digitalization of music on this island, where the creative strategies for dealing with such infrastructures (or the lack thereof) contribute to new fields of musical practice. Digital culture in Cuba is about alternative local intranets as much as the official global internet, hand-to-hand data sharing as much as peer-to-peer file transfers, human “servers” as much as computer servers.

Publisher

Oxford University Press

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