PC Gamer [CubaCreativa] by Nestor Siré, curated by Yainet Rodríguez, at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, 21/05/2025 – 25/05/2025.
7. Exhibition text:
PC Gamer As part of the project CubaCreativa [since 2014] CubaCreativa interrogates the production of technological knowledge under conditions of material restriction, foregrounding community capacities to repurpose existing technologies for local needs. Within PC Gamer, it observes gamer practices that, through hardware modding, dissolve the border between innovation and adaptation. These interventions contest global regimes that legislate which technologies count and who may develop them, exposing tensions between dominant models and collective solutions forged at the margins of hegemonic infrastructures. Deploying collaborative methodologies, the project probes the interdependence of social dynamics and technical development. Each of its projects documents, systematizes, and circulates these processes through open-design networks, social platforms, and free-software communities; each work simultaneously questions the place of art and the artist inside such sociotechnical assemblages. The pieces assert that technology is never neutral: it is both a product of social relations and an agent that reshapes them. By challenging notions such as planned obsolescence and unequal access, CubaCreativa advances a critical reading of technical autonomy. Innovation emerges here as dialogue, where marginal practices rewrite canonical parameters and sketch technological futures through collective creativity, revealing technology itself as a negotiated terrain between the individual, the communal, and the global. Acknowledgments: Yainet Rodriquez, Maurice Haedo Sanabria, Chuli Herrera, Cathy Hsiao, Ignis Lea, Michel Praga, Eduardo Pujol and Luis Rodil-Fernandez. Copincha HackerSpace, Tokyo HackerSpace and TOKAS. www.nestorsire.com / @nestorsire
