Fabián Wagmister

Professor
Department: UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television
fabian@ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: Latin America

Fabian Wagmister, a filmmaker and digital media artist, is the creator of the Hypermedia Studio, a research facility developing theoretical and practical frameworks bridging performance, installation and media art through digital technology. Wagmister’s current work focuses on alternative technological modes for collective creativity. He collaborates with diverse communities to generate reflexive media systems emphasizing cultural and locative specificity. In this context technology and culture converge into a performative social practice of investigation and expression.

He has focused much of his recent work at UCLA TFT on interpretive media systems for the Los Angeles State Historic Park (LASHP) and the surrounding neighborhoods. In collaboration with the California Department of State Parks and Recreation, Wagmister created the Interpretive Media Laboratory @ LASHP (IMLab). In late 2014, Wagmister and his REMAP/IMLab teams debuted an immersive interpretive media environment for the new Welcome Center at the park.

International exhibitions include “Behind the Bars,” a confrontational interactive environment about Latin America’s “desaparecidos;” “Time & Time Again…, with Lynn Hershman,” a distributed interactive media environment exploring technological dependency and cultural identity; and the database-driven exploratory installation “…two, three, many Guevaras,” examining the legacy of Ernesto Che Guevara. In these works and in his writings he combines a strong ideological voice with explorations into the protean media structures emerging from digital technologies. Originally from Argentina, he collaborates with artists and theorists in Latin America and lectures and presents his work throughout the continent.