Telephonic Presence. Marta Minujìn’s early works

This chapter analyzes the works at the intersection of telematic art and expanded cinema by Argentine artist Marta Minujín (1943–), who between 1966 and 1968 created specific tele-visual installations that shed light on the role of individual media in the production of forms of remote presence. Marta Minujín achieved celebrity status very early on in her homeland but only in recent years has her significant and broad contribution to contemporary art been fully recognized at international level. Her evident affiliation with the hippie scene of the 1970s long seemed sufficient to frame her work, yet her practice in fact engages in sophisticated experimentation with media technologies, from radio to computers, which places her in dialogue with the major media artists of her time. In particular, the installation Minuphone (1967) grasps the archaeological centrality of the telephone in the journey towards the technologies of telepresence, recognizing the booth as a dispositif for translating real presence into virtual presence. Due to its ability to bridge past and future, reinterpreting an old medium and prefiguring the scenarios of the future, Minujín’s work constitutes a valuable tool for media archaeology.