Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga: Nexum ATM
December 2003
Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga: Nexum ATM
Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga’s Gate Page features an animated video that serves as an entry portal to his projects Nexum ATM, Public Broadcast Cart (2003), and VAGAMUNDO: A Migrant’s Tale (2002)—mobile public art projects designed for street interactions—as well as 1000 icons (2002). Together, the works in the series seek to promote human rights, freedom, and democracy. Nexum ATM is an interactive project taking the physical form of an ATM connected to a website that critiques earlier aggressive interventions by the United States in ten countries and presents information about civil mobilization. Public Broadcast Cart, a shopping cart with a microphone and speakers, invites pedestrians to actively contribute to a radio broadcast, thereby countering the monopolization of media by corporate entities. VAGAMUNDO takes the form of an ice cream cart that allows pedestrians to play a video game that introduces them to the experience of new Latinx immigrants to New York. In 1000 icons, one icon disappears for each death reported in headlines of the New York Times online. The vanished icons are replaced by new icons reporting how the death occurred, making visible the nation, organization, or individual responsible for these incidents.
Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga (b. 1971; San Francisco, California) approaches art as a social practice that seeks to establish dialogue in public spaces. He combines the handmade with emerging technologies to create content that encourages interaction and discussion among participants, viewers, and users. Zúñiga, the son of immigrant parents, grew up between Nicaragua and San Francisco, and the ways in which inequality and power manifest in our lives are a consistent thread in his work. His work has been shown internationally at venues including FACT, Liverpool; the Eighth International Festival of Video Art (2019), Camagüey, Cuba (2019); Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany; Gazelli Art House, London; ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany; Museum of the Moving Image, Queens; and El Museo del Barrio, New York.
Gate Pages
Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.
Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.