Mercancia de Pacotilla

I.They Will Be the Center of the World “Los de México están muy ufanos con su descubrimiento, que tienen entendido que serán ellos el corazón del mundo.” -Excerpt from “Copy of a letter sent from Seville to Miguel Salvador de Valencia,” 16th century, recounting the Mexican reaction to Urdaneta’s tornaviaje In the 16th century, Spanish explorer and Augustinian friar Andrés de Urdaneta traveled westward from New Spain to the East Indies several times. By the middle of the century, he dedicated himself to calculating and conquering a seemingly impossible challenge: Sailing eastward, from the East Indies to New Spain. Somewhere between the gyres of the water and the positions of the stars, he saw a way back, a return journey, the tornaviaje. In 1565, Urdaneta sailed what would be known as the "Urdaneta Route," (alternatively, la Nao de China or the Manila Galleon), utilizing the Pacific trade winds, facilitating the journey from the Philippines back to Mexico, finally setting his anchor down in Acapulco. This development had significant implications for transpacific trade, enabling Spanish galleons to establish a more efficient and profitable maritime connection. Massive ships and accompanying armadas were subsequently contracted and quickly built to sail this new route. Trade could now flow in both directions around the earth, ushering in the first century of a truly global economy. II.Scrying for Stability (Time Is A Flat Circle) We are desperate to see what tomorrow brings. While you or I may plan for tonight’s dinner, an upcoming project deadline, or a family visit in a few months, there are countless unseen variables that determine the success or failure of these short-term plans–bank account balances, supply chain shortages, bed bugs, atmospheric pressure drops, winning big in the casino, travel bans, a bout of scurvy, solar flares–do you sense the frailty of your tiny future in front of interpersonal, geopolitical, and cosmic entropy? Countries and corporations are subject to many of the same factors, but the most powerful have invested heavily in technologies that digest the past and excrete the future. These tools are not meant to represent our present reality. Hito Steyerl points to the contemporary artifact’s move away from representation toward projection as “part of a larger drive to preempt the future by analyzing data from the past and thus trying to preemptively make the future as similar to the past as possible.” ChatGPT tells me that “​​a latent diffusion model (LDM) is a statistical model that represents the spread or adoption of an underlying variable or phenomenon through a network by capturing the unobserved factors influencing the diffusion process.” In the past, soothsayers and alchemists gazed into crystal balls to divine the unknown future from the unobserved present. Today, Stable Diffusion, a tool based on an LDM, uses external inputs along with what until now were “unobserved factors” to generate tomorrow’s visual terrain. III. Designed in Mexico, Assembled in China Let’s go shopping. With this declaration, a convoluted dance unfolds, choreographed by the likes of Alibaba merchants, dropshippers, and the dupe economy. Boundaries blur, as our (their) design intertwines with their (our) craftsmanship. Contract and copyright become both content and medium, entangling themselves in a web of ambiguous ownership. It is a game of WeChat telephone, where the “artist’s intentions” transform, mutate, and sometimes disappear altogether. IV. The Industrial Revolution and Its Consequences While the symbols and objects we use to define ourselves are not confined by borders, they may very well be confined within the six faces of a cardboard box, struggling to breathe between packing peanuts and bubble wrap. I bought this balloon at the mall… V. Transience and Reconsolidation …And it only cost a dollar! (The air was free) Gilbert Stuart painted the famous Athenaeum portrait from a sitting with George Washington. He left the portrait unfinished–likely so no one could buy it–and used it as a model to make dozens of portraits of the first president, turning his studio into a reproduction factory. An engraving based on this portrait can be found on the US one-dollar bill. While apprenticed to a portrait artist in Massachusetts at the turn of the 19th century, David Edwin made an engraving based on Stuart’s Washington that was sent by ship to an artist in China. Faithfully reproducing this engraving on porcelain and adding gold flourishes to frame the portrait, the resulting Chinese export jug made its way back to the newly independent states. Tornaviaje. The 19th-century art critic John Neal wrote, “Though a better likeness of him were shown to us, we should reject it; for, the only idea that we now have of George Washington, is associated with Stuart’s Washington.” VI. Stargazing Serving as a reliable method of orientation, celestial navigation relied upon the observation and interpretation of celestial bodies. Merchants, explorers, and travelers of the Silk Road utilized the stars, sun, moon, and constellations as celestial reference points to determine their positions and navigate through the vast and often treacherous landscapes. These astronomical tools directly informed the advanced maritime navigation that eventually connected Silk Road societies to the New World. Constellations are subjective while stars stay the same. Can you see Ursa Minor, Draco, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, or Camelopardalis? What about 南方朱雀?