Cuban Digital Pedagogies and the Question of the Interface in Yaima Pardo’s Offline
This chapter analyses Yaima Pardo’s Offline to explore how the cross-fertilization of documentary and digital conventions can be used to reconstruct web navigation as an immersive experience that offers itself as a pedagogical intervention and critical interrogation of internet infrastructures and practices in Cuba. In Offline, the immersive dimension of nonfictional representation (live action footage, interviews, and database video images), and the operational dimension of digital interfaces (reading emails, clicking links, navigating multiple windows, downloading data, but also witnessing machine errors produced by internet access restrictions or limitations in data transmission capacity) contaminate each other and produce a tense convergence of cinematic conventions and data processes. It is through this tense convergence of national and global database images, functional and dysfunctional interfaces, and the nonfictional remixing of pro-filmic spaces and cyberspaces that Offline comes to represent some polemics and disputes, as well as some contradictory and ambivalent aspects that form part of the internet debate in Cuba. Offline evokes the idea that documentaries can play an important role as cinematic interfaces for the development of digital humanities practices in countries where internet connection and access to digital interfaces cannot be taken for granted.