The Internet is frequently heralded as a positive alternative space for the exploration of new identities, allowing the imaginative creation of a new self – or selves – that may or may not be carried through into everyday life (Laurel 2001: 110). The artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña invites Net-users to project themselves imaginatively onto others' lives, to explore alternative life narratives and purge their demons through his different projects. Through his work as a multimedia artist working both on- and off-line, he aims to make others aware of issues such as race, class, gender, and national allegiances, using multiple – often ludic – methods, in order to achieve radical social change. In this chapter, I shall examine some of the games, identities, and techniques used by Gómez-Peña as an online performer and consider his stated aims.

Techno-Razcuache Border Artist

Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City and moved to the USA in 1978 where he works as a performance artist and writer. In terms of his artistic practice, he describes himself as a ‘migrant performance artist’ (Gómez-Peña 1994: 211) and ‘an interdisciplinary intellectual’ (Gómez-Peña 2005: xviii), and, with respect to his relationship to new technologies, as a ‘webback’ (Gómez-Peña 2005: viii), an unwilling ‘cyber-vato’ and an ‘information superhighway bandido’ (Gómez-Peña 2001: 281). In general terms, he tackles issues of the locatedness of cultures and the significance of borderlands, through an interrogation of the concept of a fixed nation space and an exploration of identity issues associated with such a conceptualisation of space.