The Platypuses of Art: Unclassifiable Practices and a Media Archive in Chile

This article offers a critical and historical review of media arts in Chile, addressing their emergence, development, and the challenges of their inscription within the artistic field. From a situated genealogical perspective, it analyzes practices that intertwine art, science, and technology, highlighting both their growing institutional visibility and the difficulties surrounding their categorization and recognition within national art historiography. Using the figure of the "platypus" as a metaphor for the unclassifiable, the article proposes a reflection on the tensions between practice and theory, the persistence of exclusionary disciplinary models, and the need to expand interpretative frameworks to understand these cross-border experiences. It considers both pioneering and current cases and draws on theoretical references from science and technology studies, decolonial thought, technoscientific feminisms, and posthumanism. Overall, it underscores the urgency of constructing critical narratives that account for these practices as an integral—though historically marginalized—part of contemporary artistic production in Chile.