Fran Ilich

Who is Fran Ilich?

Fran Ilich Morales is a Mexican writer and media artist who principally works on the theory and practice of narrative media. Born in 1975, during the early 1990s he co-founded the Contra-Cultura collective and was involved in the independent media scene in Tijuana—mainly the cyberpunk scene—where he was known to be an eclectic producer working with literature, photography, comics, videofilms and electronic music. Because of this, he was identified as part of the Generation X of Mexican literature, with other writers like Guillermo Fadanelli & Naief Yehya. In 1995 he began publishing Cinemátik, a printed tabloid on urban electronic culture. In 1996 he was a screenwriter for Discovery Channel Interacción, a show produced by Beatriz Acevedo. In 1997 he published his first novel, Metro-Pop. In 1998 he was signed by Digital Entertainment Network as creator for a series of 6-minute shows targeting young Latino audiences. However, the series never was produced, as the multimedia dot-com company and internet pioneer went bankrupt. The same year, along with other members of Laboratorios Cinemátik, he produced Cinemátik 1.0, which is considered to be the first cyberculture festival in Latin America. He was part of the initial group of artists and producers who founded Nortec, though he distanced himself from this scene in 1999 and moved to Berlin. There, he became involved with Nettime, collaborating with Florian Schneider, Geert Lovink, Natalie Bookchin, Pit Schultz, Ricardo Dominguez and Alexei Shulgin.