Imagining Macondo: Interacting with García Márquez's Literary Landscape

Abstract

Imagining Macondo is a public artwork that commemorates Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez. It was first showcased at the Bogota International Book Fair in April 2015 to an audience of more than 300,000 over the course of two weeks. The project involved extensive collaboration between an international team of artists, designers, and programmers. This article explores the historical and artistic contexts for the creation of the work, discusses the audience reception to the work, and describes the significant software and production requirements necessary to create an installation with thousands of participants and hundreds of thousands of viewers.