Media Laboratories explores a pivotal time for South American literature of the Thirties and ’40s. Cinema, radio, and the typewriter, as soon as visible as promising catalysts for brand new types of writing, started to be challenged via authors, employees, and the general public. What occurs whilst media not look novel and very likely democratic yet particularly consolidated and dominant? relocating between authors from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and one of the genres of fiction, the essay, renowned journalism, and experimental little magazines, Sarah Ann Wells indicates how writers at the outer edge of world modernity have been fashioning substitute techniques to those media. interpreting authors reminiscent of Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, and Felisberto Hernández, besides their lesser-known contemporaries, Media Laboratories casts a large internet: from spectators of Hollywood and Soviet montage motion pictures, to inventors of imaginary media, to proletarian typists who embodied the machine-human encounters of the interval. The textual content navigates modern scholarly and renowned debates in regards to the courting of literature to technological innovation, media archaeology, sound reviews, populism, and international modernisms. finally, Wells underscores a query that is still proper: what chances emerge whilst the keenness for brand new media has been changed by way of nervousness over their almost certainly pernicious results in a globalizing, but greatly unequal, world?