“From Brazil: A Forest of Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques” by Hisayasu, Ierusalimschy, Khoe and Menezes
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Title:
- From Brazil: A Forest of Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
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Abstract:
1 INTRODUCTION
This panel is devoted to the history of the deep, diverse, and rich contributions from Brazil to the global digital culture, from early Computer Art, the design of the Lua Programming Language to the use of digital media by contemporary indigenous communities. The panel has three presentations by key technologists, scholars, and curators:
1.1 “Waldemar Cordeiro and Giorgio Moscati:
Pioneers of Computer Art in Brazil” by
Caroline Menezes
This talk aims to present a brief overview of Italian-Brazilian artist Waldemar Cordeiro (1925-1973) with the emergence of pioneering experiences in computer art in Brazil. Together with the ItaloBrazilian physicist Giorgio Moscati (1934-), responsible for the programming of the algorithms, Cordeiro began, in 1968, to explore the use of computer resources to create a type of art in tune with the core of an industrial society that was already moving towards a computerized reality. Thus, the duo began to develop a series of works that aimed not to duplicate experiences already made in art but to expand them towards something unknown and, to a great extent, linked to the random aspect made possible by computer algorithms. Cordeiro and Moscati began to research the aesthetic possibilities of computers and seek to give legibility to the processes that take place within and around them. The loss of referential images, caused by the various abstract movements in art, pointed Cordeiro in a new direction, even more abstract, where art explains itself. These are the duo’s ideals in their contact with computers, seeking a new humanism in the emerging computerized society. In conclusion, I aim to highlight the artistic legacy of the duo and how the brief period in which they worked together opened new horizons for artistic practice in the Brazilian context.
1.2 “The Lua Bar: Lua programming language”
by Roberto Ierusalimschy
The Lua programming language was created in 1993 at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro as an in-house tool for a project for the Brazilian Petroleum Corporation. Since then, it spread to become one of the leading scripting languages in the game industry. In this short presentation, I will discuss the path that Lua followed from that “unlikely place” for the birth of a programming language into the development teams of many world-renowned companies.
1.3 “Memory Practices in Indigenous
Contemporary Cultures” by Louise
Hisayasu
Memory Practices in Indigenous Contemporary Cultures: My research studies the impact that digital technologies and the Internet have had, as tools, on the safeguarding and endurance of firstperson Indigenous memories. The inclusion of Indigenous communities in Brazil to the digital landscape has transformed remarkably since the early 2000’s, when early digital inclusion programmes, called Pontos de Cultura Indígena (PCI) emerged in rural Indigenous villages. Since then, projects like Rádio Yandê, Índios Online and Arte Eletrônica Indígena have served as great case studies for Indigenous protagonism online. By reclaiming through indigenising, cultural producers have created new methods of communication, renewed aesthetics for Indigenous contemporary art and created novel tactics for sustainable ecological preservation. Pitman uses the term digital indigeneity to describe Indigenous peoples relationships to digital media, understood through their ways of appropriating new technologies and how they feel this relates to their greater sense of identity. Artist Denilson Baniwa has described his artistic practice as a rescue of Indigenous memory through the invasion or occupation of space. Spaces need to shift to lugares de fala (spaces for discussions) where cultural, ethnic and historical pluralities can exist in harmony, and where more visibility is given to voices which traditionally lie outside the hegemony of power.
