Julio Plaza introduces his exhibition Câmara Obscura, fully aware of the risks involved in translating a visual language into words. The result is a prim illustration that spills over into the spectators’ terrain. This work is a continuation of Plaza’s previous project, Las Meninas, which sought to establish a dialogue between the “visual world” and the “visual field,” both of which were meant in the sense suggested by James Jerome Gibson. Plaza makes a comparison between the mechanical activity of “looking” and the selective and critical activity of “seeing.” To that end, he attempts to “see” by technical means, using a pinhole image for a more expansive view of the environment, in which the interrelationships of the (internal and external) spaces as well as the images in memory are split, expanded, and decoded. Both the occupation of the space and its anthropological use are the result of the various relationships of position and action used for calculating, measuring, comparing, classifying, and assigning a route.        

This is the text of the introduction to Câmara Obscura, the solo exhibition presented from September 3 to 25, 1977, at the Espaço B del MAC-USP (Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo). It addresses philosophical and semiotic differences between verbal and visual languages, and questions the process involved in the perception of reality. A pioneer in the use and contextual occupation of exhibition spaces in Brazil, the artists refers to his work as an “installation.”    

The multimedia artist, professor, and theoretician Julio Plaza (1938–2003) was a well-known figure in the world of Brazilian conceptual and electronic art, acknowledged for his graphic versions of several concrete poems. He worked with the poet Augusto de Campos to produce books and objects such as Poemóbiles (1974) and Caixa Preta (1975). He was a professor at the Departamento de Multimeios do Instituto de Artes da UNIcamp (in Campinas), and the Departamento de Artes Plásticas at the ECA/USP (Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo). He organized the first videotext exhibition in Brazil: Arte pelo Telefone: Videotexto (São Paulo: Museu da Imagem e do Som, 1982), where he was responsible for the new media salon at the seventeenth Bienal de São Paulo (1983), which introduced electronic art to Brazil. In his doctoral thesis (published later as a book), Plaza discussed his ideas for an inter-semiotic translation that converts literary texts into visual and audible codes. 

[As complementary reading, see the author’s articles in the ICAA digital archive: “77: quase-apresentação” (doc. no. 1110719); “Arte e interatividade: autor-obra-recepção” (doc. no. 1111093); “Arte e videotexto” (doc. no. 1111090); “Busca da dimensão mais firme para a realidade” (doc. no. 1110750); “Imagemega” (doc. no. 1111133); “Info foto: grafias” (doc. no. 1111091); “O livro como forma de arte (I)” (doc. no. 1111238); “O livro como forma de arte (II)” (doc. no. 1111239); “Mail-art: arte em sincronia” (doc. no. 1110592); “Manifiesto pro integración” (doc. no. 1110751); “Nem oito, nem oitenta: oi, tô aí” (doc. no. 1111270); “Poéticas visuais” (doc. no. 1110587); and “Transcriar” (doc. no. 1111237)].