Waldemar Cordeiro considers how art envisioned as information is conveyed in the mass media. Cordeiro acknowledges that art has become less traditional; its scale has changed and it has moved beyond the context of galleries to enter the urban and regional environment. Nonetheless, he feels that art today still fails to reach a larger public. He further asserts that information is lost as an original work of art is replaced by a reproduction; the lack of a context conducive to understanding art has a harmful effect on its semantic interpretation. Cordeiro defends the use of electronic media and telecommunications, which in terms of art gives shape to a complex product he calls “arteônica” [art electronics]. Indeed, in Cordeiro’s view, “arteônica” may well play a historically significant role. However, the author warns of the dangers of technical virtuosity in computer-rendered simulacra. For this reason, he favors interdisciplinary and syntactic works that further the traditions of Concrete art and of Gestalt psychological research. Cordeiro believes that if it is possible to bridge distances and overcome obstacles, an artistic culture of national and even international breadth will develop.

Contrarian painter, designer, landscape artist, art critic, and theorist Waldemar Cordeiro (1925–73) was an advocate of a brand of computer-aided creation he called “arteônica.” Cordeiro formulates a paradigm of theory and of participation at the core of art and technological advances. After having participated in the fifties in the Concrete art group Ruptura (founded in 1952) and formulating semantic objects or “Popcretos” in the sixties, he engaged in research and in artistic experimentation linked to the computer and the plotter, becoming a pioneer in those fields in Brazil and elsewhere. In conjunction with Giorgio Moscati—a physicist, engineer, and professor at the Universidade de São Paulo—Cordeiro organized “Computer plotter art” (1970) and “Arteônica” (1971), the first shows of computer art held in São Paulo. His research was brought to a sudden end by his unexpected death in 1973, two years after that second show.

Published in 1972, this catalogue contains the text that Cordeiro wrote for the exhibition Arteônica, held at the FAAP (Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado) in São Paulo in March 1971, as well as writings for a seminar that never took place.

Related texts include Waldemar Cordeiro’s “‘Computer Plotter Art’— Primeira Mostra na America Latina” and “110001 101001 100110 110101 significa arte em linguagem binária,” Computer Plotter Art (São Paulo: Mini-galeria do USIS/ United States Consulate in São Paulo, 1970), both in [doc. no. 1110487].