In this text, art critic Walter Zanini presents the show Multimedia Internacional. In it, he argues that art from the seventies was highly influenced by artists who privileged semantic concerns. They cast aside aesthetic subjectivity to take part in a strain of activism that addressed reality on the basis of the resources of a technological society. In Zanini’s view, multimedia production came to be at the forefront of artistic language, developing in startling ways and yielding unexpected results. Criticism and participation are essential values in the production of videos of a universal nature. Zanini emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature and commitment of artistic communities that operate in circuits of their own creation. He relates the exhibition Multimedia Internacional to the events held at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP) under his direction in the seventies. He mentions specifically the contribution of Recife in northeastern Brazil. In this text, Zanini also announces plans to organize a series of multimedia events.

The exhibition Multimedia Internacional was held at the Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo (ECA-USP) from November 19 to December 16, 1979. It was organized by Walter Silveira and Tadeu Jungle, students at USP, who went on to join TVDO, a group that produced experimental videos.

Critic, curator, and art historian Walter Zanini (1925–2013) was the first director of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea (a part of the USP). From that post, which he held from 1963 to 1978, he encouraged the production of emerging artists and supported marginalized forms of artistic expression. Zanini was also one of the curators of the first Bienal de São Paulo (1951). In conjunction with Julio Plaza (1938–2003)—an artist from Madrid who lived in Brazil and taught in the Departamento de Multimeios of the UNICamp and the Departamento de Artes Plásticas of the ECA-USP—Zanini organized major events in the seventies, among them this show. His efforts along these lines were focused on communicating the work of artists engaged in experimentation and a conceptual use of multimedia. In this text, Zanini mentions specifically the group from Recife in the state of Pernambuco led by Paulo Bruscky.

For related texts, see Walter Zanini’s “Introdução a Prospectiva ‘74” [doc. no. 1110588]; and Waldemar Cordeiro’s “Arteônica” [doc. no. 1110836] and “‘Computer Plotter Art’—Primeira Mostra na America Latina” [doc. no. 1110487].