In this essay, Professor Walter Zanini discusses the impact caused by the use of computers and digital images, noting the profound changes in the creation and perception of “artistic events” that this new tool designed for creativity and enjoyment has introduced. In his opinion, the transition from images produced by optical mechanisms to numerically generated images laid the groundwork for unprecedented achievement in the field of art. Zanini reviews, incorporates, and expands on concepts previously explored by authors such as Edmond Couchot, Roy Ascott, Mário Costa, and Derrick de Kerkhove. He mentions that digital technologies have prompted individual creativity to migrate toward a more collective creative environment, thus introducing new artistic horizons, including a poetics inspired by a constant flow of information in real time. This, he believes, is a real departure from the static, unique work of art that demolishes the very notion of a “copy.” New technologies will allow artists to access a sort of planetary coexistence that will increase their artistic potential. Zanini refers to postal art as a precursor to this kind of (hitherto unprecedented) human and social interaction in telematic space-time dimensions. This kind of collective activity, encouraged by the use of electronic media, will contribute to the dismantling (once and for all) of the artist’s habitual individual creative environment, to be replaced by a planetary hyper-individual.

The opinions expressed in this essay are of great importance because the critic, curator, and art historian Walter Zanini (1925–2013) is both a theoretician (who keeps an eye on how technology impacts art) and an active commentator who promotes activities and radical changes of this nature through the cultural institutions he directs. He was the first director of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea (affiliated with the USP), a position he held from 1963 to 1978, where he did a great deal to encourage the work of new artists and marginalized groups. He was also one of the curators at the Primera Bienal de São Paulo (1951). In the 1970s—with the help of the Spanish artist Julio Plaza (1938–2003), who was from Madrid but had settled in Brazil and was a professor at the Departamento de Multimedios at the UNICamp and at the Departamento de Artes Plásticas da ECA-USP—Zanini helped to expose the work of artists who were involved in experimentation and in the conceptual use of multimedia. The MAC-USP organized exhibitions and made its equipment available and thus became a broadcasting center for the first generation of Brazilian video artists. As a curator of two São Paulo biennials, in 1981 and 1983, Zanini introduced the public to experimental productions of video art, video text, slow-scan, and other forms of art in this genre.  

For additional information, see Zanini’s “Primeiros tempos da arte/tecnologia no Brasil” [doc. no. 1111029], originally published in Diana Domingues (org.) A arte no século XXI: a humanização das tecnologias (São Paulo: Unesp, 1997); and Zanini’s about mail-art “A arte postal na busca de uma nova comunicação internacional” [doc. no. 1110591].

On this subject, see also by Walter Zanini “A arte de Comunicação Telemática” (1998), Agnus Valente (org.) HIBRIDA, Revista Eletrônica [www.agnusvalente.com/hibrida/hibrida.swf], available since February 2009; cf. Ars magazine, Sao Paulo, Year 1, # 1, pp. 10-34, 2003.