This text was written by Arlindo Machado and Julio Plaza to be published in the catalogue for Artecnologia, the exhibition that the two authors co-curated and presented on September 2-9, 1985 at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de São Paulo – USP, which was at that time under the dynamic direction of Walter Zanini. The authors use an intersemiotic approach to analyze the nature of artistic production that relies on technological means as well as “inter-media” and “multi-media” concepts. They claim that technological artists can stop the progressive-centrifugal movement of symbolic communication and replace it with a centripetal force, or “icon”. The artist’s eye is what gives this iconic dimension its dominance. “Inter-media” involves the simultaneous use of media: video performance is a theatrical use of video; video installation is the use of video in a given environment; video art, in turn, is video used as a form of recording-action-montage; photography is of interest because of its alternative techniques; photocopying because of its reproducibility; holography produces holopoems; microfilm is a resource for art, and computer art can be used in the graphic arts, music, dance, and verbal language.

Arlindo Machado is one of Brazil’s principal theorists and historians in the field of technological art. He is also a professor in the Cinema, Radio, and Television Department at the Escola de Comunicação e Arte da Universidade de São Paulo and has written extensively on the subject of technological art. He has also curated and organized exhibitions of this type of art such as A Arte do Vídeo no Brasilat the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro in 1997, and Brazilian Vídeoheld inWashington, D.C.

The multimedia artist, professor, and theorist Julio Plaza (1938–2003) was a well-known figure in the fields of Brazilian conceptualism and electronic art and was widely recognized  for his graphic versions of several concrete poems. He also worked with the poet Augusto de Campos to produce books and objects such as Poemóbiles[AB1]  (1974) and Caixa Preta [AB2] (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, held in São Paulo at the Museu da Imagem e do Somin 1982, and was responsible for the special multimedia exhibition hall at the 17th São Paulo biennial in 1983, a landmark event for electronic art in Brazil. Plaza wrote his doctoral thesis, subsequently published as a book, on an intersemiotic form of translation that converts literary texts into visual and audible codes.

[Professor Walter Zanini, then the director of the Museu de Ate Contemporânea, wrote two essays about Plaza’s work: one on the exhibition Poéticas Visuais, see the ICAA digital archive for “As novas possibilidades = The new possibilities” (doc. no 1110585); and the other on the text “Primeiros tempos da arte/tecnologia no Brasil” (doc. no. 1111029)].

[As complementary reading, see in the archive the following texts by Julio Plaza: “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), “Câmara obscura” (doc. no.  1110718), “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), “Nem oito, nem oitenta: oi, tô aí” (doc. no. 1111270), “Poéticas visuais” (doc. no. 1110587), and “Transcriar” (doc. no. 1111237)].