The author of this text—politician and art critic Mario Schenberg (1914-1990)—is one of the greatest theoretical physicists in Brazilian history. Most of his published work consisted of scientific articles on thermodynamics, quantum physics, statistics, astrophysics, and mathematics. He was the president of the Sociedad Brasileña de Física from 1979 to 1981 and the director of the Physics Department at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) from 1953 to 1961. He was twice elected congressman for the state of São Paulo. Due to his ties to the Partido Comunista Brasileño (PCB), his political, academic, and civil rights were abrogated after a military coup in 1964 that ushered in two decades of military dictatorship (1964-1985). Schenberg identifies those years with a period of great creativity in Brazil. In 1969, the X São Paulo Biennial was held despite international boycotts due to AI-5 (Acto Instucional no. 5), which suspended civil rights. That same year, Schenberg was dismissed from the university without a pension and even banned from entering the premises of the USP.
Considered one of the greatest Brazilian physicists of all time, Schemberg combined his work in science with art criticism. He was one of the first figures in Brazil to address the relationship between art and technology. Frederico Morais was another major Brazilian art critic that took an active interest in the intersection of art and technology. In his article “Abraham Palatnik: um pioneiro da arte tecnológica” published in the journal Cadernos da Pós-graduação (No. 1, 2000), Morais focuses on Palatnik’s pioneering chromo-kinetic work (se ICAA digital archive doc. no. 1110793).