This essay is a brief history of how independent video developed in Brazil. Arlindo Machado highlights the role played by the renewal of open-signal television language. He notes that video emerged in the 1980s, at a time when Brazilian experimental cinema was in decline due to the high cost of production, and magnetic tape became a more viable option. Television language replaced the cinematographic point of reference for Brazilian video makers, though not in the large commercial TV networks. Machado thought that these videos experimented with the potential of electronic language, exploring social issues and thus playing an avant-garde role. Local broadcasters, such as the TV Gazeta de São Paulo, were the initial springboard for video makers. Machado mentions the original authors of this trend in Brazil, such as the group TVDO (that translated Glauber Rocha’s archaic style), Tadeu Jungle, Walter Silveira, and Marcelo Tas, among many others.

Arlindo Machado’s book A ilusão especular[AB1] , was the thesis he wrote for the master’s degree in Communication and Semiotics he earned at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. Published in 1984, it was hugely influential in photography and visual art circles. At the time, the author contributed a column to the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, where he wrote about photography, film, and mass communication, becoming one of the leading theorists on photography in Brazil, along with Stefania Brill who wrote for the magazine Íris. The following year Vilém Flusser published Filosofia da Caixa Preta[AB2] , which was reviewed by Machado and Brill. Also in 1985, Machado and Julio Plaza co-curated the exhibition “Arte e tecnologia” at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo under the auspices of the dynamic Walter Zanini, the museum’s director. The event made Machado one of the most respected theorists on the subject in Brazil.

[As complementary reading see the ICAA digital archive for the following texts on art and technology by Walter Zanini: “Primeiros tempos da arte / tecnologia no Brasil” (doc. no. 1111029), and “Vídeo-arte: uma poética aberta” (doc. no. 1110892). Arlindo Machado also wrote extensively on this subject in texts such as “Hipermídia: o labirinto como metáfora” (doc. no. 1111111), “As formas migrantes de Diana Domingues” (doc. no. 1111229), “O mito da alta definição” (doc. no. 1111113), and “Perspectivas do vídeo no Brasil” (doc. no. 1111114)].