Arlindo Machado’s point of departure in this text is that noise, rather than signals, is the basis of writing in video. Grids of lines and dots are laid out on a surface, but when an electrical current is applied the figures are manipulated and dissolve, sometimes undergoing metamorphosis. For Machado, the corporality of the image is lost as it is projected in a state so virtual, so dematerialized, that it becomes graphic or conceptual. Diana Domingues’s images raise such questions of constant mutation. Machado envisions images that are transferred from the photochemical to the digital, images that make the leap from one support or means of production to another, as a media landscape. Video encompasses image-light, the place where visual information coincides with the light source that makes it visible. The text addresses the nature innate to Domingues’s proposals and to their dialogue with devices used to produce the technological image. Machado argues that that question—that is, artists’ ability to develop some sort of freedom or creativity in the context of a society marked by technology—lies at the core of art today.

Connexio, an exhibition of work by Diana Domingues, was held at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo in 1990; it went on to the Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, and was featured as part of the show Artmedia III held in Salerno, Italy.

A professor at the Universidade de Caxias do Sul in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, multimedia artist Diana Domingues is unquestionably a pioneer in video installation in Brazil.

Arlindo Machado’s book A ilusão especular is based on his master’s thesis in Comunicação e Semiótica presented at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. Published in 1984, the book had enormous impact on the visual art and photography communities. At the time of the publication, Machado had a column on photography, film, and the mass media in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. Like Stefania Brill at Íris magazine, Machado would become an important communicator of thought on photography throughout Brazil. In 1985, the year after Machado’s book was published, Vilém Flusser’s Filosofia da Caixa Preta was released and reviewed by Machado and by Brill. Also in 1985, Machado and Julio Plaza co-curated the show Arte e tecnologia held at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo directed, at the time, by the dynamic Walter Zanini. Thanks to that exhibition, Machado became a leading theorist on art and technology in Brazil.

[For texts on art and technology by Professor Zanini, see the following in the ICAA digital archive: “Primeiros tempos da arte / tecnologia no Brasil” (doc. no. 1111029) and “Vídeo-arte: uma poética aberta” (doc. no. 1110892).

The many texts on art and technology by Arlindo Machado include “Hipermídia: o labirinto como metáfora” (doc. no. 1111111), “A experiência do vídeo no Brasil” (doc. no. 1111112), “O mito da alta definição” (doc. no. 1111113), and “Perspectivas do vídeo no Brasil” (doc. no. 1111114)].

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