In this text, Arlindo Machado analyzes the characteristics of the technological image, from the invention of photography to the computer and from Renaissance perspective to the synthesis of computer-generated images. Machado argues that in photography, film, and television the specular image of the fifteenth century continues to predominate; modern art was finally able to make a break from it. “Video art” is the first form of technological image that, in its iconography, undermines figurative realism by means of distortion and jarring use of color. The digital image generated and processed by the computer is ambiguous in that it returns to Renaissance canons by simulating the real while also shaping wholly unreal worlds that verge on abstraction. In the author’s view, emerging hybrid (computer video) forms will usher in a phenomenological “age of non-differentiation” between technological and artisanal, objective and subjective, images. 

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)].