Leonardo

The exhibition and conference, Art of the Twenty-First Century, was arranged by the media lab (laboratorio novas technologias nas artes visuales) at the Universidade de Caxias do Sul in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1995. It brought together distinguished international media artists and theorists such as Roy Ascott, Monique Nahas, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, David Rokeby and Stelarc, as well as younger figures and representatives of less-known art scenes in Latin America and southern Europe. The exhibition featured, for example, stereoscopic animations by the Brazilian Tania Fraga (see www.lsi.usp.br/~tania/tania/html), the "Infinite Poem" by the Brazilian Philadelpho Menezes (see www.pucsp.br/~phmenez/index.htm), a three-dimensional video-poem by the Spaniard Julio Plaza, and a laser installation by the Italian Ruggero Maggi. The themes of the conference were Robotics: Man-Machine Scenario; Art, Technology and Utopia; Numeric Revolution; Perspectives for a History of Art; and Technology, Interactivity and Planetary Communication.

In this CD-ROM, the exhibited works and the conference papers are sparsely illustrated with photos, video clips and short quotations. Today, this is already an historical document, and it might be of interest for everyone looking back into the rapid flow of ideas and technology during the 1990s--a decade in which many hitherto utopian ideas were starting to become reality. Suddenly there was a real Internet, various kinds of AI and VR (Monique Nahas: "The era of algorithmic wholes") and a general [End Page 387] breakthrough of non-linear ways of structuring information for utilitarian or aesthetic purposes. These aspects were all reflected in the exhibition, and Arlindo Machado's words in the conference about hypermedia express a great deal of the interdisciplinary spirit of this international meeting: "If we understand consciousness and imagination as processes of conscious association and of restructuring of images and concepts selected inside the memory, it is not hard to realize that hypermedia is a much more adequate representation of this very conscience or this very imagination than sequential, restrictive, stable and linear codes of the previous meaningful forms."

The CD presentation lacks some kind of summary or explanation to place the conference in a wider context of earlier and later developments. I found the documentation too fragmentary and the CD interface rather clumsy and complicated. Given the international character of the visual material, however, it could be useful for pedagogical purposes in museums or in classes of art history or media studies. If one wants to read the conference papers (in the native languages of the speakers), they are available in a printed publication from the media lab <http://artecno.ucs.br/>.

Fred Andersson,
Ulvsbygatan 29 (6), 654 64 Karlstad, Sweden.
E-mail: <konstfred@hotmail.com>.