Layers of Myth and Magic: the role of the “artist class” in Brazilian technology transfer and the myth of use-neutrality (original) (raw)

I investigate how situated practices of technological and the artistic classes in Brazil converge to build a cultural identity around innovation. I contextualize these artistic and technological vanguards against historical, political, and economic conditions that allow them to build an “anthropophagic” network of Brazilian innovation. I examine discursive legacies from preceding cultural economies: the Neoconcretismo and Tropicalia movements in the 1960s-1970s coinciding with the mass introduction of computers, and the Internet-based technocratic elite of the 1990s-2000s under Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil. A renown Tropicalia musician, Gil vowed to “‘transform the ministry into ‘the home of all those who think about and invent Brazil,’” setting favorable conditions for the cultural awareness of technology-based measures for progress. The ensuing accounts of technology transfer, vanguard art movements, and state measures produce contemporary visions of Brazilian networked society as state policy, local innovation, and cultural institutions that are decidedly not use-neutral.