Layers of Myth and Magic: the role of the “artist class” in Brazilian technology transfer and the myth of use-neutrality (original) (raw)
Related papers
In considering technology transfer in the Global South, Brazil's recent upsurge in open-source software development raises the historical question of how disparate ideological conceptions of nationalism, market censorship, and innovation have played a role in the dissemination and adoption of what we now consider universally acceptable technology: computers. I contest the reductive idea of a “trickle-down” model of technological adaptation by introducing various technical “actors”, or seres técnicos, who emerge in Brazil to address needs rising from specific technological moments to explore larger rhetorical ideations of labor, free speech, and knowledge production. Through a case study on Brazil’s “indigenous” or “hybrid” computers, I build a mediahistorical analysis that starts with Brazilian military protectionist policy encouraging the local development of computers during the 1970s-1980’s. I then lead up to the current cultural, political, and technological climate of global-minded free/livre open-access software (FLOSS) to argue about the various “local” valences of technology transfer.
Even under many formally democratic regimes, large swaths of the citizenry experience alienation from states with uneven presence throughout the national territory. Addressing a gap in scholarship that has examined why rather than how states establish new modes of engagement with subaltern groups, this article documents concrete mechanisms by which the Brazilian state built new state-society relations through a particular cultural policy. By recognizing and funding artistic initiatives in underserved communities, the program aimed to expand their access to the state and validate their role in the polity. On the basis of in-depth fieldwork in three Brazilian states, the article argues that new relations actually were forged through state-society encounters around the program's administrative procedures. The surprising twist—that paperwork, as much as art, played a transformative role—sheds new light on bureaucracy as a point of contact with the state and offers new insights into the ways that cultural politics can shift.
Information & Culture
In considering technology transfer in the Global South, Brazil's recent upsurge in open-source software development raises the historical question of how disparate ideological conceptions of nationalism, market censorship, and innovation have played a role in the dissemination and adoption of what we now consider universally acceptable technology: computers. I contest the reductive idea of a “trickle-down” model of technological adaptation by introducing various technical “actors”, or seres técnicos, who emerge in Brazil to address needs rising from specific technological moments to explore larger rhetorical ideations of labor, free speech, and knowledge production. Through a case study on Brazil’s “indigenous” or “hybrid” computers, I build a media-historical analysis that starts with Brazilian military protectionist policy encouraging the local development of computers during the 1970s-1980’s. I then lead up to the current cultural, political, and technological climate of global-minded free/livre open-access software (FLOSS) to argue about the various “local” valences of technology transfer.
A fablab at the periphery: Decentering innovation from São Paulo
American Anthropologist, 2022
In recent decades, many tech spaces have emerged worldwide to promote innovation. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines one of such initiatives in Brazil—a public laboratory of digital fabrication located in a low-income neighborhood in the periphery of São Paulo. While scholars have exposed the neoliberal aspects of fablabs, this article aims to de-center hegemonic understandings of innovation by attending to its situated practices. Analyzing the techno-optimist aspirations and institutional legacies behind this laboratory, I explain how the US-based fablab model was reconfigured in light of community concerns and previous Latin American experiments of digital inclusion. Against a monolithic image of tech collectives, I show how lab workers cultivated a diverse range of audiences and creative practices, specifically those of working-class women. The article concludes with a call for more anthropological attention to overlooked tech practices as a means to imagine fairer and more solidary forms of innovation.
Volume! Le journal des musiques populaires, 2015
This article seeks to put in perspective Gilberto Gil’s Brazilian cultural policy from 2003 to 2008 as a pioneer attempt to institutionally legitimate musical cultures involving sampling and remix. Mutations brought about by the digital age call for strong reflections upon the concept of “digital culture” enacted for instance in sampling and remix practices, and incarnated in a complex manner by the cultural “glocal” laboratories of underground musical cultures in Brazil. The study of Gil’s policy involves a multifaceted approach mixing music sociology, ethnology, cultural studies, the study of law, policies and of the music industry, in order to clarify the redefinition of musical authorship and intellectual property brought about by musical digital culture along with identifying some challenges for scholars and actors of the musical world for the years to come.
Cultura Viva, a Challenge to the Creative Economy Policy Discourse in Brazil
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2017
During the last decade, Brazil has experimented with two different cultural policy discourses. The creative economy was inspired by international experiences and places emphasis on the commercialisation of culture; while in contrast, the Cultura Viva is an autochthonous policy discourse that stimulates access to cultural consumption and production of resource-scarce sectors of the population. Both cultural policy discourses speak of the contributions of culture to 'development'. However, this shibboleth delineates different projects. This article shows the different connections these two policy discourses make with 'development', and it describes a number of contrasts between them.
This article discusses the changes that took place in the art scene in Brazil during the 1960s and 1970s, changes that were related to the political and economic situation the country was experiencing. The general belief in the modern destiny of the nation of the post-war period was then replaced by a political crisis and economic instability and artists and intellectuals saw themselves breaking away from the autonomy of their field to take sides in relation to the situation in the country. I will therefore discuss how the dream of a collective project for a nation, of an integrated avant-garde, was built and dissolved, in the midst of political turmoil, and how this influenced artists and critics of the time.
IX JORNADAS DE HISTORIA Y CULTURA DE AMERICA, Universidad de Montevideo (UM), MONTEVIDEO, 26-30 JULY, 2019
This paper explores how, on the one hand, the MoMA’s agenda on US cultural imperialism in Brazil triggered a war between aesthetic traditionalists and reformers on the occasions of ‘From Figurativism to Abstractionism’, the MAM-SP opening exhibition (1949), and of the first and the second São Paulo Biennials (1951 and 1953). These exhibitions promoted abstractionism as a prestigious banner of modernisation in Brazil fostered by Nelson Rockefeller, a symbol of US capitalism and the head of the American museum. Starting from this premise, the paper shows that the Brazilian Modernista establishment working with figurativism reacted to the arrival of abstractionism in Brazil by labelling it a type of degenerate art with no social engagement, anti-Brazilian, and compliant with US imperialism. The paper will therefore highlight how the MAM-SP pro-abstractionist campaign for aesthetic innovation, developed with the support of the MoMA and of Rockefeller, was rejected by the Brazilian cultural establishment engaging with the struggle of the masses against the national elite for being a clear evidence of foreign hegemony and capitalist interest. On the other hand, this paper will show how Concretismo, the abstract movement that emerged in Brazil around the MAM-SP above-mentioned exhibitions, was conceptually based on Gramscian Marxism, and, as opposed to the caustic opinion of the Modernista establishment, bore educative responsibilities with the masses. In fact, Waldemar Cordeiro, the leader of the Ruptura group that represented Concretismo in São Paulo, cited Gramsci and Marx as theoretical sources (merged with Fiedler’s theory of ‘Pure Visuality’ and the ‘Gestalt’) to respond to the local socio-political reality and to the dispute that was dividing the Brazilian artistic milieu. The paper will reveal that Cordeiro’s programme - even if he clearly sympathised with the forces of progress and modernisation that were recurrently associated with the Brazilian capitalist elite - aimed at serving the masses by means of manipulating the bourgeois order of distribution of culture, and by exploiting the exhibition opportunities that the Brazilian modern art museums owned by national figures compliant with the US geopolitical ambitions were offering to Ruptura.
The Culture Industry in Brazil
Despite the breadth of the subject, I intend to show in this article that, while being on the capitalist periphery and having had a spatially and temporally unequal industrial development, Brazil has had, since the 1930s, a system of mass media whose ideological aims were -at least in terms of form -the same as those of its counterparts in the most industrialized countries. Another purpose of the paper is to show that, taking into account some peculiarities, the analysis and theoretical understanding of the Brazilian model of mass culture can be accomplished through the same categories Horkheimer and Adorno developed in their approach to the mainstream culture industry in North America.