Flavio de Carvalho: Media Artist Avant la Lettre

Fig. 2. ExperiÆncia no. 2, 1931. (Photos © Archive Rui Moreira Leite) The first in a series of works that favored personal experience over the production of art objects. In this work Carvalho provoked Corpus Christi procession attendants with the objective of testing their reaction. The artist was saved by the police from an infuriated mob. Also in 1931 he published a book entitled Experience #2, containing an account of the episode and his own interpretation of its results: (a) A description of the experiment and drawings created by Carvalho himself. Several São Paulo newspapers reported on Fl½vio de Carvalho's experiment. (b) A fragment of one such newspaper, placed by the artist over one of his drawings.

This article is part of the Leonardo special project A Radical Intervention: The Brazilian Contribution to the International Electronic Art Movement," guest edited by Eduardo Kac.

For the print version of this article, see Leonardo Volume 37, No. 2 (2004), available from the MIT Press.

Updated 31 April 2010